Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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95 of 101 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
are you a little weird?, March 31, 2000
By A Customer
Your spouse is gone for the weekend with your children. How do you spend your time? If it is drinking a little too much wine and looking through cookbooks, this is the book for you. Kamman is a little self important, but she really loves to cook. Her love of food is infectuous and inspiring. I was bored with following cookbooks that telll you how to do things (any idiot can follow instructions). Kamman tells you WHY you need do things. I was looking for a book that would take me to the "next step" of cooking, and this is it. This book goes into a little too much detail, even for me. But I love it. I would rather have the information and not need it, than need the information and not have it. Please take notice that I am a little weird.
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42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest Cookbook Ever Written, March 20, 2006
There are only half a dozen or so cookbooks that I trust implicitly and recommend without hesitation; this book is one of them, and is clearly king of the hill. That makes this cookbook the best ever written. Not until I re-read this second edition did I realize what a terrible cook I am. Now, when I wish to know how something should be done, this is the book I reach for. This is not a comprehensive collection of all common recipes you will ever need, so I do not always find the recipe I need here. Note that many 'standard' recipes are absent; recipes are chosen for training value. Upon reading this book, it is rather hard not to be inspired to go out and become a better cook, no matter what your skill level.
The original version of this book was a terse, didactic affair. Her information was so impeccable, that it began to be used in cooking schools as a text. With this in mind, the author re-wrote the book, adding a mountain of educational information, making a real textbook suitable for use in professional cooking schools. It is the best of its type. This new version, at 1200 pages, is double the length of the original. You will find many clever things not found anywhere else, viz a still-frozen sorbet, and a trick to measure the Baume of a syrup without a saccharometer. Almost all recipes have a sidebar that recommends specific wines to serve with each recipe. It has the courage to regularly recommend beer instead of wine due to the strong flavors of the respective recipe.
The chapter on eggs was excellent. The first 20 pages have more stuff on properly cooking eggs than all of my other cookbooks put together, and this includes a couple of professional ones. It gives you much info that can only be learned from experience as a breakfast cook (and stuff you certainly will not find in any cookbook I know of), e.g. an egg cooked en cocotte is not only easier for kitchen staff to make, but looks a heck of a lot better than a real poached egg on the plate. Several times in the egg chapter, the author sent me dashing into the kitchen to check out her info. Some of her info was very different, and even exactly opposite of how I was trained in various restaurant kitchens. Darn if she wasn't right every time. If you have some foodservice experience, check out her recipes for creme anglaise, bavarian cream, and folding order for foam-based cakes. This chapter also has what amounts to a souffle master class.
The sauce chapter has special merit. Kamman offers a complete discourse about history, preparation techniques, and proper usage of classic sauces. Interestingly, she offers very few actual recipes; contrast this with a standard cooking textbook with dozens of recipes with the student's head swimming with mother and secondary sauces and remembering what ingredient turns what sauce into what other sauce. This is the only book that admits reality: sauce espagnol is too expensive to make in a restaurant, brown stock is of academic interest to culinary students only, and that in her own home, demi-glace was made exactly twice for special occasions. Note that her world of sauces starts almost exclusively with primary veal stock (you will need several pounds of veal breast to make this, and there are no alternatives or substitutes). The section on emulsified sauces is exemplary, and I wish more foodservice professionals would read it. With her production method for Bearnaise, there is no reason why even a modest restaurant cannot offer it on a routine basis.
The respectful treatment of vegetables is exemplary, and demonstrates how these wonderful foodstuffs ought to be treated. Those who are in the habit of torturing their vegetables (this includes several famous TV chefs) will have an epiphany with Kamman's sensible and wonderful approach to vegetables. This is the only book I know of that has a comprehensive treatment of swimming fish and mentions the temp at which fish is properly cooked (140-165 F). The meat chapter is what amounts to a master class. The advice on adding salt and pepper to meat, oven temperatures, and pan juices is quite sensible. It shows how difficult it is to properly cook meat, and how tasty when properly prepared. Those who know soup only through the canned supermarket stuff or 'light and healthy' recipes in lifestyle magazines will discover a whole new world in Kamman's rather parochial attitude.
The baking chapter has a clear-headed dissertation on flours. It explains in detail flour measurement, protein percentage, and the various flours she uses by name (most cookbooks do not mention specific brands but just refer to them elliptically; not Kamman). It insists that pate brisee be made up using fraisage. Atypically, she recommends against using removable bottom pie plates or tart pans (she is absolutely correct: anyone who has never used a white ceramic tart pan or glass pie pan has never enjoyed proper crisp, firm, flavorful, un-soggy pie or tart crust). The advice on hand kneading bread dough is absolutely correct (if your dough and technique are correct, kneading will take 10 minutes). Cakes get rather shortchanged.
My main complaint is the lack of a proper table of contents. Some chapters are quite long and have good internal organization, but subsections are not listed in the TOC and you are left to pretty much thumbing through a 100+ page chapter or combing through the index with a magnifying glass.
It has chapters: basics (100 pp,), egg (100 pp.), stock (150 pp.), sauce (100 pp.), vegetable (100 pp.), grain (125 pp.), meat (200 pp.), fruit (100 pp.), and baking (150 pp.). It has an impressive bibliography, so the culinary student can start to build a personal culinary library.
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50 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Text and First book on cooking. Buy It!, September 6, 2005
`The New Making of a Cook' by Madeleine Kamman is hands down the very best first cookbook for everyone from rank beginners to experienced amateurs who learned cooking at their mother's knee. If you do not own a copy of this book and are serious about cooking, stop reading this review now, go to the top of the page, and click on the button to add this to your shopping cart.
No cookbook can do everything, but at over 1200 pages, this volume comes about as close as you can expect a good cookbook to cover every major important subject, including a healthy dose of material on nutrition, sanitation, ingredients, cooking with wine, cooking equipment, references, and the `why' of cooking. And, Ms. Kamman gives us expert opinions on each and every subject. On every topic with which I typically evaluate a cookbook, this one gets between an A- and an A+, and it covers each and every one of those points.
The weakest part of this book may be its title. Were you to browse cookbook titles without noticing the heft of this volume, you may mistake it for a memoir, such as Ms. Kamman's excellent `When French Women Cook' which is a memoir with great recipes from all around France. In fact, it is a superb course in cooking, and it is, in fact, used as the textbook for many cooking schools. The books to which this volume should be compared are the Culinary Institute of America's `The New Professional Chef', Wayne Gisslen's `The Chef's Art' and Anne Willan's `The Good Cook'. The first two of these are very reliable, but just a bit too much oriented to the professional. The last is excellent on technique, but leaves out just about every other subject covered by Kamman.
While the material in this book is heavily based on modern and classical French cuisine and technique, it is not another book on French cooking. That is, it does not compete directly with rival Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking', which remains, in spite of Kamman's book, still the best source of training in French cuisine and recipes. The book also does not compete with that other great manual of French technique, Jacque Pepin's `Complete Techniques', although these two books side by side virtually cover the entire range of good culinary instruction. One would need to go far to improve on a collection with these two books plus the `Larousse Gastronomique'.
Possibly the only weakness I found in this volume was the fact that the brief chapter on cooking with wine seemed to deal entirely with wines from France and California, plus the fortified wines of the Iberian peninsula (port and sherry). While I cannot fault the author too much for this short chapter in such a wide-ranging book, I did feel an important chance was missed.
However, the author more than made it up to me in her truly remarkable and comprehensive bibliography. For the serious student of cookery, this feature alone was worth the price of admission. Kamman missed virtually no major author available to modern American customers of Amazon.com. Child, David, Olney, Hazan, Kennedy, Bayless, Beranbaum, Reinhart, Ducasse, Pepin, Claiborne and many others are all here. The only notable absence was Alan Davidson's three-volume reference on fish of the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia. One cannot even complain about the number of titles in French and Italian, as there are plenty of English language sources.
This is virtually the only cookbook I can think of where it may pay you to start at the front and moving through the book, prepare as many different dishes as your finances and market will allow. It is that close to, for example, studying an excellent book on Chess, where each chapter covers an important part of the game, with gradually more difficult exercises.
One of the things about the book which most appealed to my neo-primitive `Whole Earth Catalogue' attitude was the fact that the book gave such good recipes for so many commonly available commercial products such as soft whipped butter and quick stocks.
And, on the `hard stuff', Mme. Kamman is uncompromising in her insistence on quality, as when she gives general rules for dealing with stocks. And yet, while she gives us the professional's take on stock making, she is quite well aware of the fact that the amateur will simply not make stock that often, and tells us how to handle things when we make stock two or three times a year.
The very best perspective I gained from this book is the fact that French cooking, at least French cooking of the last 50 years is simply not about high fat content. Just the contrary is true. In fact, Ms. Kamman seems to have figured out the story of French women and fat long before the recent popular book on the subject came out earlier this year.
Just one more comparison to place this book. While it has many hundreds of recipes, it is not like `The Joy of Cooking' or any other `1000 Recipe' collections. It gives great detailed treatises on all major culinary techniques important to the cooking of Western Europe, but it does not, for example, give us 15 different recipes for an omelet. It just gives us one of the very best essays on how to make a good omelet with a few pointers which even escaped Elizabeth David's excellent little treatise on the subject.
If you can only afford a single cookbook, but you really need one, this should be the one. If you are embarking on cooking as a hobby, this should be your first!
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