Cider Mill Press’s The Encyclopedia of Cast Iron is a good, serviceable cookbook. As advertised there are more than 350 recipes in the book.
What works: the recipes come from a wide variety of cuisines and look like they are solid recipes. I tried a few recipes. I appreciated that the recipes were presented cleanly on the page. For me, a cook with years of experience, the straightforward directions were great. For an inexperienced cook, this could be frustrating because the book assumes you know the basics. The recipes I made ranged from stellar to good but not exciting. I substituted bone in pork chops for ribeye steak in one recipe and may never cook pork chops any other way.
What could be better: for a book calling itself an encyclopedia of cast iron, there isn’t much information about cast iron cookware. In the short introduction, the only cast iron cookware mentioned is a skillet. The recipes, however, call for a wide array of cookware from the fairly common Dutch oven to the rather less common cast iron aebelskiver pan. A few more paragraphs about cast iron cookware, its care and storage wouldn’t go amiss here. It also would have been nice to have the type of pan needed noted at the top of the recipe, or have it listed in the index. I inherited a cast iron wok, and have found some intriguing recipes that use the wok as a smoker, but it’s harder to find them when you can’t easily see which recipes call for a wok. This might seem like a nitpick, but I don’t want to flip through every recipe to find that one that was in a wok, when I can’t remember if it was a veggie, pork, chicken or seafood recipe. Usability is important.
There was at least one recipe that was wrong, and I hope that it will be corrected before publication. The charred sweet potatoes with toum recipe did not have toum, it had a honey butter. I was disappointed.
Imperfections aside, this is a pretty solid cookbook if you want more reasons to use your cast iron cookware.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Cider Mill Press and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.