An Article by Richard Mann
Want a cookbook that focuses on beans? We can help. Listed here, with brief comments, are the top five best-selling bean books on Amazon.com (the only place I could figure out how to get a list of best-selling bean books). Come take a look.
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From time to time, we review bean cookbooks here. I haven't done that as frequently as I would have liked, but I plan to do better in the near future. In the meantime, it occurs to me that some of you might really want some guidance as to what's available to help you with cooking beans. So, helpful soul that I am, I figured out a way to quickly help you with this important (or perhaps not so important) matter. I went to Amazon.com and, through some sleight of hand, managed to get the list of their top-selling bean cookbooks in order from most popular to least. I had to apply a little judgment as to what is really a bean cookbook, however. Some that show up on the list merely have beans in the title (such as Not Just Beans: 50 Years of Frugal Family Favorites), which is a great little cookbook for folks who want to save money--but it doesn't really concentrate on beans. This list will be helpful because you can currently buy all these books from Amazon or other online booksellers. You may have a little trouble finding these books at your local Barnes and Noble or Borders, however, since none of them are recently enough published to ensure their presence on their shelves. I'll give you enough info, however, to allow you to special order them from your bookseller if you're not into online shopping. So, without further ado (or further cliches), here are the
Top 5 Best-Selling Bean Cookbooks
This excellent book, 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains, gives you 366 recipes for healthful, delicious bean, rice, and grain dishes from all over the world. Yes, they're primarily vegetarian recipes, but the book does include variations on the recipes that use salmon, shrimp, and chicken. Mouthwatering ethnic recipes are mixed with other "natural gourmet" items that are fascinating to read, fun to prepare, and a delight to eat. How do Smoky Black Bean Burritos sound? Or how about Pesto Pasta with Cranberry Beans? I'm ready to start cooking right now. Amazon.com's customers give this great book a solid 5-star rating. Author Aliza Green has gathered recipes for all sorts of wonderful bean dishes, ranging from gourmet items such as Ravioli with Spring Greens Filling and Creamy White Bean and Sage Sauce (doesn't that sound good?) to simple fare such as Senate Bean Soup. The recipes are practical; ordinary folks can make them without having special equipment or exotic ingredients (mostly). Vegetarian recipes are clearly marked. This book is a winner. Although this is technically not a bean book, it provides plenty of help to the home gardener who grows beans. In separate chapters for each major type of home-grown vegetable, the author tells us what we need to know to use, cook, can, or otherwise preserve this bounty. (If you've ever grown tomatoes or zucchini, you know what a problem it can be to figure out what to do with them when they all ripen at the same time.) The book has been selling steadily for over ten years and remains one of the best-selling cookbooks on Amazon. Don't you love that title? The author is, of course, dead-on right; beans are low in fat and rich in nutrients, and they are highly effective disease fighters. That said, however, what about the rest of the book? The recipes are first class. Almost all of them look appetizing to me, most are fairly easy to make, and all feature wonderful, healthy beans--even the bread and muffins at the back of the book. Each recipe has full nutritional information. You're sure to find plenty of good cooking ideas here.  | | The Bean Book
by Roy F. Guste
W. W. Norton & Company, December 2000
Hardcover, 408 pages
$30
ISBN: 0393049264
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Roy Guste, the former proprietor of Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans and a noted cookbook author, has gathered wonderful bean recipes from around the world for this book, the most recent bean cookbook on the market. He provides a full nutritional analysis of each recipe as well as light versions of each. How does Bourbon and Black Bean Pie sound?
This article, in slightly different form, appeared originally on my Bean Lovers' site on Suite 101 (it's still there).
Copyright © 2002 Richard Mann. All rights reserved. Please contact the author for permission to use this article (includes reprints in mailing lists, newsletters, and/or any other purpose/format) and give details of its proposed use. Any and all use of this article in any way without permission is prohibited under copyright law. Acceptable use: Please feel free to link to this page. Of course, you can always print these articles for your own personal use (that's what they're here for).
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Library of Electronic Cookbooks
 You say you don't always have time to log on to the Net and search the Web every time you want a new recipe? You don't have time to meander through a bookshelf of printed cookbooks to find just the right recipe? If so, you've got to sample the Library of Electronic Cookbooks available from E-Cookbooks.net. Once you join the E-Cookbooks Library, you have instant offline access to thousands of wonderful recipes. You can quickly--instantly!--search for just the right item, print it out, and get started cooking right now. Oops, you spilled something on the recipe. So what? You can print another copy any time. Click over to the Library and download some of the free samples to see how much you'll like this handy resource. Then, for $12.95, you can buy instant download access to the E-Cookbook Library for life. Try it; I think you'll find it to be a good value. (But you should always come back here to your beloved Bean Bible when you want bean recipes. Right?) |
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