Home Made Basics: Simple Recipes, Made from Scratch

This book, while titled Home Made Basics, should really be called “Homemade from the Basics.” It contains an awkward combination of elaborate gourmet cuisine and simple “from the basics” techniques. It is hard to navigate, with a tricky index and odd text. There are nice sequences of diagrams that describe some of the basic mechanisms for making such things as pickles or bread. These are some effective and useful tidbits in the mostly hard-to-handle book. Some minor recipes and applications of techniques are bunched together on one page.

I don’t recommend purchasing this as a basic cookbook, but I think that if you already have cooking skills and wish to create food from scratch you might like this book. A great number of the ingredients are odd, expensive, and difficult to find. There is no recommendation for where to source them, either. None of the desserts are as simple as a good cake; rather, they all have unusual flavor combinations. I don’t think that libraries should stock this cookbook. Home Made Basics, which is mistitled and badly organized, is not worth purchasing.