The Gourmet Cookie Book

It is fun to look through food magazines or magazines with recipe sections to see what looks good every month. You never know what kinds of recipes you’re going to find in all of those magazines, and you’ll inevitably clip out those that sound the most delicious, making some right away and adding the rest of the clippings to your collection. But when it comes down to it, you usually don’t end up trying all of those recipes in the end and part of the reason is that you really don’t know what is going to be good until you try it (or you can’t find the clipping in the “collection” when you’re looking for something to make). Wouldn’t it be nice to have the recipes from all of those magazines sorted out for you? That is what The Gourmet Cookie Book has done. This cookbook contains the best cookie recipe from every year of Gourmet Magazine’s history from 1941 through 2009.

The book doesn’t simply list the recipes. Each recipe is accompanied by a detailed description of the cookie or its history, as well as by information about the magazine itself at that point in time. This feature is great because it gives you some insight as to what flavors were popular, hints at food trends and helps you to figure out what made each choice the best from that year. The recipes are detailed and range from familiar gingerbread men to more unusual Scandinavian rosettes.

The recipes are accompanied by plenty of photos of the cookies and magazine covers. It gives the book a lot of flavor and makes you feel a bit like you’re reading through a scrapbook of all of those recipe clippings – which is a nice change from just another cookie cookbook, especially for fans of Gourmet.