13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Soup Book, Excellent Cookbook. Buy It!, March 21, 2006
This review is from: Complete Book of Soups and Stews (Paperback)
`The Complete Book of Soups and Stews' by the late blooming culinary writer, Bernard Clayton was very slow in coming to my attention as a reviewer, even though I have owned a copy for several years. Part of my tardiness is due to the fact that I am very sanguine about the ability of a `...Complete...' book to live up to its presumption on just about any culinary subject, especially one so big as soups and stews. Another part of my reluctance to critically read this book is the fact that I did review the author's `The Complete Book of Breads' and found it to be missing an awfully big chunk of bread lore, in that it had very poor coverage of artisinal breads baked using wild yeasts such as the famous San Francisco sourdough yeast. In comparison, Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Bread Bible' and books from Peter Reinhart are superior on some of the more arcane corners of bread baking.
So, I have spent my time reviewing good soup and stew books by such luminaries as Barbara Kafka, James Peterson, and Deborah Madison, plus a passle of `soup Nazi' wannabes who run soup restaurants from one coast to the other. I am paying for my tardiness in my regrets for not cracking open this excellent book much sooner. This is one of those books which makes you wonder why later writers bother to write on a subject, since Master Clayton seems to have covered the subject so well. On the issue of `...Complete...', Clayton addresses this issue head on by saying that the book is not complete in the literal sense, since one can easily write volumes on the subject of onion soups alone. Rather, the book is complete in that it touches on every major genre of soup and stew.
The very first thing to impress me about this book was the meticulous detail to which all recipes went in both fact and in useful typographical layout. And, all of this is done in the service of soups, by golly, which the author quite correctly says are certainly a lot easier to make than, for example, breads. The next thing that impressed me was the author's description of stock making. It was not overly fussy, but it managed to leave out no important details about the stock making procedure for the basics such as beef, chicken, fish, and vegetable stocks. I did spot one minor misstatement when he says with no qualification that older meats are better for stocks than flesh and bones from young animals. There is a major counter-example to this statement in the use of veal to make thick stocks with gelatin, since young animal bones have more gelatin in them then older animals. I am also tempted to argue with his identifying genus vegetable stock as `count bouillon'. I strongly suspect that `court bouillon' is simply one species of the very large family of vegetable stocks. I know this from my reading of Deborah Madison on stocks, with whom by great good sense, Clayton concurs in that both state the opinion that a stock should be made to reflect the use to which it will be put. To that end, Clayton makes the excellent observation that stocks made for creamy soup have no need to be clear, or at least not as clear as stocks to be used in consumes or chicken noodle soups, for example.
This is a somewhat old fashioned cookbook in that it spends a fair amount of space on discussing kitchen equipment used to make soups. This is good stuff, but even better is his little tutorial on how to prep the six most important vegetables (onions, celery, carrots, leeks, garlic, and shallots) used in soup preparation.
Unlike a lot of books which are organized by soup styles (consommé, noodle, bisque, cream, chowder), it is organized by principle ingredient for the simple reason that people reach for a soup recipe (or can of soup) based on a particular taste. And, unlike stews, soups are a preparation where it is common for a single ingredient such as clam, carrot, leek, mushroom, chestnut, or whatever to predominate. I think this argument may be just a bit weak when we get to the thick Italian `everything but the kitchen sink' minestrones, but its better than having no good organizing concept at all. This concept also works well when you look in your fridge or pantry and find an overabundance of leeks or onions or potatoes or tomatoes or sausage.
In examining several important soup type recipes, I find, in general, that Clayton's recipes tend toward the simple. I find fewer ingredients and steps in, for example, his chowder recipes than I see in Jasper White's definitive and excellent recipes in '50 Chowders'. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that you can rely on this book for finding relatively easy examples of virtually every major classic soup recipe known to the cook in the European tradition, including lots of recipes coming to us from Japan and China.
For foodies, the book also manages to cover a pretty sizable number of interesting background facts. My favorite is the story behind the `Les Halle' onion soup, especially since I was fortunate enough to have this treat at 4 AM in a bistro on the outskirts of the `Les Halles' produce market in Paris, before they tore it down to be replaced by a larger and more sanitary market in the Paris suburbs (See Tony Bourdain's travel show on the new market.)
If you have the resources for owning no more than one soup book, and that book does not have to be vegetarian, then this is definitely the book for you. It is cheap and a smallish trade paperback, although still with over 440 densely packed pages.
Very highly recommended.
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