Thoughtful, informative, well-written - not always what you get with a cookery book. This is a delight to read and will definitely help with my cooking skills.

This book really does pull out the best of the best and does the hard work for you. Lots of fool proof receipes for even inexperienced budding chefs!

Useful and user q friendly, not to mention substantial, cookbook from Felicity Cloake. Each recipe is perfectly laid out, simple to follow and not over complex - the quirky illustrations that accompany the recipes throughout the book are a delight and visually pleasing. (Personally I do like photography of finished dishes in a cookbook but that is not to take away from the joy of this book and I found myself enjoying the illustrations very much.). Straighforward, honest to goodness cooking, Well presented in a very pleasing volume indeed.

It's a novel concept for a cookery book: these are not Felicity Cloake's recipes but the best ones she found to do a particular job - the job of delivering the best meal, the Completely Perfect meal of the title. Think of it as the equivalent of a comparison site for when you want to renew the car insurance and then taking the best elements out of each recipe to make perfection. There's nothing cutting edge here: it's the sort of food which we've been eating for decades and probably will be for decades to come. There's a reason for that: roast chicken followed by apple crumble works and providing that you don't have a vegetarian or a vegan at table, it's a meal which is unlikely to do other than go down well.

There's good advice about getting ready to cook and how to salvage a disaster. We've all needed that on occasions. Advice on the sort of equipment you'll need is eminently practical and aims for value rather than celebrity endorsement and it might mean that you need to spend more to get something which will stand the test of time. As with everything there were the odd items which Cloake found essential which I've not needed in over half a century in the kitchen (not constantly, although it's occasionally felt like it) and a few things which I wouldn't be without which aren't mentioned. It's down to you, but you'll not go far wrong with what she suggests. She's an experienced cook with a lot of common sense.

We're taken through the meals of our day, beginning with breakfast and told the best way to make what we want to eat. Usefully, we're also told when a particular chef's method doesn't work or has drawbacks. It's a good read, too - there's a wicked sense of humour lurking in there and sometimes it peeps out at just the right moment.

There's enough of the science behind a recipe to inform you but not enough to bore. You'll understand more without feeling that you've been educated. The range of the 120 recipes is impressive: we go through all the meals and snacks which you'll encounter in daily life including such temptations as brownies and cakes. Instructions are given clearly and you're always going to be able to find a dish to cook for a particular meal. Beginners will find nothing daunting and experienced cooks will learn: I've cooked more meals than I care to remember but I still found a good few new points to bear in mind and several tips which will make life easier.

I'd like to thank the publishers for making a copy available to the Bookbag.

I was keen to see this book after enjoying Felicity Cloake's column in The Guardian for several years.

The central premise is to test as many versions of a recipe as possible to establish what really works. Each piece ends with the resulting 'perfect' recipe.

I learned to cook omelettes from someone who made delicious fluffy omelettes after learning the secret long ago from demonstrators at the Ideal Home Exhibition. Turning to Felicity's recipe - bingo there it is, exactly the same!

There's an awful lot to be learned from each discussion of recipes by noted cooks. Why add milk to an omelette? Why not?

There are no cutting edge recipes here. Rather it is a collection of established staples and favourites. Boiled eggs, roast chicken, crumble...

There are no photographs inside, just some line drawings. Do we need pictures of staples though? Better surely to pack more recipes in!

Everyone can gain from this thorough and practical book. An enthusiastic beginner who wants to understand the whys and wherefores, through to the experienced cook looking to hone their dishes.

I was sent a digital review copy by the publisher via NetGalley.

I loved everything in this book: the style of writing, how it guides you through different recipes more or less complex, and the lovely illutstration.
It's perfect if you want to learn to cook or if you want to check other way of cooking something you already did according to "mama" :)
I want to try some of the recipes as I really liked them.
A very good reference, highly recommended!
Many thanks to Penguin Books (UK) and Netgalley for this ARC

I must admit upfront that I am a big fan of Felicity Cloake’s column in the Guardian, so it was a delight to get a copy of her book, Completely Perfect.
As a competent and adventurous cook, I was rather disappointed when I read the table of contents and saw that the first four recipes were for very basic egg cookery – boiled, fried, poached and scrambled. But what a delight it was to read each page, boiled eggs included! Felicity Cloake’s writing is glorious – informative yet entertaining, packed with lots of details and snippets of advice. It’s a long time since I enjoyed actually “reading” a recipe book so much. To give an example, in the section on Fried Eggs, talking about a perfectionist French chef’s labourious method of frying eggs she has this to say “ All well and good monsieur, but it’s pretty fiddly, and almost impossible to do in quantity. Also, it is definitely cheating.” What fun to read!
Not only are the introductions and explanations as to how she reached the “perfect” recipes well written, but the recipes themselves are excellent. I made the Gobi Aloo and it was delicious; I tried the Rice Pudding and savoured a delicately spiced, creamy delight. My only very minor quibble is that there is no suggestion for the size of the pie dish to use – that would have been very useful.
Cooks who only like recipe books with full colour photos of every recipe will be disappointed by this book, but I did not think this detracted from the book at all.
One final plus for me was the extensive bibliography at the end of the book.. Comments in the book piqued my interest to follow up on chefs and authors, and the bibliography and list of web sites makes this very easy to do.