Customer Reviews

Rotis

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I've never been dissappointed by any of Stephane Reynaud's cookbooks, I've got all I could lay my hands on. It's rustic, honest, French home cooking. If you like food without pretense, he's your guy.

When we were in Paris, my wife and I had a chance to eat at Stephane Reynaud's restaurant. The food was wonderful (best of my life) and we even got to meet Stephane, who was an extremely nice man. All of his books reflect this - world class food presented in a thoughtful and accessable manner.

This is a wonderful cookbook! I was a little nervous about it being French food--that it would be too difficult or "fancy". But everything is very simple to do, and explained beautifully. As a novice cook, I never felt over my head. And my "Grand Ma" roast was really delicious. It was polished off in one sitting, with our guests wanting the recipe. I look forward to cooking more! Sunday here I come!

We don't eat a lot of meat, not because we don't like it, partly because I grew up eating a lot of it as a kid and didn't particularly care for it. Mom would toss a roast in the crockpot with carrots, potatoes and a can of cream of mushroom soup, eight hours later, it was done.

I remember seeing pictures of roasts in magazines, their brown sides dripping with juices, surrounded by crispy potatoes and turnips and they looked so much tastier than the slightly grayish meat I was used to. I determined to make one that was picture perfect, lets just say it didn't turn out and I gave up after decimating my second Sirloin Roast.

Fast forward to now, I found a recipe for a roast that seemed to break every cooking law I'd grown up with. It wasn't cooked in a pot. There was no cheery red and white can of soup. It turned out perfect, dark brown on the outside, reddish pink flesh inside and was easily sliceable for sandwiches the next day.

Then I saw this book and it's beautiful pictures of roasts got me thinking about what else we'd been missing out on because of my lack of roasting skills.

A lot it turns out. Roast Pork with brown Ale and Prunes, Roast Pork with Bacon and Comte Cheese, Chicken with Anchovies, Fillet of Wild Boar with Bilberries (don't know where I'd find boar, wild or not and bilberries could be subbed for something else I'm sure, cranberries?) .

Best of all, it has some fantastic recipes for fish, I wasn't expecting that, just the word ROAST conjures up a picture of a huge hunk of meat, usually of the cow persuasion. Anyways, I'm a novice when it comes to cooking fish. I grew up on fishsticks and canned clam chowder. The first time I ate fresh lobster, I was twenty years old.

For some reason I find cooking fish oddly intimidating. My first foray was with salmon, a simple salmon with lemon and butter, it turned out great and I (wrongly) thought, 'Ha, this is easy peasy' and bought a pound of shrimp next and proceeded to fry them into rubbery chewy lumps. I've been haunted by this failure ever since.

But the pictures of fish in this book made me want to eat the pages. Roast Monkfish with Cockles, Roast Salmon with Fresh Herbs (or what to do with those giant whole salmons you see on sale at the store), Roast Sea Bass with Fennel, I could go on, but I haven't eaten yet and have started to feel grungry (grumpy+hungry).

The book is divided into seven sections, one for each day of the week, Monday is Beef, Tuesday is Veal, Wednesday is Chicken and Game, Thursday is Pork, Friday is fish, Saturday is Lamb and Sunday is Game (mostly venison and boar).

I have two complaints about the book and it is a familiar one, no substitutions are given. Chefs are accustomed to having serrano ham and pastis (not sure what pastis is) readily available, but when they write a book for home cooks, they should discuss a few likely substitutes.

Second, the book has a lot of exotic meats, sea breem, cockles, rack of pork, guinea fowl, pigeon and venison. I like the look of these exotic cuts but my local butcher doesn't carry them and so almost 1/5 of the book is full of recipes I could not make for lack of the main ingredient, very sad.

But, other than these two problems, I think this is an excellent cookbook, I'm going to try out the pork with prunes recipe for Christmas dinner (I'll post pics on my blog, booksmakemehungry).

This is the only cookbook you will ever need for any roast, of any kind of meat, game, fish, or fowl. It is beautifully organized, starting out with a plain roast of each kind, and then giving multiple variations that can follow, giving the cook an almost infinite repertoire and an easy understanding of the process, on which to build their own creativity.