Things Cooks Love

Food and kitchen catalogs are just as much fun to get in the mail as the latest issue of a favorite food magazine. From stores like, Williams Sonoma and Sur La Table, it’s always interesting to see what new products are out and how they can be used. Even better is that now many stores are including recipes alongside related products in the catalogs and the fact that they give you a much better sense of how to use things, when to use things and why you might want this stuff in your home.

Things Cooks Love is a new book by Sur La Table that definitely has something of a catalog feel to it, but also has all the appealing things about the same type of publication. It covers all the equipment that should be in a well-stocked kitchen for basic cooking, and breaks down several more specialized cuisines into chapters to talk about gear and gadgets that pertain specifically to them. There are some recipes (we all know that their inclusion is the best part of a food catalog if we’re going to be really honest), too.

Fortunately, this book doesn’t read like a catalog because instead of talking about specific brands, the book spends a lot of time going over the various properties of pan types, bowl types and utensils. It’s more like a resource guide to all things kitchen equipment and it’s a good one, at that.