The Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know (Cookbooks) [Hardcover]

Raymond Sokolov (Author)

Book Description

Series: Cookbooks | Publication Date: October 21, 2003

The Cook's Canon is Raymond Sokolov's pick of the recipes essential for culinary literacy. He provides crystal-clear recipes for 101 classics, from Apple Pie to Zabaglione. Each iconic recipe is paired with a short essay -- historical, ethnographic, chemical, physical, and often very funny. Readers who know their way around the kitchen will rediscover what got them into food in the first place, and they can feast on witty morsels of the origins and significance of these beloved dishes. Neophytes will find a short and brilliantly informed survey course in The Cook's Canon, a liberal arts education for the palate.

The Cook's Canon celebrates great and fundamental food ideas from all the world's great and fundamental cuisines: French, of course, and Chinese, but also Italian, Moroccan, Thai, Indian, English, and German. While no short-list of favorites could take in the thousands of fabulous things human beings have learned to cook since the first genius chef boiled water over fire, Sokolov's canon is an indispensable, satisfying, and inspiring introduction (or re-introduction) to the world's culinary classics.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know is Rayomond Sokolov's tenth book. Add to that his years of magazine and newspaper columns devoted to digging down to the roots of a dish or food tradition and you have a man who knows a thing or two. Drawing on his own taste and ideas--and his concern that a current generation of talented food enthusiasts, amateur and professional alike, don't seem to know much at all about the evolution of the food we eat and take for granted--Sokolov has come up with 101 recipes he thinks everyone should know and understand. He's looking to "train the palates of a generation whose connection with traditional food has been short-circuited." The recipes he has chosen, then, are classics accompanied by "historical and cultural and sometimes scientific information that tells in some depth where they came from, what they meant to the people who first ate them before they spread to other societies, and why they are importa! nt to us now."

Since Sokolov is writing for an English-speaking readership, he has chosen the recipes that reflect that prejudice, Euro- and Gallocentric recipes for the most part, with a tip of the hat to China, India, and Morocco. For those inclined to argue with the choices, Sokolov says so much the better, "because that will mean that you have thought passionately about the subject." He begins with Apple Pie and ends with Zabiglione. In between, in alphabetical order, you'll find the likes of Chicken Adobo, Doughnuts, Jambon Persillé, Osso Buco alla Milanese, Pork Vindaloo, Shepherd's Pie, Suckling Pig, Terrine of Foie Gras, and Vinaigrette. His notes accompanying each recipe are entertaining and informative. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

Sokolov, former food editor of the New York Times and author of The Saucier's Apprentice and Great Recipes from the New York Times, throws down the gauntlet, rejecting all things fusion and trendy and touting tradition. While he leans toward French and Italian cuisine with dishes like Choucroute and Saltimbocca alla Romana, Sokolov includes American favorites like Apple Pie as well as international dishes that have made it into the North American repertoire like Tamales, Tempura, and Poori. The 101 recipes were selected for their fame and influence, or because they "represent whole categories of food-cannelloni for pasta, blanquette de veau for stews." Comparing himself to a professor teaching Shakespeare, Sokolov can come off as stodgy. He includes token non-Western dishes, like Hong Kong Salt Shrimp, with a sense of colonialist entitlement. Organized alphabetically, this "canon" is easy to use, but leaves the reader with no sense of continuity except for Sokolov's authoritative voice. In the end readers learn that the line between "old" and "new" has been illusory all along-Profiteroles au Chocolat, included here in their nouvelle cuisine form as dessert, began as an unsweetened main course, which Sokolov recommends bringing back. The best parts of this book are the well-researched, amusing introductions to each dish; this will be of interest to food historians and cultural mavens, who, ironically, may find it most useful as a jumping-off point for new creations.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks; 1 edition (October 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060083905
• ISBN-13: 978-0060083908
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #617,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative Culinary Scholarship and Opinion, November 24, 2003

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know (Cookbooks) (Hardcover)

Raymond Sokolov has collected recipes and background stories on what he believes are the 101 most important dishes or cooking preparations a cook should know, from the point of view of Western, primarily French culinary tradition. This is a book I wish I had written myself, so I obviously believe this is a very important contribution to those of us who approach food as somewhere between an interest and an obsession. I also must say that Sokolov has done a pretty good job of it.

First, I believe the choice of the 101 to put into the canon is very well made. I cannot easily think of one preparation I would replace with an alternate choice. Even the more obscure choices appear to be right on. For example, I have a good familiarity with Fillipino cuisine and I concur that the one Fillipino dish included is the correct choice.

Second, I believe the recipes are also very well chosen. The recipe for ?bread? for example, is not the simple square loaf one can produce in a few hours in a home kitchen. Rather, it is a much more sophisticated generic artisinal recipe using a sponge developed overnight and baked with high humidity added to the oven to promote a hard crust. Very good choice. Also, most of the recipes are actually very simple and few require any unusual ingredients. With some exceptions I will mention below, I believe the care with selection of ingredients is well placed, for example, when Raymond gives us the warning about using very fresh eggs to make zabaglione.

Third, the headnotes to the dishes are delightful and make turn the book into exactly the kind of foodie book I like the best, a combination of historical and linguistic scholarship with references connecting us to the wider world of food writing to such luminaries as Julia Child and Elizabeth David. Herein lies my most significant disappointments with this book.

The headnotes are very entertaining, but they are sometimes so at the cost of very cheap shots at respected colleagues in the food writing field. There is one paragraph in the article on macaroni and cheese which is highly disrespectful to John Thorne and some of his statements. I believe Thorne is if not the best, then one of the best contemporary writers on cooking and the origins of cuisine. I do not always agree with Thorne, but I believe he deserves respect. Sokolov has gone for the mantle of scholarship and has let it slip by a crude ad hominum attack. He makes a similar personal but less acid observation on Elizabeth David. While I love the work, this has turned me sour on the author.

There are some lapses, also, in the description of ingredients. In the recipe for Daube de boeuf a la provencale, Sokolow calls for bacon, preferably pancetta. Later, in the list of ingredients for spaghetti, he correctly distinguishes bacon (smoked) from pancetta (unsmoked). In the first case, it would have been much better to specify pancetta and say one would substitute bacon if necessary. A small point, I guess, but it did tarnish my opinion of the author?s expertise.

For the quality and usefulness of the material, the book is very reasonably priced, and I do not miss photographs common to almost every other culinary oeuvre printed today, as I?m sure it would have jacked up the price. What I do miss is a formal bibiographic reference to where the author selected his recipe. Many contain some vague reference to a specifec work, but rarely the full chapter and verse of his text. For quiche lorraine, the author cites both Julia Child and Craig Claiborne for two different opinions, but does not say exactly from which source his recipe comes, as if he had a direct connection to the Platonic idea for each of these recipes.

I really enjoy the kind of culinary writing which opens threads to other writers so the reader and connect the ideas from different sources. This is the heart of scholarship. Mr. Sololov has written an immensely useful book, with blemishes.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tasty Smorgasbord of Culinary HIstory, November 15, 2003

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EDR (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know (Cookbooks) (Hardcover)

If you've ever wondered what meatloaf has in common with zabaglione, this is the book for you. Classics scholar, former restaurant critic, and food writer Raymond Sokolov has put these and 99 other recipes together in this entertaining and enlightening book whose prose is as worth savouring as its recipes. The author writes an erudite defense of his choices for the 101 recipes that are included in his compendium of classics, chosen to help heal what he calls a "decline of literacy" that "infects the kitchen". What he means is that the food is good, the stories interesting, and we ought to know them. There are few cookbooks in which you'll find references to Bill Murray's movie "Groundhog Day" , the purchase of Alaksa in 1867, and HBO's "The Sopranos" along side a quote from Brillat-Savarin's 1825 "La Physiologie de gout".
Whether or not I try all the recipes and I do plan to attempt it, it's been great fun to read and will enliven my culinary conversation for months to come.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Logical Cookbook, February 9, 2009

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Cindy C. Solomon - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Cook's Canon: 101 Classic Recipes Everyone Should Know (Cookbooks) (Hardcover)

the Cook's Canon offered enough interesting recipes to warrant its' purchase. I ended up purchasing a second copy as a birthday present for a friend. For the most part, these are not "30 minute" recipes, but there are some we considered excellent and more than worth the time.
Cindy/Florida