The New Food Lover’s Companion, 4th ed.

The indispensable guide to food is now interactive!

The fourth edition of this widely praised reference guide has been updated with new information for everyone, including lovers of ethnic foods and health food aficionados. The authors have added many all-new entries on exotic produce and other unusual ingredients. An earlier edition of The New Food Lover’s Companion was hailed by Bon Appétit magazine as “one of the best reference books we’ve seen, a must for every cook’s library.” This new edition has even more to offer! Among the myriad foods and culinary subjects defined and explained are cooking tools and techniques, meat cuts, breads, pastas, international foods, and literally everything else related to good food and enjoyable dining. Handy appendices cover many topics, including suggestions for substituting recipe ingredients, a microwave oven conversion chart, recommended safe cooking temperatures for meats and fish, and much more. The New Food Lover’s Companion is a reference guide—not a cookbook—but it includes hundreds of cooking tips plus an extensive bibliography of recommended cookbooks. More than 6,700 entries!

From the Associated Press article “A Book Worth Devouring”

“You, too, can be an expert, for less than 20 bucks.

Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst’s Food Lover’s Companion has served as an indispensable reference to the food world since the first edition was published more than a decade ago. It’s a bible for food writers, and it belongs in the home kitchen, too.

An updated forth edition with more than 6,700 entries recently was released, continuing the tome’s tradition of helping home and professional cooks make sense of myriad techniques and ingredients.

As valuable as the dictionary-style entries that form the core of the book are the appendices, which include a pasta glossary, a guide for reading food labels, illustrated charts depicting cuts of meat, and substitution and measurement charts.”
—Associated Press


From the Reviews:

“If you don’t have this book for your collection, it is surely time to add it, as the previous edition was regarded by Bon Appétit magazine as ‘one of the best reference books’ and ‘a must for every cook’s library.’ At such a reasonable price, this book is a mandatory purchase for any library supporting a culinary program and is highly recommended for all other academic and public libraries.”
—Booklist, January 1 & 15, 2008

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Praise for previous editions.
"From abalone to zwieback, Sharon Tyler Herbst lists nearly 6,000 culinary terms in the newly published third edition of her classic Food Lovers Companion. Hands down, it is the ultimate accessible cooking and dining reference book."
—Mat Schaffer, Boston Herald, March 2001

"The New Food Lovers Companion is an updated version of this amazingly comprehensive encyclopedia of everything you ever wondered or will need to know about culinary terms and ingredients. My old copy is more dog-eared than any favorite cookbook, and referred to almost daily...Dedicated foodies cant do without it."
—Susan Miller, The Home Monthly, May 2001

"If theres a culinary reference book that foodies reach for more often than Food Lovers Companion, we dont know what it would be. This mini-tome is brimming with useful information on thousands of foods and terms, from abalone to zwei-back—including pronunciations (ZWI-bak, ZWI-bahk, SWI-bak, SWI-bahk). No surprise that the book has sold more than 1 million copies since its debut in 1990...The new edition has 6,000 terms and a larger appendix. We especially like the pasta chart, which lists more than 100 pastas (with, thank goodness, pronunciations). Also added is a broadened pan substitution chart, expanded listings on soy foods, and more ethnic foods."
—Renee Enna, The Chicago Times, June 2001