Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market [Paperback]

The first positive aspect of the book is the title, `Field Guide to PRODUCE'. It would have been easy and misleading to say it was a guide to fruits and vegetables, when many items in the book such as chestnuts and mushrooms are neither fruits nor vegetables. The book should have taken this positive title one step further and not divided entries up into fruits and vegetables. As I said, chestnuts and mushrooms are neither, and other products such as tomatoes are classified under their commercial category of vegetable instead of their botanical category of fruit.

The next positive aspect of the book is that the only product I could not find in either a primary entry such as `cabbage' or as an entry type such as `Brussels Sprouts' was the truffle. I will forgive them this omission, as it is the rare megamart that even carries truffles. On the other hand, the book did include such rarities as durian, loquat, and mung beans (although I thought the coverage of mung beans could have been a bit better).

Another positive aspect is that for produce such as apples, pears, cabbage, and tomatoes, several major cultivars are cited, with the best uses for each given.

The single biggest use for this book would probably be to find out when produce is in season, how to choose the best specimens, how to clean them, and how to store them. I will not be searching this book for the best fruits for a particular dish, although I may refer to the properties of apples to pick the best variety for a tart. On this subject, the book is excellent. It tends to be very conservative in specifying storage times. It gives apples about two weeks in a refrigerated produce drawer, while I have successfully kept some there for two months with little degradation.

Another use may possibly be to help identify a particular item in the grocery store. I often run across tamarind in South Asian recipes, but I would be hard pressed to describe exactly what it looks like, and most written descriptions really don't seem to hit the mark. A picture here is truly worth a thousand words. For this reason, there is probably a virtue in bringing all photographs together in a single section rather than having them accompany the article of the product. Another reason is probably because this was cheaper to publish.

Useful aspects of many articles are things like the climates in which the plants flourish, the land in which the product was first cultivated, the origin of `manmade' products such as grapefruit (from orange and pomelo), the scientific name, and best uses for products. I am constantly amazed at how many of our most commonly used fruits and vegetables originated in or near the Fertile Crescent formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Several alternate names like `aubergine' for eggplant are given; however, the author would have made this feature immensely more useful by including the alternate names in the index. Great help for people scratching their heads over `rocket' in Italian salads.

One `expected oversight' is the absence of cross-reference entries. Brussels Sprouts, for example is in the index, pointing to a paragraph in the article about cabbage, but there is no entry for `Brussels Sprouts, See Cabbage' in the main text. Broccoli and Cauliflower are derived from cabbage and even have the same scientific name, yet they get their own articles. This rant is probably due entirely due to my fondness for Brussels Sprouts, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Missed opportunities are the absence of a tabular presentation of produce seasons and tables of uses versus varieties for major families of products such as apples, pears, cabbage, oranges, and tomatoes. A fun feature, albeit somewhat difficult to accomplish may have been a table or `tree' of food preparation techniques with most useful products.

I could add more nice things to see, but most of these would lead to a full-sized volume, loosing the utility of the `field guide' size.

This is a better than average book of its type. If you need something to make the best of finding, selecting, cleaning, and storing produce, this is your book. It will also help you pick the best apple for the pie and the best potato for your salad.