Book review: New Good Food

New Good Food
by Margaret Wittenberg

I read cookbooks for fun. And for knowledge, but mostly for fun, because I think food and cooking is lots of fun. The cover of this new book caught my eye immediately, and I decided to settle in with it one evening. Even though the subtitle (Essential ingredients for cooking and eating) should have prepared me, I was still taken by surprise. This is not a cookbook, but an ingredient book!

I love the way it’s organized, covering foods by categories (fruits, grains, seafood, sweeteners, etc), alphabetically within the category. There are also charts sprinkled liberally throughout with seasonal information, cooking times, nutrition, heat comparisons (for hot peppers), and just about anything else you might want to know about food. It’s not a dry textbook though, so if you’re looking for really in-depth nutritional info, you’d be best off with a different book. What this highly entertaining volume offers is a glimpse into a world of many new choices that weren’t available to us even 5 years ago.

Now, if only my local market was a bit bigger…