Culinary Artistry [Roughcut]

Andrew Dornenburg (Author), Karen Page (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 1996

"In Culinary Artistry...Dornenburg and Page provide food and flavor pairings as a kind of steppingstone for the recipe-dependent cook...Their hope is that once you know the scales, you will be able to compose a symphony."a Molly O'Neil in The New York Times Magazine.

For anyone who believes in the potential for artistry in the realm of food, Culinary Artistry is a must-read. This is the first book to examine the creative process of culinary composition as it explores the intersection of food, imagination, and taste. Through interviews with more than 30 of America's leading chefsa including Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Gray Kunz, Jean-Louis Palladin, Jeremiah Tower, and Alice Watersa the authors reveal what defines "culinary artists," how and where they find their inspiration, and how they translate that vision to the plate. Through recipes and reminiscences, chefs discuss how they select and pair ingredients, and how flavors are combined into dishes, dishes into menus, and menus into bodies of work that eventually comprise their cuisines.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you really find food fascinating--the idea of food, working with food, and the eating of food--then Culinary Artistry should be on your bookshelf. There are two books at work here. One is What Chefs Have to Say About the Foods They Create. The other is Fun with Food Spread Sheets. A cynic might suggest that after putting together Becoming a Chef, the authors had so much leftover interview material that Culinary Artistry was but the natural outcome. The chef's point of view, however, would be to make use of everything passing through the kitchen, to throw nothing away. In other words, if Becoming a Chef is an entrée, then Culinary Artistry is the special of the day.

The book is divided into sections that discuss and reach out to chefs to join in that discussion of such ideas as the chef as artist, dealing with sensory perception in food, composing with flavors, putting a dish together, putting together an entire menu, and standing back to admire the growth of a personal cuisine. This is thoughtful material. It is not how-to material. These guided conversations are made practical for the home cook by charts such as which foods are in season and when, the basic flavors of foods (bananas are sweet; anchovies are salty), food matches made in heaven (lamb chops with aioli or ginger or shallots), seasoning matches made in heaven (dill and salmon), flavors of the world (Armenia means parsley and yogurt), common accompaniments to entrées (beef and potatoes), and, most fun of all, the desert-island lists of many of the chefs quoted so extensively throughout the text. Many recipes accompany the text.

How this will affect any individual's own culinary art, be that professional or personal, remains unclear. It may be as private an experience as reading. For the uninitiated, this book will prove that there's a lot more going on with food and restaurants and chefs than they may ever have imagined. --Schuyler Ingle

From Booklist

In this ambitious guidebook to the current state of culinary art in American restaurants, the authors offer a comprehensive flavor catalog of comestibles that constitutes a palate-pleasing palette of the spectrum of gustatory stimuli. They flesh out long lists with reflections and observations on the craft of cooking by some of the world's most illustrious chefs, both historical and contemporary. These philosophical ruminations give the up-and-coming chef an understanding of the evolution of taste in the past half century by comparing the classic tastes of France's Fernand Point with the tastes of current celebrity chefs, such as Alice Waters and Rick Bayless. Although short on prescription (hence, the paucity of recipes), the book is exhaustive in its rosters of flavor complements. So extensive are the volume's lists that the book is useful as a reference tool for only the most serious chefs and die-hard foodies. Mark Knoblauch

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Roughcut: 448 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (November 4, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471287857
• ISBN-13: 978-0471287858
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 1.1 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (114 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Professional Cooking > Professional
  • #52 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Culinary Arts & Techniques

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

119 of 122 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Reference Material October 24, 2001

By disco75

Format:Roughcut

I am a self-taught home cook who enjoys the activities of the kitchen. I entered the cooking arena one of the standard ways, using cookbooks. Collections of recipes familarized me with the techniques and ethnic cooking styles. Gradually, my cookbook collection included reference books that provided some of the theory behind tastes and preparation styles. Gold's 1-2-3 series, Peterson's Sauces, and others introduced to me the philosophies that allow a cook to go beyond mimicking a recipe to improvising and even creating a dish. Culinary Artistry is perhaps the best available reference for learning about the traditions of combining flavors and food groups.

It contains vital information that I suspect is taught only in some of the culinary schools. It provides valuable charts of information about cooking and menu planning. The book contains sections on Menus, including a seasonality chart and a chart explaining successful seasoning combinations. There is a section for Composing Flavors, the highlight of which is a chart showing successful food contrasts. Another section involves Composing A Dish. Here there is a chart showing great food matches and one showing seasoning matches. The Composing A Menu section offers a chart showing frequent accompaniments to meats and paragraphs presenting theories about Hors Douevres, Cheeses, and Desserts. This was a sparse and incomplete passage in an otherwise comprehensive book. Finally, there was a fun section addressing the Evolution of Chef's Styles. Here the authors provide sample menus comparing chef's offerings from earlier decades to their present day productions.

The volume offers multiple anecdotes, quotes, and side bars concerning the views of popular chefs. Various recipes are interspersed to illustrate the principles.... My one criticism was that the book was laid out like a college textbook. Photos, captions, quotes, highlighted lines, sidebars, and other areas compete on the same page, magazine style. The book serves as reference, frequently glanced at rather than read straight through as a narrative. Read more ›

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Inspiring"..."A godsend." November 25, 2003

By A Customer

Format:Roughcut

"FLAVOR MATCHMAKING: Some cooks look to books not for precise ingredients and specific instructions, but for inspiration. I've got a book for those cooks.

It's the loftily named CULINARY ARTISTRY by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page (1996), also the authors of the better known BECOMING A CHEF. It's not a cookbook per se. Nor is it a treatise on the techniques every cook ought to know. And it's certainly not a collection of culinary prose. It's more a style manual for those who need to find out if a certain something will go with another certain something.

The most relevant information is found in the aptly named section 'Matches Made In Heaven.' Arranged alphabetically, the list comprises about 328 ingredients and seasonings and, for each ingredient listed, the authors provide several complementary flavors. It may not come as any surprise that the entries under beef ribs read ginger, horseradish, mustard, potatoes, tomatoes.

But it is incredibly liberating, when in a chicken rut, to alight on the appropriate page and find 57 compatible ingredients for a plain old hen. When the vegetable bin is overflowing with leafy greens or I'm flummoxed over a side dish for a dinner party, I consider it a godsend to flip through the pages and decide on mustard with the greens and walnuts with the watercress.

And it's inspiring to be reminded in the midst of Thanksgiving chaos that perhaps that pear dish needs a sprinkling of black pepper rather than a drizzle of honey. As with any reference work, it's not the entire book I value so much as a particular page or two in a desperate moment.

The balance of the book's 426 pages are chapters on composing a dish and a menu, complete with advice from restaurant chefs. I confess I haven't read the book cover to cover. And I doubt I ever will.... But it's nevertheless the one book that regularly makes the commute from office desk to kitchen counter." ... Read more ›

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiration and insight abound if nothing else. October 26, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Roughcut

Culinary Artistry is a book some may passover or leaf through in the bookstore for the likes of the Joy of Cooking or a Martha Stewart volume 20 cookbook. But look closer, the charts and the what-goes-well-with-what sections of this book alone are worth the price if only to give the food lover an inspired moment to create a dish with ingredients he or she may love. If you find yourself saying, "gee, I'd really love to have salmon tonight but I don't know what to put with it", pick up this book, find Salmon and refer to the extensive list of items that the interviewed chefs prefer with it and an idea is born. After that, all it takes is a little know-how in the kitchen and you've created your very own gourmet meal. If you choose to read from front to back you'll also discover page after page of insightful information from some of the nation's top chef's. Take your time, it's not a novel but it can be read like one and used as reference even after you've reached the last page. For the money, this is a book that will stay on your shelf for years to come and still manage to provide a new idea each time. So put down the Martha Stewart Haloween cookie issue and give Culinary Artistry a try, "It's a good thing". Sorry about that last one, she's infectious.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars WOW, I know what all my foodie friends are getting for xmas May 12, 2006

By Amalfi Coast Girl

A serious foodie that has been perfecting her cooking skills for the last 25 years in her home kitchen writes this review. My favorite cookbook is "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America. I am also a cookbook collector, with more than 500 books in my cooking library. With the many books in my cookbook collection I find that I am frequently disappointed in my recent purchases. That was not the case with this purchase.

I was absolutely blown away by this book. I read the entire book in one sitting, fixating on each new idea. I have never enjoyed another book as much as I have enjoyed this one. If you are one of those people that never follows a recipe as written (guilty as charged) you are going to love this book. This book might just be my new favorite cookbook. Although this book is not a cookbook in the most literal sense of the word, it is more a guide to cooking than a cookbook. Yes, there are recipes in the book, but not as many as a traditional cookbook.

The book is subdivided as follows:

The Chef as Artist
Meet Your Medium
Composing Flavors
Composing a Dish
a. Why Food Matches
b. Food Matches Made in Heaven
c. Seasoning Matches in Heaven
Composing a Menu
a. Common Accompaniments to Entrees
Evolving a Cuisine
a. The Evolution of Leading Chef's Cuisines
b. Dessert Island Lists
Culinary Art as Communion
Resources

The tables that are included in this book are amazing. I have already copied some of the tables and moved them into my kitchen to use this evening with dinner. The table that the authors titled "Flavor Pals" is just wonderful.... If you have ever been in the kitchen and wondered if particular spices and/or herbs go together, there is a table that answer those questions. There is another table titled "Flavor Enemies" that is extremely helpful. If you have ever tried to make Sauterne and Oranges because you didn't have peaches and wondered what went wrong, you know there are just some things that don't play well together. The table tells you which combinations are difficult to get right. There are too many tables in the book to discuss them all. But suffice it to say; I think that all the tables are fantastic.

I will be ordering more of these for all my foodie friends that love to cook. This book would help anyone that loves to cook, and doesn't want to be constrained by a recipe. There is a great comment by Todd English that sums up how I feel about recipes, it is as follows, "having to follow a recipe was, to him, like being put on a leash." If this sums up your philosophy, quick buy the book. You will not be sorry. Read more ›