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Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should (and Shouldn't) Cook from Scratch, by Jennifer Reese
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rachelmanija Mar. 20th, 2019 01:45 pm)
rachelmanija Mar. 20th, 2019 01:45 pm)What it says on the tin. Reese kept hearing Michael Pollan various people make complaints about how terrible it is that people buy things, especially food, instead of cooking them from scratch like they did when everyone ate potatoes and buttermilk every day in the good old days.
So she decided to see for herself if that was true, by doing head-to-head comparisons of things bought and things made - everything from bread (make unless you have a truly great bakery nearby, it's delicious and easy) to goat milk (buy, your neighbors will hate you if you keep blatting goats in your backyard) to maraschino cherries (buy, home attempts resulted in concoctions of even more hideousness and inedibility than the store-bought versions.)
She intersperses recipes (mostly pulled from an assortment of other cookbooks rather than original) with often hilarious accounts of her attempts at everything from cheesemaking to beekeeping, to cost-benefit analyses of cost, hassle, and whether the hassle is worth it. I found her voice and style charming - she's slightly hapless without being incompetent, i.e., her results probably map fairly well to mine. She's also very upfront that she's writing for the kind of person who is both interested in and capable (financially, timewise, etc) of actually doing at least some of the things she's discussing.
Though I often had completely different ideas of what's too much hassle and what's worth it, her analyses did give me a solid idea of whether I'd find trying something at home to be worthwhile. Bread, for instance, is a pretty big hassle if you have a demanding office job, and not worth it if you're not much into bread anyway. If you work from home, enjoy making it, and appreciate good bread, it's 100% worth it. But much as I love cheese, the process of making it sounds too fiddly and gross, though Reese found it mostly worthwhile. On the flip side, she thought homemade rice pudding doesn't come out any better than the store-bought version, and so is not worth it. HERESY.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should (and Shouldn't) Cook from Scratch to Save Time and Money
So she decided to see for herself if that was true, by doing head-to-head comparisons of things bought and things made - everything from bread (make unless you have a truly great bakery nearby, it's delicious and easy) to goat milk (buy, your neighbors will hate you if you keep blatting goats in your backyard) to maraschino cherries (buy, home attempts resulted in concoctions of even more hideousness and inedibility than the store-bought versions.)
She intersperses recipes (mostly pulled from an assortment of other cookbooks rather than original) with often hilarious accounts of her attempts at everything from cheesemaking to beekeeping, to cost-benefit analyses of cost, hassle, and whether the hassle is worth it. I found her voice and style charming - she's slightly hapless without being incompetent, i.e., her results probably map fairly well to mine. She's also very upfront that she's writing for the kind of person who is both interested in and capable (financially, timewise, etc) of actually doing at least some of the things she's discussing.
Though I often had completely different ideas of what's too much hassle and what's worth it, her analyses did give me a solid idea of whether I'd find trying something at home to be worthwhile. Bread, for instance, is a pretty big hassle if you have a demanding office job, and not worth it if you're not much into bread anyway. If you work from home, enjoy making it, and appreciate good bread, it's 100% worth it. But much as I love cheese, the process of making it sounds too fiddly and gross, though Reese found it mostly worthwhile. On the flip side, she thought homemade rice pudding doesn't come out any better than the store-bought version, and so is not worth it. HERESY.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should (and Shouldn't) Cook from Scratch to Save Time and Money
