Mes Confitures: The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Ferber is a fourth-generation French patissiere whose specialty is her unusual, delicious jams and jellies, which have gained an international following among chefs (Alain Ducasse, who wrote the foreword, serves them at his renowned restaurants) and other gourmands. This book, a best seller in France, presents dozens of recipes, organized by season, for preserves from Black Cherry with Pinot Noir to Greengage and Mirabelle Plum with Mint; a number of them include chocolate, not a standard addition. Few of the recipes include headnotes, although translator's notes identify the more exotic ingredients; instructions are on the brief side. However, any jam maker will find Ferber's book fascinating. Recommended for all canning and preserving collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

I love jams, jellies, marmalades, and fruit coulis in all forms and shapes, and for me a jar of apricot jam is the quintessential comfort food. Nothing can equal a breakfast of crispy baguette slices coated with butter and cherry jam, and dunked into a bowl of foaming café au lait. Bravo to Christine Ferber for giving us these luscious, mouthwatering recipes! --JACQUES PEPIN, chef, cookbook author, and host of his own PBS-TV series

This is a book not only to use in the kitchen, but to read just to take in the flavors and aromas evoked on every page. --- DEDE WILSON, Contributing Editor, Bon Appetit

With all the chef cookbooks at large these days, serious home cooks can try their hand at many haute cuisine specialties. But what to do if you wanted to recreate, say, the Alsatian Morello cherry preserves chef Alain Ducasse serves with a semi- soft sheep's milk cheese at his restaurant in Monaco? Or a jam made from wild blueberries, raspberries, and kirsch? Or a Pinot Noir jelly? To reproduce these and scores of other exotic preserves, readers need only seek out Mes Confitures: The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber. --- JUDITH WEINRAUB, The Washington Post

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 305 pages
• Publisher: Michigan State Univ Pr (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870136291
• ISBN-13: 978-0870136290
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 8.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #278,024 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deceptively Simple, July 28, 2004

By	Jadepearl "geezer geek" (Wandering, USA) - See all my reviews

The recipes are very simple. Usually requiring a few steps for small batch jams and preserves. However, it is not for the inexperienced unless they have good back-up books like _Blue Ribbon Preserves_ which explains clearly how to sterilize and prepare jars and focus on a more scientific approach to preserves.

Ferber provides flavor inspirations and deceptively simple approach. However, there is no explanation in the book for pectin substitution. She relies on either the natural pectin found in the fruit or uses green apple jelly as a pectin base which means you get to make alot of green apple jelly adding a whole set of steps to the jam/jelly process. The book does not explain which fruits have enough natural pectin to set and what level of set.

If you know what it means to skim the juices already then the simple instructions are enough to work with but if you have no "feel" or previous knowledge of preserves making than the instructions seem skimpy. This is NOT a teaching volume it is an inspirational volume for the experienced preserves person.

The important thing though is that the flavors are fabulous. Just be sure to read the instructions first and research carefully your subsititutions and also your preserve process or else the simple instructions become too simple.

Recommended for the collection.

62 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master Class in Fruit Confits. Artisinal Jams!!, January 31, 2005

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`Mes Confitures', subtitled `The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber' is written by Ms. Ferber herself, in French, translated by Virginia Phillips, and introduced with a foreword by Alain Ducasse. In case these circumstances are not enough to clue you in to what is afoot here, let me tell you that this book is not about your grandmother's strawberry jam. It is also not about your mother's Smuckers and certainly not about your Polaner jelly. This book is about artisinal products as carefully done as French wines and cheeses. In fact, the similarity between wines and these preserves are a lot closer than almost any other comparison, as the raw material of both is very similar.

Before going much further, I must give a word or warning that I do not consider this book a complete manual on how to make and preserve jams and jellies. In fact, it is telling that the title and subtitle DO NOT include the word `preserves'. While I am not an expert on preserves and canning, I have enough knowledge, acquired from a typically excellent episode of Alton Brown's `Good Eats' to know that successfully packing a confit in a sterile container is not the same as prepping a PRESERVE which can safely sit on an unrefrigerated shelf for up to a year. So, if you are serious about making confits and preserves, get a very good introductory book on canning, as Ms. Ferber's book is much more of a master class on the subject, which assumes you know a lot about the mechanics of canning and preserving. The book is primarily a collection of primo recipes for producing jams and jellies worthy of smearing on your artisinal breads or filling your handmade Linzer cookies.

The book's recipes are divided by season, and there is an extreme attitude about selecting the very freshest fruits at the very best time of the season and the day. I am rarely swayed about goings on about using fresh ingredients. I will only state that there is probably a much bigger connection between the quality of your starting ingredients and your final product in the making of fruit comfits than there is in the making of a soup or braise or any other cooking method using most meats from hoofed or winged beasts and using most vegetables, even the seasonally persnickety tomato. The one condition which tempers this fact is that unlike most pedestrian recipes for fruit confits, Ms. Ferber's recipes often contain several spices and other seasonings which may buffer the impact of a less than perfect crop of apples or peaches.

While Ms. Ferber lives and works in the fabled Alsace district of France, her seasons are not too different from temperate North America, so there should be few incongruities on the part of geography. There may be several difficulties in the fact that Ms. Ferber uses several cultivars that may simply not be available in a timely manner to us Nordamerikaners. But, we carry on with the best substitutions we can do.

Spring recipes open with a big surprise with two recipes for comfitted carrots. Otherwise, the stars of the show in spring are cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apples, and rhubarb. Here we first encounter green apple jelly, which is the `veal stock' of the fruit confit world. Just as veal is one of the richest sources of thickening gelatin, green apples are one of the best sources of pectin for gelling the confit, while the apple taste is tame enough to stand in the background, behind stronger tasting fruits. One puzzle Ms. Ferber does not elucidate is how one gets a supply of green apple jelly, a product whose season comes in the fall, when you wish to use this ingredient in the spring.

The stars of the summer recipes are Bergeron apricot, generic apricot, wild and generic (farm grown) blueberries, nectarines, currants, celery, zucchini, raspberry, melon, and apples. Some of the more important costars seem to shine in the summer recipes. These are vanilla, black pepper, chili peppers, anise, pinot noir, almonds, chocolate, essences of edible flowers and flower petals, and eau-de-vie. Citrus juices and zests, especially those from lemon contribute to a large number of recipes in all seasons.

The stars of the autumn recipes are dried fruits, nuts, pears, quinces, rose hips, figs, grapes, vineyard peach, honey, ginger, cinnamon, apple, tomato, and Gewurztraminer (wine). Winter is devoted to tropical fruits such as citrus (marmalade, marmalade, marmalade), pineapple, banana, mango, and passion fruit. It is the one season where there are recipes for a particular event (Christmas). It is also no surprise to find tea as an ingredient here, as bitter orange is, itself, an ingredient in Earl Gray tea.

The recipes are very well detailed. You should be able to do everything in every recipe if you have the tools listed at the beginning of the book. As canning is an old American rural custom, none of the equipment should be much farther than a good hardware store or good mail order or Internet source. The book gives an excellent list of American sources, although there is no guarantee you will be able to get some of the cultivars found in the Alsace.

My mind's virtual taste buds tell me that this is one excellent collection of recipes for fruit confits, and, a fair amount of improvisation is certainly allowed. Which is even more of a reason to exercise your canning skills on a few simpler recipes before tackling the 20 plus ingredient Christmas jam.

Every food subject has its quality leader or artisinal high end. This is the high end for jams and jellies!

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars truly unusual jams & jellies, July 16, 2003

By	Sarah Lally Brown (Woodinville, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love jams made with unusual ingredients and combinations, but I don't love making five batches to fine tune the taste. Christine Ferber has already done it for me in this book, and her inventions are *fantastic.* She has a true european appreciation for the concept of savory. Not every jam needs to be cloyingly sweet. Many of her recipes call for overnight fruit/sugar macerations to slowly combine the ingredients.

She does have a habit of seeming to forget that most of us don't live next to farmers and friends who can stroll about and collect fresh ingredients for us. Her recipes often call for specific varieties of fruit. Luckily the translator has written brief footnotes for most specific listings like that, and you can figure out a good substitution. If nothing else, head to a farmers market and tell them the flavor/consistency of fruit you want and they can help you find a native variety that matches.

Hopefully none of my family members will read this book, because if they do they're going to know what jellies they're getting for christmas this year.