Just One Pot (2007) is a handsome, coffee table-style cookbook from the good folks at Readers’ Digest.  I am a sucker for pretty pictures and picked this one up at one of those cheap book warehouse emporiums.  My only cultural touchpoint for Readers’ Digest comes from the bookshelf in the bathroom of my childhood home.   If you knew my mother this would not seem odd to you.  The bathroom was home to a small selection of Family Circus books, a few sci-fi paperbacks, and a dozen or so Readers’ Digests.  I usually just read the jokes, which were plentiful and spread throughout the book, but occasionally found a story worth reading.   I never once saw a recipe, and have no idea what business Readers’ Digest has publishing a cookbook.

The theme of the cookbook, as you might surmise from the title, is dishes that can be cooked in just one pot.   With the exception of a few side dishes, each of the three hundred-odd recipes can be cooked with a single pot, though the definition of a pot is quite loose.  There are dedicated chapters on soups and stews, as well as chapters dedicated to a specific cooking styles such as “Fry Pot” or “Boiling Pot” (which also include a variety of soups and stews).  The final chapter, called “Tabletop Pot”, contains a variety of hot pot, fondue, and slow cooker recipes (including even more soups and stews). 

Since the book is arranged by “how” rather than “where” you’ll often find recipes from different parts of the world on the same back.  The stew chapter includes conventional beef and lamb stews, as well as fruit-filled tagines, spicy curries, and chili.  The Fry Pot chapter has dozens of stir-fries. but also risottos and frittatas.  Recipes range from dutifully authentic, such as Indonesian Nasi Goreng to weirdly Americanized, such as a chicken soup flavored with curry powder and canned corn.  

Which makes this a great book to turn to when I can’t figure out what to make for dinner.  In the years I’ve owned it I’ve cooked maybe a dozen of the three hundred recipes, mostly Mediterranean dishes but a couple of the South American or regional Italian soups. What I have cooked is quite good, but I think this is largely a function of recipe selection.  I’m a restless soul and always looking for something with a little bit of pizzazz, but to find those recipes in this book I have to skip past dozens of variants on meat + veggies + herbs in a pot.   I’ve been around the block enough times to make a basic stew or soup by feel and taste;  I’m sure the stew recipes in Just One Pot are fine, but they don’t necessarily spark joy in me.

There are helpful factoids scattered here and there, like a short paragraph on why such-and-such soup is popular during Hungarian winters, or why certain herbs are used in a certain region of France.   There are also short spotlights on less-familiar ingredients like spelt and whole fennel.   They are few and far between, not enough to make this a “readable” cookbook, but enough add a little bit of color and context.

You can find more recipes from Just One Pot here.