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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Slight Variation on The Same-Old Chef Memoir, March 7, 2009
This review is from: Spiced: A Pastry Chef's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the Kitchen (Hardcover)
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I love cooking, books about cooking, chef's autobiographies, television shows about kitchens and cooks. If it's chef-restaurant related, even if it's not top-quality, I'll likely give it a chance and enjoy it on some level.
Spiced, the story of a New York pastry chef's rise from student to hugely successful, seemed a book right up my alley. Not only was the book going to take on the perspective of a woman in the kitchen, but it also was going to focus on desserts. Women and desserts famously don't get a lot of foodie respect. What would Dalia Jurgensen have to say for herself?
Well, honestly, nothing too surprising. The book seemed to cover a lot of the same ground of the hard work and burn marks that were covered better in books like Heat, or those by Michael Ruhlman. And guess what? Restaurant kitchens are full of sexism and hostility toward women.
The best part of the book was discovering how she learned the art of pastry and dessert making at Nobu,
and then built on that knowledge until she was able to create her own dessert menus that earned her national acclaim at restaurants she helped open.
The worst part of the book was the sexual talk that didn't seem to add to the story and seemed out of place.
Dalia had a lesbian affair with a waitress? So what? Another chef talked in graphic terms about his previous evening? Allrighty then. I am not sure why the out-of-the-blue sex talk bugged me, but I think it's because they didn't seem to add to the story and therefore struck a weirdly false note.
Maybe this isn't the best chef memoir ever. But certainly, if you have the food fascination that I have, you'll enjoy enough of the book to make it a worthwhile read.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Spiced, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blancmange, April 25, 2009
This review is from: Spiced: A Pastry Chef's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the Kitchen (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Although the job of professional chef is something about which we civilians may be very curious, I imagine in broad terms it's not hugely different from the jobs that many of us have. You still have co-workers you may or may not get along with; you still have a day-to-day routine that you willingly or unwillingly fall in to. So many times the trick to these behind-the-scenes exposés is to succeed at three things. First, describe the mundane and monotonous tasks in an interesting and insightful way without needlessly dwelling on them. Second, pick out the unusual or note-worthy moments and relate them as humorous or thought-provoking anecdotes. Third -- and surely the most difficult -- present yourself as someone the audience could understand (if perhaps not immediately relate to), as someone with whom the reader would want to spend three hundred or so pages.
At those three tasks, Dalia Jurgensen succeeds admirably. She manages to evoke herself as an interesting person. In the beginning potions of the book she carefully strikes the correct balance between describing confidence in her skills (and her ability to learn) and a worry that she's in over her head.
SPICED opens with Jurgensen already frustrated with her conventional office job and taking two steps towards profoundly changing her life. She enrolls in culinary school and trades in her desk job for a lowly position at Nobu in New York City. By the end of the book, she's become a full fledged head pastry chef. There are several detours along the way, including some jobs with salad and entrée preparation, a stint as a caterer and even preparing recipes and cooking on-set for Martha Stewart's TV show. There's a moving chapter in which she describes the charitable reactions of her and other New York City restaurants in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001.
Jergensen's writing skills are quite strong and she has a great ability to explain terms to the layman without coming over as condescending. Of course, the real fun of the book lies within the descriptions of the typical bizarre but ubiquitous occurrences in restaurant kitchens, such as swearing and foul-mouthed chefs, drunken and irrational superiors, and hostility between different classes of restaurant workers. (This is not exactly a female version of Anthony Bourdain's KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, but it is definitely a look at the same world from a female point of view.) Jergensen manages to effortlessly portray both the normal day-to-day work as well as out of the ordinary events (at one point a food critic from the New York Times is spotted and it's amusing to watch the controlled panic that sets in as they frantically pull out all the stops to create something special).
SPICED starts off good, but I actually enjoyed it more the further along I read as I got to know the author better. It's a quick read, which I say as praise of the quality of the author's prose, not as a criticism of the substance. In a book of this kind, it is the writer's voice and personality that must serve to keep the audience interested no matter how predisposed a reader is towards learning about the profession. That sounds like a simple thing for a writer to get right, but where other insider books have failed, Dalia Jurgensen has produced a winner.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dahlia Jurgensen the Diablo Cody of Pastry Chefs, May 27, 2009
This review is from: Spiced: A Pastry Chef's True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the Kitchen (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I picked up this book expecting it to be like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential or the many other books I have read from people in the culinary world. As someone who has graduated from culinary school and also at one time worked in a bakery I thought that I would be able to relate to this book. I will say that Dahlia does a good job of describing what she went through in her career. From her beginnings just starting out and all the way to the point where she has made a name for herself. She also shows that the culinary world is not an easy world for a woman and it is a world where respect is earned and not given. And sometimes you have to fight for it. My main problem with this book is that Dahlia seems to go off on expletive filled rants and give way too much detail on subjects that have nothign to do with baking. At times it felt like the book was Julia Child mixed with Sex and the City. The book is a decent read but I have read far better and would suggest a few of Anthony Bourdain's novels before reading this one.
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