Mes Tartes: The Sweet and Savory Tarts of Christine Ferber (Hardcover)

by Christine Ferber (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
This cookbook by famed French pastry artiste Ferber contains recipes for dozens of appealing quiches and tarts, like a sweet Fig Tart with Caramel and a rich old-fashioned Quiche Lorraine. However, as tempting as the recipes are, they will prove frustrating for the American home cook who is instructed to find ingredients like "pear quinces," "Gariguette strawberries" and "Beaufort cheese," a creamy cheese that is admittedly "not readily available here." Suitable substitutions are infrequently provided, and although the local ingredients may pique the interest of expert pastry chefs, the culinary novice may be intimidated by the apparent need for several different kinds of sugar, flour and butter (it's not a matter of salted or unsalted for the latter-the question is Plugra, Charentes or Normandy butter) and other specialty ingredients. The prose can be awkward, which may have something to do with the translation: e.g., creams coat tarts "with their creamy softness and are melting and sweet in the mouth" and "the finish coat makes the tart even more glistening." Complicated directions make several of these tarts difficult for the American chef to create at home. In short, there's wonderful stuff in here, but it's only for the dedicated tart-maker.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description
After the publication of the original French edition of "Mes Confitures" in 1998, Christine Ferber was chosen as France's finest patisserie. Here she brings together a collection of her unique recipes. Ferber unravels a seasonal thread of ingredients to create an encyclopedia of tastes, advice, slights of hand, culinary tricks and inventive and successful methods for insuring magnificent tart fillings and perfect crusts.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Michigan State University Press (December 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870136887
• ISBN-13: 978-0870136887
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 8.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,708 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very European Master Class in Pastry. Buy It!, March 6, 2005

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

`Mes Tartes' by Christine Ferber, subtitled `The Sweet and Savory Tarts of Christine Ferber' is a highly polished gem of a book and a rare find if you are fond of classic MittelEuropean pastries. While the book was originally written in French and finely translated into English by Virginia R. Phillips, the book's contents show a broad influence of France, Germany, Italy, and Austria, the powerhouses of western pastry traditions. This is only appropriate, as Ms. Ferber is headquartered in Alsace, near the borders with southern Germany and Switzerland.

To my knowledge, this is the second of Mme. Ferber's works available to us in English. The first, fittingly, was on preserves and confits, the classic ingredient in sweet tarts. While this earlier book is a leader in its class, its audience is a bit limited. The audience for fine pastries, at least the audience of those willing to make fine pastries is a lot larger than the readers willing to make preserves.

Aside from the quality of this book, the most important thing to know about it is that it covers a range of pastries much broader than what you commonly describe as tarts. While it covers both sweet and savory flat pies with pastry crust and cooked fillings, it also covers galettes, quiches, Tatins, and clafoutis (custard or flan based cherry filled pastry), although almost all recipes produce something which has a fairly strong family resemblance to a tart or pie.

I have read many fine books on pastry making lately and this book will certainly never replace some of these better texts such as Rose Levy Beranbaum's `The Pie and Pastry Bible' or Nick Malgieri's `Perfect Pastry' or Flo Bracker's `The Simple Art of Perfect Baking' or Gayle Ortiz' `The Village Baker's Wife', but this book is by far the finest presentation of the very French techniques of making pie and tart pastry by working the butter into the flour with a cold work surface and the heel of your hand which `smears' the cold butter into the butter. There is no way this method is easier than either a pastry cutter or even better, a food processor, but the results are so distinctive, I feel anyone with a love of pastry techniques will want to see Mme. Ferber's use of this technique.

While Ferber does not go into the depth of explanation as, for example, Ms. Beranbaum, about why certain flours are better than others for pastry making, Mme. Ferber is very careful in describing the needs of the flour in each case and typically specifies one of two French style flours and approximates how you can reproduce these products with mixtures of American wheats. The general introduction on techniques and equipment is not as big as you may find in some books, but it is more important than most in that Mme. Ferber recommends a very typically French selection of dark iron pans which may not be readily available in the United States. Knowing this is important because one may wish to pay just a little more attention to baking times if your equipment did not fly in on a plane from Strasbourg. The only piece of equipment that gave me reason to rush to the Sonoma-Williams web page was the tart pan with the detachable bottom and NO FLUTEs. Most of the finished products in the book's photographs show tarts done in fluted pans, but more than a few are done in fluteless pans.

Like her book on confits, this book is arranged by season. Two years ago, this organization did not appeal to me as much as it does today since I do much more cooking and baking today than I did two years ago, and I find myself going more and more to cookbooks organized by season, now that I have a pretty good collection of them. In fact, I believe this organization doubles the value of this book as the variation in quality and price of fruits is much more than with vegetables. A cabbage is a cabbage the year around, but a peach is only a prime Georgia peach for two months of the year.

Another really delightful find in this book is some of the more unusual recipes, such as the sauerkraut and Munster tart. You can almost pinpoint on the map the site of this recipe's birth, as Alsace is `sauerkraut' central, just north of Munster, Germany. You can almost imagine that in pizza was invented in the Rhineland, this is what it would look like. And, adding a little corned beef and Russian Dressing to the recipe may bring you achingly close to a great Reuben flavored appetizer.

All measurements are given in units familiar to American cooks. When the `professional' unit is metric weight and the U.S. amateur cook would use a volumetric measurement, the primary unit is given in cups. Aside from the great variety of recipe types, the classic fruit tarts are done to a level of perfection you may not see outside of a very fancy patisserie. Fruit fillings have carefully prepared flavored glazes that I simply do not see in my average Martha Stewart recipe. This is no reflection on Martha Stewart Living's recipe writers. It is an indication that these are extremely serious recipes with no compromises to easy baking.

For a book originally written in French, the list of American suppliers and resources is very good. In fact, this is the first and only reference I have yet to see to a web site for doing measuring unit conversions. As I thing this alone may be worth the price of the book, I suggest you buy the book and check out page 285.

If you bake or collect books on baking or are especially fond of French cooking techniques, this book should be high on your list of future purchases.

Very highly recommended indeed. My deepest thanks to the Michigan State University Press for making Mme. Ferber's books available to us.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Example of French Pastry; Poor Editing, March 11, 2007

By	Reader (New Haven, CT United States) - See all my reviews

For someone who has enjoyed Christine Ferber's jams, the news of publication of her two books (Mes Confitures and Mes Tartes) in English were very welcome. The mere flipping through the pages reveals the beautiful pairings of flavours, colours and textures as well as Mme. Ferber's genius in highlighting (rather than masking) the flavour of fruit.

However, I was less impressed with the editing of the English edition of Mes Tartes. The first red flag was a mistake in the staple recipe for flaky pastry, which called for 3 tablespoons of butter (per 1lb of flour). Thankfully, the metric measures retained from the original edition provided the correct ratio (375g of butter per 1lb of flour).

In other words, I highly recommend the book, but I would urge caution in relying solely on the cups/tablespoon measures provided. Use the metric measures prodived for guidance.

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky translation, but an excellent guide to French tarts and flans, June 26, 2009

By	Donald M. Farmer (47.7375°N, -122.12611°W) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a super book to read and to work from. The translation is a little difficult for beginners to follow, partly because it is badly edited - the recipes don't always flow logically, and measures are inconsistent. However, if you know what you're doing, there is endless inspiration here, yet the techniques and patterns of ingredients are deeply grounded in the traditional cuisines of careful French cooking.