Sauces : Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making

Rating:
Summary: The BEST
Review: This book is for the professional or SERIOUS hobby cook. It is NOT for someone coming home from a long, hard day at work looking for a quick sauce to slosh over the overcooked maccaroni. It is to be read as a book from beginning to end and kept as a reference tool. The stocks and sauces take time to make, but the results are fabulous. James Peterson is THE master...

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book for Professionals and beginners
Review: This is a book to have on your shelf. I have been collecting catering books since I started out in catering college back in london, England. I got the first book of sauces that Peterson wrote, and when I see the new one (4th Edition) I had to have it. It's easy to follow, and helps the mind to flow with thoughts of great sauces. I love what I do, being a professional Chef, and would recomend this book to anybody.

Rating:
Summary: Listen: NOT for recipe cooks
Review: This is a great book, but it's not for recipe cooks. If you're looking for recipes, go to allrecipes.com and get a bunch. I think this is one of the best cooking books I have ever read, it sits right next to the Oxford Companion To Food. Both are encyclopedic, really explaining what is what, the history, giving you insight into real processes and techniques for doing things. To me this book is for learning the basic in-depth skills, giving you background, etc, so that you can innovate and create things on your own with whatever you happen to have around you. I really love this book. But again, if the reader is looking for a book that is going to give them recipes for tartar sauces, best look elsewhere! This is NOT the book for you! However, if you want to learn just what a sauce is, the ways they are thickened, the various ingredients that go into them, their purpose in the meal, etc, then you've just found what is possible the only book on the shelves that is going to give you a clear answer. I really like this book, can you tell ?

Rating:
Summary: Easily the most important recipe reference for your kitchen
Review: `Sauces, 2nd Edition ' by leading food teacher and writer James Peterson is high on my list of important, valuable single subject cookbooks which should be in the kitchen library of any serious amateur chef or professional chef in training.

The very first impression is the very large number of named sauces listed in the table of contents. And, it should be no surprise at all that almost every one of these sauces has a French name, even if the sauce is based on a non-French ingredient such as Sauce Hongroise based on paprika and Sauce Porto based on Port (originating in Portugal). Of the chapters covering eighteen different kinds of sauce, only one, the chapter on `Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes' has even the slimmest majority of recipes with a non-French cant, with its large selection of Spanish and New World salsas, south Asian chutneys, Greek mint lamb sauce, and American cranberry sauce.

The book opens with a short history of sauces, which becomes more interesting the more you know about Medieval and Renaissance cooking. The book even gives something missing from books on medieval cooking, the outline of an actual recipe for the ubiquitous verjuice, which was the Medieval and Renaissance source for sour tastes, which could be prepared from either grapes or apples. Just for fun, Peterson gives a few samples of Medieval and Renaissance recipes. The most interesting observation I found for culinary history was the statement that in the Middle Ages, sauces were thickened by pureeing meat, which is not at all surprising, as Medieval nobility looked down on all vegetable products (such as flour?) and preferred animal ingredients and spices in their dishes. The high point of the last three centuries for sauce making was the advent of more broadly based cookbooks for regional and bourgeois cooking and the systemization of classic sauce making by Antonin Careme, the `father of modern French cooking' (See Ian Kelly's biography of Careme, `Cooking for Kings').

After the historical chapter and two better than average chapters on equipment and ingredients come the fifteen (15) chapters of recipes on:

Stocks, glaces, and essences
Liaisons: An Overview
White Sauces for Meat and Vegetables
Brown Sauces
Stock-Based and NonIntegral Fish Sauces
Integral Meat Sauces
Integral Fish and Shellfish Sauces
Crustacean Sauces
Jellies and Chauds-Froids
Hot Emulsified Egg Yolk Sauces
Mayonnaise Based Sauces
Butter Sauces
Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes
Purees and Puree Thickened Sauces
Dessert Sauces

The quality and authority of this book, especially with the added weight of a second enlarged and corrected edition is such that it is much more useful to state why you need this book rather than try to criticize it or find improvements.

First, this book is the very best reference I can think of when you need a sauce and don't remember how to make it or want to improve on the last time you made it. This use is valuable even if you never make any sauces other than vinaigrettes, marinara sauce, gravies, and bechamel sauces for Mac and cheese or creamed chipped beef. This book is my standard reference for all such purposes and it has NEVER let me down! The existence of this book always makes me wonder why restaurant chefs always include a chapter of pantry recipes for stocks and sauces. Except for the really finicky writers such as Judy Rodgers (Zuni Café) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Bouchon), Peterson's recipes will be about as good as you will find in any restaurant chef's book. So, you may prefer coming to this book even when an author gives us his version, as this will mean that all your stocks and sauces will be made from a common point of view and a common palate. This book is better than any other source in that it simply has everything you can possibly need.

Second, this book gives excellent recipes for sauce-based dishes, especially for seafood such as lobster, shrimp, salmon, clams, and scallops. For many fish dishes, the sauce is the dish, as cooking the fish is usually no more than the ten minutes it takes to poach, broil, bake, sautee, or fry the little critter(s).

Third, the book is an excellent source when you need alternatives. You need a fancy sauce for lobster, but you don't have time to create a stock from lobster shells and go through all the other steps needed for a good shellfish sauce. If you really need to impress, consider a homemade remoulade or aioli (variations on mayonnaise), which can be done in a few minutes in a food processor with eggs, oil, and a little mustard, plus flavorings.

Fourth, this book is simply the very best source I can think of to enlarge your repertoire of basic dishes and elements of dishes which can be swapped in to change a simple steamed vegetable into an elegant side dish. I am constantly pleased with the power of serendipity, that chance encounter with a great, easy recipe which enables you to cook up a yummy dish without having to consult a cookbook, let alone remember in which book the recipe was. My very first use of this book produced such an encounter when I was looking up the recipe for beurre blanc and discovered beurre citron (lemon butter sauce). This encounter also revealed that there is a considerable mystique connected with beurre blanc, as it is considered difficult to make. As I make it regularly as a dressing for fish, I can assure you that it is relatively easy and worth the small difficulty involved. It is also interesting to learn from this book that beurre blanc was also one of the sharpest weapons of Nouvelle Cuisine in banishing flour based sauces from restaurant sauces. So, with one fell swoop, you can be trendy, healthy, and haute cuisine with a single recipe. Wow!

If you wish to be a serious cook, you need this book!