This is an interesting book to browse through for ideas but not a practical cookbook for everyday use. Many of the recipes call for special ingredients that many average families will not have on their shelf. If purchased, the ingredients are likely to sit on your shelf for years. Routine use of the Internet may suggest suitable substitutions in some instances, but the search will become a regular activity.

The table of Contents is almost unreadable, further limiting the practical usefulness of this book. Soups are organized by style or primary ingredient: beef, chicken, chili, chowders, and so on. In each section the name of a soup is followed by the page number, another name, and another page number, until all of the soups in that chapter are listed. In the section devoted to vegetable soups, for example, the list runs on for almost an entire page. Clearly an alternate approach would have made more sense.

The format of the recipes is nontraditional. The list of ingredients is presented first but divided into sections. The primary ingredients appear first, followed in some instances by the ingredients to be include in the Sachet d’epice, and then, again in some instances, by additional ingredients. The Sachet d’epice is a bundle of herbs and spices in a metal tea ball or tied in a cloth or cheesecloth bag and used to flavor the soup. It is to be removed when the cooking is completed.

The directions follow, listed in the order the activities are to be completed, but not in the traditional numbered manner. The wide margins and extra spacing between steps result in some recipes sprawling across three pages.

Like most cookbooks, “The Complete Book of Soups and Stews” is best regarded as a reference to be consulted as needed. I found a few recipes I want to research further, but I imaging I will be able to find comparable recipes on line without the esoteric ingredients and other rigamarole recommended herein. ( )

Done many, liked all ( )

“The first time your mother ever baked a loaf of bread,” my Dad used to tell me with fondness, “it was so hard it put a hole through the drywall in our apartment.” I’ve always had a hard time believing this story, because my mother is one of those people who ends up being very good at whatever she decides to do—from gardening to cooking to raising kids to drawing to decorating Easter eggs to being completely prepared for any eventuality that might occur on a family camping trip with three small children. So the idea that she could decide to bake a loaf of bread and have it NOT turn out perfectly stretches the imagination a bit. Still, I have to admit that when I think of my mother and baking, what I remember was an endless series of cookies, pies and desserts; cranberry bread and carrot cake and date pinwheels and banana nut bread. I don’t remember bread—as in sourdough or sandwich, although I suppose she must have made it because otherwise why would my father and I be having that conversation?

Still, it wasn’t until I was out of college and in my own apartment that I started to pay attention to bread, buying my first loaf of non-white, non-presliced, artisan-crafted sourdough from a crunchy-granola supermarket down the street called “Bread and Circus.” I had to buy a bread knife to slice it. At that point in my life, bread—and eating—was an act of resistance. I shopped at food coops for organic produce and bought herbs and spices in little plastic ziploc bags that would have surely made a cop’s eyebrows climb if he happened to peer into my back pack on grocery day. And because I was very poor, and buying organic was rather expensive, I ate a lot of bread, which at least had the virtue of being filling even if it wasn’t all that cheap.

I experimented a little bit with baking my own bread in those days, but I was too easily intimidated by the counter-cooking-culture to really feel comfortable with it. Back then, my friends were the type to build their own wood-fired stone bread ovens in their back yards, and use 100-year-old sour dough cultures they had preserved from immigrant great great grandmothers. They ordered stone ground organic flour off of cheaply printed order forms from special coop farms. They let their breads rise in hand-made bowls and baked them on special stones and tiles they found in little artisan shops in Italy and France. A loaf of their bread probably cost about twenty-five bucks when you took into account all the extra time spent procuring pure ingredients and special equipment, and I could eat for a week on $25 if I didn’t mind the taste of Ramen pride too much. Besides, I lived in a tiny apartment with an oven whose thermostat was…eccentric. It made baking difficult.

So it wasn’t until I came South, moved into a house with a little more space than your average walk-in closet, and installed an oven that meant what it said when it showed the tempurature to be 400 F, that I tried once again to learn how to bake bread. It was a different experience this time around. I was in a brand new kitchen, a brand new house in a brand new city. I didn’t know anyone, and had no one to impress but myself (and my mother, who I still called regularly once a week). I had five pounds of flour in the cupboard and nothing else to do with it but bake. I had one large glass bowl, two regular sized glass bread loaf pans, and one fairly sturdy wooden spoon. I had a baker’s dozen books on the art of baking bread “from scratch.” I had no job and a lot of time.

As it turned out, all my bread baking books, while fascinating to read, were rather more complicated than I was willing to attempt as a nascent bread baker, so after a bit of searching I found what looked like a simple recipe in the back of one of my cookbooks that was actually devoted to soups and stews. “Good soup deserves good bread.” said author Bernard Clayton, who then proceeds to give a simple recipe for “A Peasant Loaf” using only flour, water, yeast and salt. It turned out so well, I have been using the same recipe ever since.

Oh, I’ve wandered. I’ve tried more elaborate doughs, added other ingredients, used other kinds of flour and other types of starters. I have gone through whole grain phases and challah phases and flatbread phases. I even once had the freezer full of naan—a kind of Indian bread made with yogurt that is cooking in a frying pan stuck in an oven. That was educational, but ultimately wasteful since even I couldn’t eat that much naan. But on the whole, Clayton’s original peasant loaf has proved so reliable that I come back to it again and again, the rhythm of it so ingrained in my hands that I haven’t needed to look at the recipe for years. In fact, when a friend asked me for my bread recipe, I had to actually think my way through the steps to give it to her—like the way you can only tell someone the lyrics of a song if you sing it to yourself in your head.

Baking bread became a kind of ritual for me. I often give the loaves away (one person can only eat so much bread) but I used the process as a way to relax. Some people do yoga, I knead dough. The smell of loaves baking in the oven is more therapeutic than aromatherapy. And far more satisfying. It took a few months before I learned—by feel—when the dough had been kneaded to that perfect, silky elasticity, and when I had over done it. It took awhile before I had figured out when the water was too hot or too cold for the yeast. And there was one fateful and sad day when I forgot I had left the dough rising, and it did far more than double in size—spilling over the lip of the bowl and dripping down over the edges of the counter tops.

Now, I use the recipe below—tweaked slightly to accommodate the use of some sourdough starter my mother gave me–and bake bread about once every other week—unless it has been a very stressful week, in which case I might go through a good five pounds of flour baking bread for the neighborhood.

As decompression techniques go kneading bread dough is pretty harmless. I could be out drinking.

also found on here

This was my favorite soup book until Barbara Kafka turned up with hers. Sorry Bernie. ( )