Gratins : Golden-Crusted Sweet and Savory Dishes

Rating:
Summary: An Importantly Useful Source of Easy, Tasty Dishes
Review: This is the type of book I find the most useful in my collection of over 200 cookbooks for finding a recipe to fit a particular niche in a menu. The book deals with a single type of dish, the gratin, but it has at least one big surprise. That is, the dishes in the book are evenly divided between 39 recipes for savory gratins and 39 recipes for sweet gratins. And, the author on the cover is more closely associated with the creation of the sweet gratins than he is with the savory.

The best thing about the savory gratins is that few if any of them would be considered standards. There are, of course, some which include sliced potatoes, but all of these include some new twist to make them more interesting. That means, you have 39 new dishes which are easy to access and relatively easy to prepare. In fact, almost all savory gratins are made with the same drill:

- Boil an ingredient, usually a pasta or vegetable, until al dente.
- Saute one or more ingredients, usually onion and garlic and a vegetable.
- Create a sauce, sometimes from the sauteed mixture, sometimes in a double boiler.
- Heat the oven to about 425 degrees fahrenheit, sometimes heat the broiler.
- Grease a gratin dish, build the gratin by layering ingredients.
- Heat in oven for 15 to 45 minutes until bubbling or until top is browned.

There are small variations with each recipe, so there is no thought of turning this into a formula, but once you get the drill down, each new recipe becomes that much easier.

If you did not adduce this fact from the publisher or from the author's bio, you may be able to see from the savory contents that this book was written by a French chef. The amount of butter used in these savory dishes is enough to keep Land o Lakes in business for a very long time. Not to mention that it will keep a battalion of hens in the egg laying business until the cows come home.

The savory gratins are very good, but the main attraction is the sweet gratins, which actually appear first in the book. The differences between the savory and sweet gratins are not merely based on using the same drill with sugar replacing onions and garlic and fruit replacing brocolli and potatoes. It is true that every sweet gratin does feature one or more fruits, but there is a greater variety of containers. Many of the sweet gratins are done on dessert dishes, ramekins, and small souffle dishes rather than the trusty old gratin dish. (To be fair, several savory dishes use ramekins also, but not as many). The sweet gratins replace boiling and sauteeing with macerating fruit and creating custards. The sweet gratins' recipes are typically one or two steps longer than the savory, and, as true of pastry the world around, often require a closer attention to measuring and to the application of heat. Custards and caramels are very finicky!

One thing the two styles of gratin share is that their style of finishing in the oven means that they will rarely be the dish on the critical path to getting a meal on the table. Savory gratins and warm sweet gratins will very nicely stay warm in an oven for many minutes while you fuss with the last minute sautee.

There are at least three features of this book which distinguish it from most other cookbooks. First, there is a complete list of recipes at the beginning of the book. For all but the largest 'Joy of Cooking' style of book, I always consider this a plus. For this type of book, it is a real added value. Second, there is an index of ingredients in the back, separated by sweet and savory, indicating all of the recipes in which the ingredient was used. For example, if you have some leftover leeks, you can easily find the two gratin recipes which include leeks. Third, there is virtually none of the chatty headnotes and sidebars which you find in cookbooks of almost all styles. I did miss this, as they tend to make the book more interesting to read, but it stresses the point that this book is all business, gratin business, that is.

The book is very attractive and very typical of a European style of binding. I found two small issues with the book. First, while the binding of the book is very sturdy, especially for a volume listing at less than 30 dollars, it is too stiff and not made to lie flat. Not a good configuration for a cookbook. Second, there were at least two misprints, neither one attributable to a faulty translation from French to English.

I give this four stars because this book is USEFUL and it's recipes are relatively easy! I don't give it five stars because it does not, unlike some books by Daniel Boulud or Tom Colicchio or Mario Batali or Paula Wolfert, broaden and deepen my understanding of the culinary arts.