New Good Food is basically a reference work about ingredients.  It is large format and 282 pages, with no pictures, so it is crammed full of information.  It has 13 main chapters: fruits and vegetables; grains; whole grain and specialty flours; breads; pasta and noodles; beans, peas, and lentils; nuts and seeds; culinary oils; mean, poultry, and eggs; dairy products; seafood; essential seasonings; and sweeteners.  Suppose you want to know more about teff.  It is a grain, and there is half a page on it.  It is gluten free, and is mostly used in Ethiopia.  It has tiny seeds, and is used to make soup, porridge, beer, and injera bread (and there's an entry for that in the bread chapter).  It is only available in whole grain and is high in fiber, calcium, and iron.  It is often accompanied with a symbiotic yeast.  It comes in 3 forms: white, red and brown.  White teff has a mild flavor, while red and brown are nuttier.  Wittenberg recommends adding 2 tablespoons when cooking a cup of rice, millet or barley, to add flavor and texture.  It needs only 20 minutes of cooking.  So for cooks who want to explore a wider range of ingredients or to know more about the ingredients they do use, New Good Food is a helpful resource.  Where else will you get information about Spanish Tolosana Beans or Tongues of Fire (another kind of bean)?  The answer to this rhetorical question, of course, is … the Internet.  You can also find pictures of these products when you look them up on the Internet.  This capability makes books like this rather less essential.  But most of us don't have easy access to the Internet in our kitchens, and it is more effort to sort through a number of search engine results than it is to go to one reliable book.  Unfortunately, the index in this book is rather short, and so you have to do some searching through the book yourself using your own knowledge and intelligence.  Still, cooks who like books about healthy food will probably a great deal of interesting information here.

© 2007 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.