The Good Egg

The Good Egg
More than 200 Fresh Approaches
from Soup to Dessert

By Marie Simmons

Let's thank our lucky stars that the good egg is no longer the bad seed. Marie Simmons—award-winning cookbook author and Bon Appetit columnist known for her irresistible flavor combinations brings us The Good Egg: More than 200 Fresh Approaches from Soup to Dessert, a dazzlingly diverse collection celebrating the versatile egg. From sophisticated dinners like Gnocchi with Butter and Herbs to superb desserts such as Fallen Chocolate Soufflé Cake, this book has it all.

Eggs are definitely back in style. On menus of the country's finest restaurants from San Francisco to New York, classic egg dishes such as hard-cooked eggs, spaghetti carbonara, omelettes, frittatas, and crème brûlée are back. At home, cooks are beginning to discover what the experts have always known: when you have an egg, you can make a perfect meal at a moment's notice.

The Good Egg provides plenty of recipes for appetizers, comforting soups, flavorful sandwiches, innovative salads, sauces, soufflés, cookies, cakes and pies. It's filled with tips and techniques for the basics: how to scramble, fry, bake, poach and hard-cook eggs.

And Simmons provides us with hundreds of dinner possibilities, many of them vegetarian. She reinterprets such classics as quiche, adding broccoli and provolone or caramelized tomato and corn, and rediscovers dishes from the past, such as Mom's Eggnog, Lemon Chiffon Tart and Popovers. There are inspired classics, including omelettes, which wrap around various fillings (broccoli rabe sautéed with olive oil and garlic; avocado, bacon and brie; even strawberries and ricotta cheese), and deviled eggs, stuffed with Italian tuna and capers or with salmon and potato or with cream cheese and chutney. There is even a crème brûlée that has been reborn by delicately infusing it with Earl Grey tea.

Simmons's ideas are always fresh and inspiring: Eggs Baked in Fresh Tomato-Cilantro Salsa with Melted Cheese; Green Bean, Egg and Mint Salad; Fresh Fig and Prosciutto Frittata; Spring Pasta made with Eggs, Asparagus and Ham; and Tender Egg Yolk Cookies.

Brimming with informative sidebars, The Good Egg is the ultimate book on a subject long overdue for serious attention. It's an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club's Good Cook.

About the Author

Marie Simmons's knack for simple, appealing food has won her millions of readers in dozens of magazines, including Bon Appetit, where she writes a monthly column. She won a James Beard Award and a Julia Child Award for Lighter, Quicker, Better. She is also the author of Fresh & Fast and the A to Z cookbooks.

Buy the Book!

The Good Egg:
More than 200 Fresh Approaches
from Soup to Dessert
By Marie Simmons
Houghton Mifflin Company, May 2000
Hardback, $26.00
480 pages, hardcover, two colors throughout
ISBN 395-90991-0
Information provided by the publisher.