A straightforward, easy-to-use reference for home bakers.
A handbook of common (and not-so-common) baking substitutions.
The fourth entry in MacLeod’s (The Waste-Wise Kitchen Companion, 2017, etc.) ongoing series on kitchen tips and tricks focuses on baking. As in previous volumes, she presents an alphabetical list of ingredients both familiar and unusual, from açai to zereshk, with brief explanations of appropriate substitutions. Many entries are quite detailed, with information on which swaps are appropriate for which types of recipes. The entries on flour, sugar, and chocolate and cocoa are particularly comprehensive, with MacLeod dedicating more than a dozen pages to discussing the various types of flour, from the basic all-purpose variety to more specialized variations, such as amaranth, teff, and popcorn flour. Many suggestions will help cooks who want to adapt recipes to be vegan or gluten-free. Other tips could save the day for those who discover that their cupboard is bare of basic items, such as baking powder (use a combination of cream of tartar and baking soda, instead, MacLeod says) or brown sugar (mix granulated sugar with molasses). Egg alternatives include tofu, yogurt, or chia seeds, depending on the recipe. The book also includes a helpful list of food equivalents and yields, which will be especially useful for those who lack a food scale or are unsure of how much of a particular item to buy. For example, one ounce of cocoa powder, she says, is equivalent to five tablespoons plus one teaspoon. A list of baking-pan equivalents is also practical for those whose kitchens aren’t stocked with a wide variety of cake pans, and a list of oven-temperature equivalents will aid those who want to translate recipe instructions from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Finally, the author’s comprehensive bibliography points readers to cookbooks and other references to further assist them in their culinary efforts. Those who are familiar with MacLeod’s previous works will notice some repetition here; the entries for vanilla extract and date paste, for instance, are identical to those in Seasoning Substitutions. However, there’s enough variation between the two texts to make this a worthy stand-alone.
A straightforward, easy-to-use reference for home bakers.Pub Date: July 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9974464-4-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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