Cookbook with broiling, roasting, baking, deep-fat frying sauteing braising and boiling recipes. Groups recipes according to methods of cooking and devotes one chapter to each method reasoning that once the technique is learned the recipes will be easy. "I suppose I should say a little about why I cook. Well, first of all I love to eat, and always have. When I was eight years old I remember returning home for lunch, feeling very bilious from my first encounter with a cigarette. Mama had cooked my favorite meal for us (we were four children)flounder pan-fried in butter with exquisite fresh peas and a platter of large slices of vine-ripened tomatoes literally covered with chopped parsley, a little garlic, and, I would imagine, some salt. We were at our home on Martha's Vineyard. The water surrounds us there and is very close to the house on the seaside. The sea was so calm, the sun so warm and comforting. It was one of those days that lift you away from reality." — Joe Hyde “Upon graduating from Trinity College in Hartford in 1950, Hyde decided on a conventional enough career, the hotel business, because he enjoyed meeting people. He went to work at the Hotel Raleigh in Washington, D.C., and there he was started in the kitchen. He perceived immediately, he says, that cooking was to be his destiny. He spent three weeks with the roast cook, two weeks in the pastry shop, three weeks in cold meat and a week in the storeroom, where his first task was to clean all the cans on the shelves. He had no sooner absorbed the location of the canned goods than he was drafted into the Army. There, amazingly, he wound up serving as a cook for a heavy‑mortar company in Korea. Hyde took along a Betty Crocker cookbook. ‘When the menu said steak, I always made stew,’ he recalls. ‘I made a casserole with the hamburger meat. I browned the meat, poured off the fat, added garlic, bay leaf, onion and tomato puree and simmered the sauce for two hours. Then I put layers of cooked elbow macaroni, sauce and sliced American cheese into the deep pans until they were full. The whole affair was baked for an hour; one pan went out to each platoon. The boys liked it. They called it Holy Mattress.’ — Sports Illustrated What a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and helpful line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Hyde himself says in the introduction, 'If you can read, you can cook.' — Cooking Weekly # # # # #