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Got Milk? Review

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Got Milk? (Canada, UK)
By Peggy Cullen
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Publication Date: Oct. 2000
ISBN: 0811826465

Got a great advertising campaign? Write a book. Got a cookie recipe? Write a book. Got both? Write a book. Notice the trend here?

There are surely enough cookie recipes in the world already. Heaven knows there are also enough advertising campaigns. But are there enough cookie recipes based on advertising campaigns? Apparently not!

This book seeks to remedy the problem — blending the successful "Got Milk?" advertising campaign with a new cookie book of the same name, by Peggy Cullen. The book features about 50 recipes, clustered in several categories: chocolate chip cookies, butter cookies & shortbread, mostly chocolate cookies, twice-baked cookies (such as biscotti), tuiles & lace cookies, macaroons & meringues, and other classic cookies (black & whites, pecan sandies, palmiers, etc.).

I just don’t understand why anyone tries to fiddle with the classic Toll-House chocolate chip cookie recipe printed about a zillion times each year on the back of Nestle’s packages. In this case, Cullen essentially cuts the standard recipe in half and adds a drop more vanilla and subtracts a little salt. I suppose if you’re going to send this book to your favorite former foreign exchange student from Minsk where chocolate chip cookies are a rarity, a traditional recipe might come in handy, and if there’s a shortage of chocolate chips in Minsk (as there must sometimes be), a half-sized recipe could be very useful.

Redemption comes though because Cullen also provides useful chocolate chip cookie variations — a Thin & Chewy CCC, a Thick & Chewy CCC and a Crisp and Crunchy CCC — that will serve the interests of the many people whose favorite comfort cookie is just a little out of the ordinary.

Since parents are the leading purchasers of cookie cookbooks, we think an essential consideration is how well the book works for kids. Although this book is not specifically for children, it passed our test with flying colors. Our seven-year-old volunteered to make some cookies for a homebound couple recently and, after paging through Got Milk?, selected the Chocolate Marbled Meringue Kisses (which we thought were a little over her head). With some help from mom, however, the cookies turned out very well, and the recipients even requested the recipe.

We also made the Chocolate Vanilla-Cream Sandwich Cookies, which are glorified home-made Oreos, and which are featured in a photo on the back cover. They take a lot more work than breaking open a package of Oreos, but they’re also much better.

The book includes a lot of information on techniques, equipment and ingredients to help the beginning baker. There’s also a little story about how milk gets from the cow to the carton, which is totally unnecessary, but helps support the theme.

The recipes are laid out one to a page or on facing pages, so you don’t have to flip pages when you’re up to your elbows in butter and flour. The photos of many of the cookies are lovely and inviting.

I cannot stand the recent cookbook publishing trend of grouping similar recipes under chapter headings in the table of contents and only listing the page number for the chapter, so that you have to turn page after page to find the recipe you want. In this book it’s not so bad, because there are only a dozen or so recipes in each chapter, but would it be so hard to tell us exactly what page to look for? The index of Got Milk?, on the other hand, is quite good, grouping recipes under lots of different ingredients, so if you’re yearning for a cookie that includes dates, you can find appropriate recipes easily.

One final quibble with the layout of the book is that some photographs are used to decorate pages here and there, but are not identified. So you may see a cookie that really tempts you, but have a hard time finding the recipe for it.

In a world full of cookie cookbooks and recipes, this is really a very nice book. Shockingly, however, the author’s photo on the inside back cover, while attractive, does not include a milk mustache! Could it be that she hasn’t got milk? Hmmm…

Got Milk? (Canada, UK)

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