Authentic American Snacks & Food - Best Sellers for Parties, Gifts & Home Enjoyment | Taste of America

If you like to eat, like to cook, or just like history, you'll enjoy this book. It's easy to read since it's one topic per page. But in the dairy section over 20 pages were devoted (wasted) on essentially the same story for each cheese: girl discovers goat; goat gives milk; girl learns to make cheese...well, you get the idea. In addition to being repetitively redundant those pages could have been used to acquaint us with the history of pasta/noodles/etc. a topic which is completely ignored.I thought the is would be about places where food might be found and it is, sort of. However, there is no info on restaurants that use the products recommended nor are there sites whereat the product can be ordered. Disappointed.The book gives us background information about these featured products which we often do not obtain from a label. And then when you try them, you are pleasantly surprised that his opinion is well justified. Good honest information for the buyer.Even though when I did the search for cookbooks this book came up, it is not a cookbook and does not have any recipes and that is not very clear from the description.Although most entries in this book are accompanied with beautiful pictures, others don’t have pictures at all. Where there are no pictures of a particular food product there is all this odd blank page space. Cool concept and an interesting book to leave out on a coffee table, but those two things keep it from being a more beautiful read.What I liked about this book, is that it's similar to the books "Food Finds", and "True Grits":A Southern Foods Mail-Order Catalog". These books give out information on ordering specialty regional food products from all over the United States. I would recommend this book and the other two books to any foodie who desires to try something different than what is offered in their home state.I have no idea what the intended audience for this book is. I expected to get a nice exposé of Americana with cutting edge food photography of Cheeseburgers, Pulled Pork, American Style Barbecue. Instead, the entire book is an utterly boring list of common grocery items (and I mean common, because you can get them everywhere) followed by a clinically boring description of what they are. Example - Free Range Chicken. There is a page devoted to telling you what a free range chicken is! And another page about rice with an essay that basically says americans like to eat rice. The pictures are equally boring. How this got past an Editor, I do not know. My copy is going to the charity shop.Great book! Great price!There are no recipes in this book, just a bunch of explanations about food consumed in America (which always fails to include Canada and the rest of the Americas. If you want a book that gives you ideas and reading it might be useful but otherwise it is nothing more than a coffee table book