Antony Worrall Thompson's Top 100 Beef Recipes: Quick and Easy Dishes for Every Occasion

The author of Ready Steady Cook and host of BBC2's Saturday Kitchen offers a number of inventive ways to dress up beef in this occasionally frustrating collection. He provides recipes for almost every cut, but the British terms (fore-rib for ribeye, fillet for tenderloin and a multitude of terms for ingredients) can make for confusing reading. Recipes frequently co-mingle Metric and American measurements, creating the potential for errors. Thompson offers translations for many ingredients, such as sea salt when he calls for Maldon salt, but other recipes require ingredients unfamiliar to Americans, such as dry martini, a liqueur that is markedly different from James Bond's drink of choice. Thompson does offer a number of alternatives for every price range, and many of the recipes are forgiving if the cut of meat isn't the best quality. Patient cooks will find a number of new twists on old favorites, such as Bloody Mary Steak, Chargrilled Thai Beef Salad and a number of delicious curries. The breadth of styles and flavors Thompson incorporates makes for a well-rounded cookbook that will encourage repeat visits. As he writes in the introduction, ""this book needs greasy fingerprints.""