The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook: Over 350 Natural Foods Recipes, Free of All Common Food Allergens: wheat-free, milk-free, egg-free, corn-free, sugar-free, yeast-free
July 25, 2010 · Posted in Bestselling Cooking Books
Product Description
The most comprehensive kitchen resource for overcoming food allergies-now completely revised and updated!
Since its original publication in 1984, The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook has helped thousands of people overcome their food sensitivities and intolerances. Now, the tips and recipes have been entirely revamped for 21st-century cooks with little or no time to spare! Includes:
* Extensive breakfast and dessert chapters
* Updated nutrition informat… More >>
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5 Responses to “The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook: Over 350 Natural Foods Recipes, Free of All Common Food Allergens: wheat-free, milk-free, egg-free, corn-free, sugar-free, yeast-free”
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Although this is a very useful book for anyone with an uncommon food allergy, those who are allergic to peanuts, nuts, and shellfish (and those who are gluten-intolerant) would not find this book as useful. Most of the recipes feature nuts or peanuts as main ingredients, and there’s no real help given as to how to make a substitution. As the most common allergies (and the most serious, sometimes even leading to death) are to nuts and peanuts, I’m surprised that these ingredients are featured so prominently in a supposed allergy cookbook.
The same could be said with respect to the seafood recipes and the many recipes featuring grains that contain or (as is the case with oats) may be contaminated with other grains that contain gluten. Even a trace of gluten can bring grief to someone with celiac sprue.
I did not find this book very useful. However, those with allergies to rarer items or whose ‘allergies’ are merely intolerances (ie. no hives, throat swelling, cardiac arrest, etc.) might find this book useful. I can’t recommend it to the average food allergy sufferer, though.
Rating: 3 / 5
My review pertains to the version of the book that has 350 recipes. But I would assume that this version is a similar quality.
This book has really been a great resource for me. My son (who is 3) has multiple food allergies (wheat, rye, corn, eggs, soy, dairy, chicken, foods in the night-shade family like potatoes, tomatoes, bell pepper….the list continues). It has been quite a nightmare to know what to get for him. And he also started developing sensitivities to the food that he ate all the time (oats, pork).
When I got this book, I learnt about the rotation diet, about how one could get sensitive to foods if exposed to them for an extended period of time. It provided me with alternative foods, information about food groups (which is essential when planning a rotation diet), lots of alternative things to use instead of sugar (agave nectar, maple or date sugar), how to use alternative flours (amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, teff) which have all been so much help.
I have been using the breakfast and better breads section extensively, and also the snack and dessert sections. With the range of allergies that my son has, those have been the hardest types of food to prepare. The main course sections have some good suggestions as well.
I would highly recommend this book if you need to deal with multiple allergies and are at a loss as to where to start. I found the recipes in this book much better to use than the recipes from the Food Allergy Network, which is rather strange. The recipes from the FAN mostly had wheat flour in them, and provided no information on rotation diets, food groups or alternative flours. Some of the other books that I have bought are also not very strong in these areas. This book is particularly good if you have the type of allergies that I listed earlier. If you only have one or two of these allergies, perhaps you might find the recipes too esoteric and it might be unnecessary to go to such lengths as I have had to, to find the right food.
Rating: 5 / 5
As an allergy sufferer who counsels many allergy patients, I am disturbed that this book bills itself as “free of all common allergens” yet contains many recipes with soy, peanuts or tree nuts. It is well known that peanut and nut allergies are among the most severe of common allergies. Less well known is that reactions to soy are increasingly prevalent. Indeed people who are allergic to peanuts are often allergic to soy as well though they may not know it. Deaths from soy in children who had not previously reacted to soy have been reported in Sweden and the Ministry of Health there warns that children who are allergic to peanuts and have asthma are at very high risk. I’ve also found that those who are allergic to dairy who start drinking soymilk will, in all likelihood, soon be allergic to soy as well. Finally, people who eat a lot of soy often develop digestive problems and “leaky gut” syndrome, causing further problems for allergy sufferers. Yet this book includes lots of recipes with soy. I recommend that people educate themselves as fully as possible on this subject whether they think they have soy allergies or not by reading the book “The Whole Soy Story” by Kaayla Daniel. The book has been endorsed by Dr. Doris Rapp, a leading authority on allergies who has a great website drrapp.com.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book needs to be in your kitchen if any of the following apply to you:
· you are vegan,
· someone in your family has food allergies,
· you are vegetarian and want to include more vegan recipes in your diet, or
· you enjoy baking but cringe at the amount of butter and sugar in most recipes
Author Jones was diagnosed with food allergies in 1976. She defines a food “allergy” as the following experience: “eating a food causes you distress, or if you discover any clear cause-and-effect symptoms that are relieved by avoidance of specific foods.”
Her completely updated and revised cookbook includes over 350 recipes. Each is free of all common food allergens. No more getting halfway through a recipe only to realize that it would have been gluten-free if only you had used the other flour option. There are also chapters on ingredients that may be new to you, rotary diversified diets, keeping your home allergy-free, eating out, and helping children with allergies.
Note that this is not a vegetarian cookbook. However, a majority of the recipes are vegan. There are 17 vegetarian main dishes, and several of these have become instant hits at my house. The Better Burgers are the greatest. For Thanksgiving, I served the Zesty Loaf for the first time and an hour later, the loaf was gone, and my sisters-in-law were begging for the recipe.
We have also grown quite fond of the Fresh Apple Muffins. They will be going with us to our La Leche League meeting this month. And I’m willing to bet that none of them will be making the return trip home.
The only recipe that hasn’t turned out well was the Date Pecan Pie. Too much blackstrap molasses makes things taste like cough syrup.
My only complaint with the book is that quite a few of the baked goods call for white buckwheat flour or a combination of flours. While the author explains how to grind whole buckwheat groats in the blender, I find that to be too time consuming. With a preschooler and baby around, I don’t have time to grind my own flour. I have the same issue with the combination of flours used in some recipes. It takes extra time to get out and measure three different flours.
However, as one who eats a vegan diet in the comfort of my own home, I have to say that I love allergy-free cookbooks: no dairy, no eggs, and all-natural sugars. As a fine example of a cookbook that fits this bill, The Allergy Self-Help Cookbook will always have a place in my kitchen.
–Reviewed by Virginia Delaney
Rating: 4 / 5
“Yeast free” not, “nut free” not, “soy free” not, allergen free like the book claims -NOT. There are allergens throughout the entire book! There were only a couple I could use out of the 350 recipes!
Rating: 1 / 5