Book Review: Cooking with Friends

Title: Cooking with Friends

Author: Amy Lyles Wilson

Date: 1995

Publisher: Rutledge Hill

ISBN: 1-55853-383-4

Length: 134 pages

Illustrations: color photos

Quote: “If your guests ask what’s that curry flavor, tell themto shut up and eat or go to their rooms.”

These were, according to food writer Jack Bishop, the recipes the cast cooked and ate on the “Friends” TV show. Bishop supplied the recipes; Amy Lyles Wilson supplied the summaries of the scenes in which each recipe was prepared, consumed, or reminisced about; the Warner Brothers corporation supplied the lines and full-color photos from the TV show.

This cookbook is recommended to fans of the “Friends” show for nostalgia value. Unfortunately, I can’t find much to recommend the recipes, unless you’re trying to help someone gain weight. The arrangement of recipes is clever—instead of the routine sequence of appetizers, soups, meat, fish, veg, bread, desserts, and drinks, these recipes are classified as appetizers, coffee and accompaniments, comfort foods, holiday foods, New York food, vegetarian entrees, and desserts—but the recipes themselves are basic foods with lots of added fat. One dozen muffins would normally be made with two tablespoons of butter or oil; Jack Bishop’s recipe for a dozen corn muffins calls for ten tablespoons of melted butter.

If you buy the book and want actually to eat any of the food, I'd ignore the amounts of fat Bishop recommends dumping into everything. Start with one tablespoon of butter or oil per two servings of anything made with vegetables, fruits, or grain, and just enough to coat the pan for anything made with milk, meat, or egg since these foods already contain more fat than most bodies really need. 

Another way to cut cost and improve quality, if you insist on trying to eat any of these recipes, is to realize that you don’t have to use a food processor to make everything. Actually, if you don’t enjoy wasting electricity while subjecting your friends and relatives to unpleasant noise, you could forget about the food processor altogether. The only foods discussed in this book for which a food processor really saves time and trouble are the “creamy” whipped-oil salad dressings. You could just pass oil and lemon juice on the side and forget about the mayonnaise-y stuff. Picky eaters would thank you.

Otherwise, eggs fluff up about as fast when beaten with an eggbeater, a small hand tool that’s ecologically sound and easy to clean. Vegetables can be chopped more evenly and efficiently with a good sharp knife, also ecologically sound and easy to clean. Mixing dough and batter with a big wooden spoon is one of the main reasons why people bake in the first place; if tennis elbow has put you out of touch with the primal pleasure of beating up food, let a child do it—children instinctively know that beating batter is a treat in its own right. You can save those kilowatts for the actual cooking and find something more enjoyable to do with the money.