Book review: Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook

I’m ashamed to say I didn’t own a single general cook book until Dorling Kindersley very kindly allowed me to chose a couple of books from their recent catalogue to review and Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook arrived on my doorstep.

I’m a huge Mary Berry fan and own a couple of her baking books but wasn’t aware she had written more than seventy cook books since her first book was published in 1970 (thanks Wikipedia!). Anyway, my poor family have been eating recipes torn from magazines for years so the Complete Cookbook has been very welcome.

I have spent some happy hours flicking through it and have renewed enthusiasm for my weekly meal planning and cooking. We’ve already had a jaunty Tricolore salad with our pasta, eaten bacon-wrapped chicken breasts and a delicious gingerbread with a steaming cup of tea. My husband is incredibly grateful to Dorling Kindersley!

We’ve been on a real mission to eat healthily and set a good example to the children. We’re at the stage the toddler can eat with us so I find it’s worth the effort to make sure our meals are nutritious, simple to prepare and look good too.

As you would expect from a Dorling Kindersley book the Complete Cookbook is really well set out and includes a visual guide to choosing a special dish for a dinner party or just your evening meal, a guide to equipment, freezing, microwaving, flavouring food and safe and healthy cooking.

Recipes are divided into 13 sections and each section shows recipes according to length of time to prepare and cook, and a brief introduction to the food type with handy details such as how to bone a chicken or make stock. The book contains 1000 recipes and many are illustrated. Each recipe details how many it serves, the calories per serving, a list of ingredients and the method of preparing it. Healthy tips and Cook’s know-how are dotted throughout.

I can’t tell you how much I love this book. There are lots of old family favourites and many new recipes to try for snacks, meals and treats which will keep my family happy for a very long time.