Wit and Wisdom from the Kitchen: A Lifetime of Cooking Knowledge, Passed Down from Generations of Food Lovers

This unusual cookbook is about as inconvenient in the kitchen as it possibly can be. Wit and Wisdom from the Kitchen has no table of contents, no index, not even page numbers. It seems like this is author Dominique Devito’s personal notes waiting to be organized. Should you want to cook a previously tried recipe, the only way to find it is to page through the book. The first half of the book called “Wit and Wisdom from the Experts” is quotes with some illustrations, one quote on every page, hardly anything you would ever reread. The second half is “From My Kitchen to Yours,” consisting of recipes, many more quotes and some family snapshots. The recipes are good but all rather ordinary you may find in any of your own cookbooks: roast chicken, fried chicken, meatloaf, and enchiladas then apple pie and chocolate chip cookies. The recipes are good, well-written and easy to follow but on many pages white lettering on colored paper results in poor readability. Yellow lettering on white pages is not much better. Photo illustrations of foods are good but are poor-quality amateur attempts. Your cookbook shelf will not gain much with this volume.