44 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential Seafood Cooking Reference. Buy It., January 6, 2006
This review is from: Rick Stein's Complete Seafood (Hardcover)
`rick stein's complete seafood' by, you guessed it, English restauranteur and culinary teacher, Rick Stein is the kind of book which promises great things and thereby simply invites criticism for its presumptuous title. I think I can safely say that no book that claims to be a `Bible' or `Complete' really does give either a total or fully authoritative treatment of its subject. But the fact that this book happens to be just a bit less than `complete' is no reason not to buy it, because it does give a full treatment of some very important aspects of cooking seafood.
The book is divided into three great parts containing thirteen chapters. These parts and chapters are:
Part 1 - Techniques
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Preparing Fish
Chapter 2 - Cooking Fish
Chapter 3 - Preparing raw, smoked, and cured fish
Chapter 4 - Preparing and cooking seafood
Part 2 - Recipes
Chapter 5 - Soups, stews, and mixed seafood
Chapter 6 - Large meaty fish, skate, and eels
Chapter 7 - Large Round fish
Chapter 8 - Small round fish
Chapter 9 - Flatfish
Chapter 10 - Crustaceans
Chapter 11 - Mollusks and other seafood
Chapter 12 - Stocks, Sauces, and Basic Recipes
Part 3 - Information
Chapter 13 - Seafood Families
Identifying Seafood - Pictures of seafood animal groups
Classifying Seafood - Species which may be substituted for one another
Index of Recipes
The easiest way to see where this book falls short of `completeness' is to look at Alan Davidson's three excellent volumes on seafood of the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and southeast Asia. Davidson's books may be more for the scholar than for the casual cook, but they do give valuable information on where to find various species, in which local cuisines they commonly occur, and hundreds of ethnically accurate recipes. Stein says very little about regionality or about specific species. Stein is a hedgehog to Davidson's fox in that Stein concentrates on grouping things best seen in his first and third parts.
His first part covers 57 seafood preparation and cooking techniques independent of any individual recipe, although he ingeniously links each technique with a specific recipe in Part 2 so that you can embed the technique within the recipe. In comparison, the best two other books on culinary techniques, Jacques Pepin's `Complete Techniques' and James Peterson's `Essentials of Cooking' have 32 and 18 techniques respectively on fish cookery. And, while I think Pepin's procedures are models of instruction, his pictures are in black and white, which looses a bit for the beginner. These differences become a bit less impressive for an amateur when you look at the specific techniques and realize that there are many techniques here which you are unlikely to ever use, especially those dealing with breaking down a whole fish.
The last part is also a great resource for the amateur cook in that it gives some ideas on what seafood species may be substituted for another. These sections also give some information on the regions of the world in which you are likely to find each species genus. As such, it gives some of the information you will find in Davidson, but organized `vertically' by genus or larger biological category rather than by species and location. This section, especially the `seafood families' chapter may take some study for those of us who slept through biology class when the aquatic phyla were being covered, as groupings are often given in unfamiliar terms such as `cephalopods'. Oddly other groupings are given in very common names such as `the herring family' or `mackerel and tuna'. The academic in me finds this annoying, not that the author did not stick to scientific names, but that there was no parallelism in section naming. The `cephalopods' section would have been better named `squid and its relatives'. The most entertaining section is the `identifying seafood' sections with what I believe are scale pictures of 98 representatives of seafood species. The selection is just a bit Eurocentric, as a picture of what I would certainly call a `Maine' lobster is named a `European Lobster'. And, while there are six crab pics, none are the primary American West Coast species generally called the Dungeness crab. The very last section, `classifying seafood', is useful for matching up a particular fish with a method in Part 1. This tells me, for example, that the north Atlantic goosefish is a variety of monkfish and the wolfish can be treated like a sea catfish.
The middle part on recipes may be where the notion of `completeness' may lead one to the biggest disappointments. This chapter, for example, has but one simple recipe for court bouillon while Mark Bittman's excellent `Fish' book has three different recipes, including one traditional French recipe and a Cajun `couboillon' recipe. In several other examples I find Stein's recipes to be less than the best. I compared his New England clam chowder recipe with one from Jasper White's definitive '50 Chowders' and I find Stein's recipe pretty uninspired. I say this with confidence because I have made several of White's chowders and they are uniformly excellent dishes. Another symptom that the book is less than complete is the fact that there is no recipe for `New York' clam chowder.
My final word on this book is that if you aspire to be a serious seafood cook, you need at least three books. This volume in addition to Mark Bittman's book of recipes and at least Alan Davidson's book of North Atlantic seafood. It would be best to have all three.
A superior book in many ways, but not complete!
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best You've Ever Read On Fish--Bar None, August 9, 2007
This review is from: Rick Stein's Complete Seafood (Hardcover)
I own over 1,000 cookbooks, am a trained chef, and a food/wine/travel writer and editor. I must say without fear of contradiction that this book is the ULTIMATE guide to all things that swim and how to cook them. Not only recipes, techniques, and guides, but insight and understanding, all written with Rick's great sincerity and true love of his field. Moreover, unlike some other books, the recipes are sorted by FISH, not by region or type of dish, so you get to basically buy what's fresh then wander through ideas for it that range from asia to europe to latin america and that are ALL spectacularly appetizing. YOU MUST BUY THIS BOOK if you ever plan to cook fish. It really is that good.
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