Customer Reviews

Everyday Cooking With Jacques Pepin

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3 star:		(1)
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This is one of those books that is just fantastic. It is great for accomplished cooks as well as novices.

I consider this book the original "french food made easy" cookbook. All of the recipes are easy, and most of them are inexpensive to prepare. Jacques does a magnificent job explaining basic techniques within the recipes themselves. Just by using this book you will learn a lot of the techniques on french cooking.

Many of my friends that are new to French cooking has borrowed this book with great results. If you want to add some French cooking to your menu's but don't want to go into the depth of a Julia Child tome, this book great.

This book covers:
Menus
First Courses
The Main Dish
Desserts

Of all the recipes in this book I think the Crepes Souffles is my favorite; beautiful, unusual, easy and delicious.

If you ever run across a copy of this book pick it up, you won't be disappointed.

I bought this book well over 25 years ago when I was cooking in a kitchen the size of a postage stamp in midtown Manhattan. It was probably the first or second book that started my collection which has grown substantially in size since that time. It is dog-eared, pages are stained, but everytime I open it I am reminded of the wonderful smells of food cooking, the sighs of satisfied friends and family, and the fun I had playing with Jacque's recipes. This little book, much less expensive at that time than the "popular" writings of today, gives a novice cook the opportunity to follow his recipes to a T, or to veer off and imagine what they can really do. As for the experienced cook - he gave and continues to give them so much food for thought. His vegetable soup is awesome, but at the same time it inspires a cook to see what's happening on a cold winter's night, what's available in that fridge, and create something amazing. The pate, so simple, teaches techniques that make this dish a signature piece. It's all about food that's available, technique and imagination. Oh, and the Stew of Chicken Wings...a perfect play on a simple paella.

Jacques Pepin inspired the foodies revolution a long time ago, and continues to do so. As a previous reviewer noted, grab it if you can find it. My collection continues to grow. Jacques Pepin's book are definitely not taking up space. They will move over a bit, but they are here to stay! Most importantly, they will always be dog-eared!

This Pepin book has a wide range of recipes that are very interesting. Nothing is studied in depth, but there's a chatty informality about the text, where you can dig out more information. I enjoyed it on first read-through, and I'm confident I'll be quite at ease with cooking the recipes. Not an essential part of your cookbook collection, but one very enlightening that widens your horizons.

The intention of this book is very commendable. The execution, however, is less than adequate, and I do not recommend it. The stated purpose of this cookbook is home cooking that is economical, uses leftovers, and educates the home cook to become `recipeless'. Pity that the author's selection of recipes does not match his intentions.

About the genesis of this book: I do not know. According to the author's notes, this book is a companion to a season of cooking shows on PBS. I have not seen or am familiar with this TV show, so I do not know. It states that the intention was to present many more recipes than time allowed for the TV show, so he included all of them in this book.

Happily, the author includes a number of really versatile home cooking recipes that are quite amenable to ingredient substitutions or are really preparation techniques and not recipes per se. Example: `Fish Fillets Nicoise' or `Grenoble'. It is a versatile preparation method for all types of fish, especially tuna and salmon, even though the author does not name these types specifically, but just refers to oily or fatty fish. `Vegetable Soup' can be made with, well, any vegetable.

There are a couple of format problems. The beginning of each chapter includes all recipes in that chapter; hurrah. Sadly, the rather goofy graphic layout of them makes it difficult to read at one glance. Many of the recipes recommend substitutions; many of them are cross-indexed in the index in the back, but not all of all the author's suggestions are so delineated (`Stewed Crinkled Kale' can be used for just about any tough, large, green leaf vegetable, but you would not know this by examining the index; you would learn this only by carefully reading the author's preliminary remarks to the recipe). In many cases, the only way to tell about these substitutions is to study the author's rather enlightening comments that precede each recipe. It would have been more useful to have some sort of chart that tells you what recipes are relevant based what leftover ingredient you are trying to use up from your refrigerator. It is impossible to know, unless you study each and every recipe in detail, that `Eggs Jeannette' is a wonderful way to use up hard boiled or deviled eggs, unless you study the index very closely with a magnifying glass.

About half of the recipes are inconsistent with the author's stated intention: lettuce souffle and several other recipes that use whipped egg whites; several recipes that use veal breast; liver pate with decorations. Many recipes are based on a specific ingredient, and substitutes are not mentioned or suggested, because the recipe the author cites is not that versatile: corn chowder, cabbage gratin, potato and gnocchi, cucumber salad, tomato salad, roe and liver persillade, mackerel in vinaigrette, pilaf of mussels, chicken cassoulet, chicken livers. In his `Pate Brisee' recipe, the author laments ; `You may get excellent results one time and ordinary pastry the next.' Monsieur Pepin: the reason your recipe is not consistent is that you are measuring your flour by volume using measuring cups. If you will please make this recipe measuring your flour by weight with a scale, you will discover that the recipe will miraculously work perfectly each and every time, regardless of the age of the flour, the ambient temperature in your kitchen, or the relative humidity.

On the good side, each recipe is surprising complete with many steps carefully and fully explained, along with several color photos of what is going on in each step. The author needs to learn, however, that just because a recipe is easy to explain does NOT mean it is easy for the home cook to execute properly.

On balance, it is a decent learning tool for the home cook, but it leaves a lot to be desired.