I've had this on my shelf for a while and am just now beginning to use it. According to my notes, the 3 recipes I tried before from it were simply "easy, ok."

I do really like these Hermes House cookbooks for reading material, even if their recipes aren't anything to get excited about. In Hermes House style, there's a gorgeous, full-page picture of each dish with easy, concise instructions (with picture of different steps in the process). This is why these cookbooks are irresistible in the faculty room (left by the peddler). The books begin by informing you; this one begins with the history of potatoes (quite interesting, actually), a description of and how-to on every known way to cook potatoes, a catalog with pictures of each tool that could be called for in any given recipe involving potatoes, and frustratingly, a visual encyclopedia of every known type of potato (which actually includes 169 varieties). It annoys me because almost all of these 169 potatoes look exactly the same, and what's the point of knowing about them when my local grocer offers maybe 3 of them? I felt the same way about the Encyclopedia of Vegetables (also by Hermes House) that excited me about Jerusalem artichokes, which were in several recipes but nowhere to be found in the flesh, even San Diego. Perhaps this book's audience is the world traveler; someone who may, say, fly on their private jet to get a pinch of this from Sicily, a pinch of that from Spain... What is "demerara sugar?" It's one of the ingredients in a potato salad recipe I had considered: I don't think it should be so much work to find out what the ingredients are in a cookbook, but if I did have access to any of these potatoes and ingredients around the corner, the recipes are quite simple, pretty, and unusual, but again, they don't take your tastebuds to the level of ecstasy that the photos suggest.

Overall, I did learn some new things about cooking potatoes and about potatoes in general, so I'm glad I read it and I'm glad that I have it on hand, but it could've been better (especially if I were a different person). ( )