Customer Reviews

Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've been dabbeling in sauces for a number of years in my home kitchen. In my considerable collection of cookbooks none attempt to teach a culinary subject with the thoroughness of this effort. The book assumes a general knowledge of cooking, such as what temperature to roast your chicken at, and focuses on the theory behind what your sauce should do. While the book contains many recipes, they are presented as illustrations of various types of classic sauces. The author encourages the reader to experiment and fine tune their sauce efforts by illustrating the classic techniques and recipes.

In all my years cooking and collecting cookbooks this is the first cookbook that I have read cover to cover. While you can simply peruse the recipes and use the book as a reference it really shines when read in its entirety. If one is really interested in French sauces and the theory and technique behind them, this book is all that will ever be needed on the subject. And if you're wondering what kind of sauce to make with those lamb chops tonight...

"Sauces" is a book for professionals and serious home chefs and is the first book I've seen that compares and contrasts both classical and modern sauce-making methods. The author emphasizes the importance of quality stocks in sauce-making and points out that a stock appropriate for older, roux-based techniques is often inappropriate for more modern, reduction techniques. This explains why the stocks formulated in, say, the French Culinary Institute's "Salute to Healthy Cooking" are so much more concentrated than those in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and other classic French cooking texts. Peterson also includes methods for pan-prepared (integral) sauces that offer the professional and home cook alike a rapid way to prepare an impressive array of fine foods.

`Sauces, 2nd Edition ' by leading food teacher and writer James Peterson is high on my list of important, valuable single subject cookbooks which should be in the kitchen library of any serious amateur chef or professional chef in training.

The very first impression is the very large number of named sauces listed in the table of contents. And, it should be no surprise at all that almost every one of these sauces has a French name, even if the sauce is based on a non-French ingredient such as Sauce Hongroise based on paprika and Sauce Porto based on Port (originating in Portugal). Of the chapters covering eighteen different kinds of sauce, only one, the chapter on `Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes' has even the slimmest majority of recipes with a non-French cant, with its large selection of Spanish and New World salsas, south Asian chutneys, Greek mint lamb sauce, and American cranberry sauce.

The book opens with a short history of sauces, which becomes more interesting the more you know about Medieval and Renaissance cooking. The book even gives something missing from books on medieval cooking, the outline of an actual recipe for the ubiquitous verjuice, which was the Medieval and Renaissance source for sour tastes, which could be prepared from either grapes or apples. Just for fun, Peterson gives a few samples of Medieval and Renaissance recipes. The most interesting observation I found for culinary history was the statement that in the Middle Ages, sauces were thickened by pureeing meat, which is not at all surprising, as Medieval nobility looked down on all vegetable products (such as flour?) and preferred animal ingredients and spices in their dishes. The high point of the last three centuries for sauce making was the advent of more broadly based cookbooks for regional and bourgeois cooking and the systemization of classic sauce making by Antonin Careme, the `father of modern French cooking' (See Ian Kelly's biography of Careme, `Cooking for Kings').

After the historical chapter and two better than average chapters on equipment and ingredients come the fifteen (15) chapters of recipes on:

Stocks, glaces, and essences
Liaisons: An Overview
White Sauces for Meat and Vegetables
Brown Sauces
Stock-Based and NonIntegral Fish Sauces
Integral Meat Sauces
Integral Fish and Shellfish Sauces
Crustacean Sauces
Jellies and Chauds-Froids
Hot Emulsified Egg Yolk Sauces
Mayonnaise Based Sauces
Butter Sauces
Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes
Purees and Puree Thickened Sauces
Dessert Sauces

The quality and authority of this book, especially with the added weight of a second enlarged and corrected edition is such that it is much more useful to state why you need this book rather than try to criticize it or find improvements.

First, this book is the very best reference I can think of when you need a sauce and don't remember how to make it or want to improve on the last time you made it. This use is valuable even if you never make any sauces other than vinaigrettes, marinara sauce, gravies, and bechamel sauces for Mac and cheese or creamed chipped beef. This book is my standard reference for all such purposes and it has NEVER let me down! The existence of this book always makes me wonder why restaurant chefs always include a chapter of pantry recipes for stocks and sauces. Except for the really finicky writers such as Judy Rodgers (Zuni Café) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Bouchon), Peterson's recipes will be about as good as you will find in any restaurant chef's book. So, you may prefer coming to this book even when an author gives us his version, as this will mean that all your stocks and sauces will be made from a common point of view and a common palate. This book is better than any other source in that it simply has everything you can possibly need.

Second, this book gives excellent recipes for sauce-based dishes, especially for seafood such as lobster, shrimp, salmon, clams, and scallops. For many fish dishes, the sauce is the dish, as cooking the fish is usually no more than the ten minutes it takes to poach, broil, bake, sautee, or fry the little critter(s).

Third, the book is an excellent source when you need alternatives. You need a fancy sauce for lobster, but you don't have time to create a stock from lobster shells and go through all the other steps needed for a good shellfish sauce. If you really need to impress, consider a homemade remoulade or aioli (variations on mayonnaise), which can be done in a few minutes in a food processor with eggs, oil, and a little mustard, plus flavorings.

Fourth, this book is simply the very best source I can think of to enlarge your repertoire of basic dishes and elements of dishes which can be swapped in to change a simple steamed vegetable into an elegant side dish. I am constantly pleased with the power of serendipity, that chance encounter with a great, easy recipe which enables you to cook up a yummy dish without having to consult a cookbook, let alone remember in which book the recipe was. My very first use of this book produced such an encounter when I was looking up the recipe for beurre blanc and discovered beurre citron (lemon butter sauce). This encounter also revealed that there is a considerable mystique connected with beurre blanc, as it is considered difficult to make. As I make it regularly as a dressing for fish, I can assure you that it is relatively easy and worth the small difficulty involved. It is also interesting to learn from this book that beurre blanc was also one of the sharpest weapons of Nouvelle Cuisine in banishing flour based sauces from restaurant sauces. So, with one fell swoop, you can be trendy, healthy, and haute cuisine with a single recipe. Wow!

If you wish to be a serious cook, you need this book!

When I was in grade school I observed that the food with the best flavor always ended up stuck to the pan. Over decades of reading cookbooks this became the emperor's clothes of cooking to me. It was in reading Peterson's Sauces that I had my epiphany: Continental chefs had been taking advantage of this fact for centuries in their preparation of tasty sauces. For me this turned the world of cooking on its ear. In my own experience, Sauces was the single most important cookbook I could ever have bought.

In this book Peterson meticulously explores every style of sauce, starting with the backbone ingredients and working through the flavoring additions. He develops the topic of 'integral' sauces beautifully. And this alone is worth the full price of the book. Gravies, flavored mayonaises, the classic French white sauces, purees of vegetables, gelees, and more are to be found here. The book is encyclopedic in scope, meticulous in its explanations, brimming with love of the topic.

While every good cook must one day master the ideas in this book, not every cook is ready for this book. Peterson was trained as a chemist before he was trained as a chef. And as a chef he works as a teacher. So he is much more interested in teaching you to think about sauces for yourself than in giving you a list of specific recipes for specific sauces. Many of the recipes are written for commercial kitchens, making translation to home use even more difficult. If you are a 'recipe cook' and are just interested in 1000 detailed step-by-step recipes for 1000 specific sauces, this book will disappoint. Nor is this an ideal book for anyone who has less than half a dozen good cookbooks and as many years of kitchen experience - unless one is training as a chef.

For those who wish to internalize the principles of sauce-making and to improve every single savory dish they might cook, it is impossible to imagine a better book. Those who invent food for themselves and seek ever better flavor in dishes will find this book to be among the most impactful and valuable cooking books they own.

If you ever wanted to know the inner workings of sauces this it the book for you. Everything you could possibly want to know about making a sauce is in this book. Although it isn't completly obvious from looking at this web page this book is enormous(could be used for killing mice), and thorough. You will learn many different styles and techniques. There are only two complaints I have about this book. It caters more to expensive restaurant chefs than to inexpensive home cooked meals. This isn't entirely true, it let's you know what shortcuts you can take, but it berates you for taking them. The other complaint, It is overkill, unless you are a proffesional chef there is very little chance you will everyone of the techniques discussed. This book is full of recipies, but I feel that they are only there as an example. A chapter will talk about a technique and then show recipies, that do exactly what the chapter talked about. Don't buy this book for recipies, but buy it because you really want to learn how to cook. I haven't followed any of the recipies in this book to the letter, but because I read about the theory I modified/improvised some seriously good sauces. If you want recipes there are better things out there for that.

This book is for the professional or SERIOUS hobby cook. It is NOT for someone coming home from a long, hard day at work looking for a quick sauce to slosh over the overcooked maccaroni. It is to be read as a book from beginning to end and kept as a reference tool. The stocks and sauces take time to make, but the results are fabulous. James Peterson is THE master...

This is a great book, but it's not for recipe cooks. If you're looking for recipes, go to allrecipes.com and get a bunch. I think this is one of the best cooking books I have ever read, it sits right next to the Oxford Companion To Food. Both are encyclopedic, really explaining what is what, the history, giving you insight into real processes and techniques for doing things. To me this book is for learning the basic in-depth skills, giving you background, etc, so that you can innovate and create things on your own with whatever you happen to have around you. I really love this book. But again, if the reader is looking for a book that is going to give them recipes for tartar sauces, best look elsewhere! This is NOT the book for you! However, if you want to learn just what a sauce is, the ways they are thickened, the various ingredients that go into them, their purpose in the meal, etc, then you've just found what is possible the only book on the shelves that is going to give you a clear answer. I really like this book, can you tell ?

I LOVE all of James Peterson's books, but this one is in a class by itself. It doesn't matter if you're the Chef de Cuisine in a top restaurant, an ambitious home cook, or just a food nut, you'll appreciate this book.

This is not a list of recipes. Mr. Peterson doesn't want to tell you what to do; he wants to teach you how to cook. Be prepared for history, food science, analysis of ingredients and techniques, notes on substitutions and further ideas for exploration, and eventually ... recipes that illustrate all of the above.

If you're interested in recipes only, look elsewhere--you'll be annoyed that these are measured out in restaurant quantities by weight (this is a professional book at heart) and you'll likely be annoyed that they're hard to make, since without the background knowledge of the rest of the book you won't know what you're doing. You'll also likely remain in the dark, glued to your Betty Crocker, toiling in the kitchen following the minutia of lists of instructions you don't even understand. But why hide from life? Throw off the shackles, buy some Peterson, and learn how to cook. My friends are amazed after dinners when they learn that I made up all the recipes. The credit belongs to Mr. Peterson. He taught me how to do it--how to go from thinking "hmmm, maybe apples and basil would taste good together ..." to knowing how to make a sauce and build a dish around it.

A great feature of this new edition is the photographs. He shows clear pictures of many important sauces at different steps along the way, so you can see how they're supposed to look. This removes a lot of the stress of trying something completely new. Amazingly, Peterson took all the pictures himself, and they're brilliant. I'm a photographer, and do not how to take food pictures as well as he does.

So what else can I say? His Essentials of Cooking is also excellent. A great reference for the basics. So is his Glorious French Food, if you're looking for a phone book sized primer on French dishes, ingredients, and techniques. Fish and Shellfish and Splendid Soups are the best in their class. Vegetables is good, although I don't feel it's in the same league as his others. I'm waiting for a more thorough and authoritative update.

Anyway, in short: buy this book! It would be a bargain at $100.00.

This book covers everything that you might ever want to know about sauce making. I have given the chapter titles below to help you to understand what is covered in the book.

The chapters are as follows:
1. History of Sauce Making
2. Equipment
3. Ingredient
4. Stocks, Glaces, and Essences
5. Liaisons
6. White Sauces for Meats and Vegetables
7. Brown Sauces
8. Stock Based and Nonintegral Fish Sauces
9. Integral Meat Sauces
10. Integral Fish and Shellfish Sauces
11. Crustacean Sauces
12. Jellies and Chaud-Froids
13. Hot-Emulsified Egg yolk Sauces
14. Mayonnaise-based Sauces
15. Butter Sauces
16. Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas and Relishes
17. Purees and Puree-thickened Sauces
18. Pasta Sauces
19. Asian Sauces
20. Dessert Sauces

The author gives you not only recipes for sauces but he tells you want to do and not to do and how to fix broken sauces if that was not your intent. The recipes are given in US and European increments.

The does more than just give sauce recipes. There are many recipes included in this book that are much more than just sauce. I will list just a few to give you an idea of content:

Coq Au Vin (Rooster Braised in Red Wine)
Lobster a la nage (Lobster in a Lobster Court Bouillon)
Steamed Bass Fillets with Yogurt Curry Sauce
Salmon en Papillote with Julienned Vegetables.

My only compliant of the book is that there could be more pictures of the various stages like they included in "The Professional Chef" by the Culinary Institute of America.

All in all I think this is a wonderful book.

The book:
In twenty chapters, Mr. James Peterson reviews, details, lists, describes and definitely reveals all topics and aspects related to the essence of cooking: Sauces.
You start with a brief, joyful and full-of-information chapter about the history of Sauce making. Equipments to follow, with smart advises to have you avoiding spending money on the wrong piece. Three chapters after this give you the basic of the sauce which are (3) Ingredients, (4) Stock, Glaces [, Jus] and Essences and (5) Liaison. You would plunge endlessly after this in recipes of sauces in fifteen beautiful and delicious chapters leaving no information behind, and covering sauces of all kinds and for all types of food, from white sauce, through meat and fish sauces, salad sauces, puree sauces, pasta sauces, Asian sauces and finally dessert sauces.
In hardcover, more than 600 pages in total, 32 colored pages with clear useful photos, and 7 appendixes that include Glossary of terms and full Index, the presentation of this book is excellent.
Opinion:
One can argue that you do not need such "deep" book for cooking. Well, this is incorrect, since the book is well chaptered, enabling using it for (a) getting quick recipe for the dinner tonight; (b) reading completes chapters for academic research (?); (c) or enjoying few hours of quiet and entertaining readings. The "Recipe Contents" index in the beginning is very helpful for the amateur of cooking, the indexes and appendixes are of similar value for the researching work and the reading of chapter-by-chapter is adequate for reading hobby. The style of writing is excellent considering the subject. One minor defect is the absence of clear picture and separate chapter (or chapters) about the Arabian and Middle Eastern sauces, since it is embedded unnoticeably in the contents and not separately detailed for obtaining its unique tastes (try Nigella Lawson books on this topics). However, the well-structured contents and the wide knowledge that you would obtain from this book waive off any serious critics. The book is definitely nothing like cold and technical "the complete book of..." series.
Reading the first three chapters would give you a strong command on cooking in general and in preparing sauces in particular, although it is not necessary if you are simply looking for recipes. Some titles like "The Relative Thickening Power of Liaison" might be offensive, but do not be troubled, since it is rather useless for home cooking, and followed by titles like "A Few Thoughts about Wine", would definitely calm you and give you good idea about the character of the writer.
In few words, it is great book, a valuable assistance and guide for new pleasures of cooking and enjoying foods and really deserves to purchase and embellish your bookshelf or library for long time.