Slow Cooker Comfort Food by Judith Finlayson

I think of slow cookers (which I know by the brand name of Crock Pot) as labour-saving devices, so I would have expected a book called Slow Cooker Comfort Food to be full of recipes that call for little more than 15 minutes of chopping and eight hours of simmering. But Canadian author Judith Finlayson already has eight cookbooks under her belt, of which five deal with slow cookers (one is designed specifically for diabetics), so Slow Cooker Comfort Food is at a whole other level of sophistication.

Finlayson’s range will please cosmopolitan types who want to experiment off the Joy of Cooking-style Euro-American food map; the book includes plausible recipes for Chicken Pho (Vietnamese soup); congee (Asian rice soup); Thai-Style Red Curry Tomato Soup; Harira with Chicken (a variation on the hearty Moroccan soup served at the end of Ramadan, which is normally based on lamb), and Caribbean Oxtails. Despite the meat-and-potatoes image of “comfort food”, 50 of the recipes are specifically tagged as “vegan-friendly”, and numerous others are noted as being vegetarian.

This international focus has its down side, though. I might normally test at least one recipe before offering an opinion about a cookbook, but when I looked through to find something I felt like trying, I discovered that almost every recipe would necessitate a shopping trip outside the neighbourhood for one offbeat ingredient. (How many of these do you have in your pantry right now: harissa, Mexican crema, Thai red curry paste, Aleppo pepper, cremini mushrooms? If you do have them, run and get this book!) This having been said, there don’t seem to be any particularly difficult or fussy instructions, beyond certain stages where you have to watch the pot and add new ingredients at timed intervals.

The other reason I didn’t cook anything out of the book is that, of a total 275 recipes, 116 call for large (4- to 8-quart) oval cookers, with most of these in the 5-quart range. To my disappointment, almost all the baking and dessert recipes call for larger cookers than the one I own, which is about the size and shape of a paint can. Otherwise, I would certainly have tried out the Cranberry Orange Bread, the Blueberry Corn Bread, the Chile-Spiked Chocolate Pots, the New York-Style Cheesecake or, most exciting of all to my mind, the traditional steamed Christmassy puddings like the Gingery Orange Sticky Pudding.

However, as someone used to following recipes, I can attest that these are well laid out, clearly explained and delectably illustrated. The book lies flat on the counter, a plus when your hands are messy, and the pages are thick and sturdy enough to withstand splatters. One tiny quibble: the table of contents lists only broad categories; if you want to scan the list of recipes and don’t know what to look for in the index, you have to flip through the book to find the contents of each section. A colour-coded section tab system would have been nice.

Finlayson gives some great advice in her introduction. She discusses browning meat first, using whole spices, and reducing the amount of liquid when using a slow cooker compared to other cooking methods. She offers tips on certain ingredients that should only be added at the end, on making smaller batches and on using other cookware (like springform pans) inside a slow cooker. Especially valuable, she also describes a simple test to determine whether the slow cooker is keeping food hot enough to prevent bacteria from thriving in it; this could be very important for anyone cooking with an older model or a garage-sale acquisition.

Final analysis: Slow Cooker Comfort Food is not the best resource for a harried working parent trying to hurl nourishing food onto the table three times a day, seven days a week. Because of the complexity and diversity of the recipes, as well as the fairly large quantities, it would be a great choice for a curious young cook planning to entertain in a first apartment. Better yet, this book (along with a big oval slow cooker, of course!) would make a fabulous wedding present for an adventurous yet domestic couple who’d like to try a new recipe every week.

Slow Cooker Comfort Food, 275 Soul-Satisfying Recipes by Judith Finlayson (Robert Rose Inc., 2009) ISBN 978-0-7788-0224-2