`chocolate and vanilla' by Chicago star pastry chef and Food Network maven, Gale Gand, with co-author credits for Lisa Weiss is a gimmick book on at least two levels. Ms. Gand is the co-owner of Tru (along with former husband, executive chef Rick Tramonto), one of the most highly honored restaurants in Chicago. But unlike her business partner Rick's cookbooks, which aspire to the heights of sophistication reached by Thomas Keller and fellow Chicagoan, Charlie Trotter, Ms. Gand's books all tend to be very light, with recipes almost always oriented to simply having fun in the kitchen. This also sets her books apart from the excellent cookbooks by other leading pastry chefs such as `The Sweet Life' by Chanterelle pastry chef, Kate Zuckerman and `The Secrets of Baking' by Spago pastry chef, Sherry Yard.
This is above all, a gimmick book, which is rare in cookbooks for adults. The most obvious manifestation of the book's surprise approach is that it is not really a book about chocolate and vanilla together, but two completely separate books, one about vanilla and the other about chocolate. The two are bound together between the same covers, but the book on the one subject is printed upside down and backwards against the text of the other text. This is initially surprising, since vanilla and chocolate together is one of the most dramatic arguments for the notion of `terroir' in the whole culinary world. As Ms. Gand points out in her independent introductions to the two products, both are native to central America, including what is now southern Mexico, and, the pre-Columbian cultures actually used the two together in their `hot chocolate' preparations, along with another famous New World product, chiles. This admixture of vanilla and chocolate is no geographical accident, as it is still a universal practice today to add vanilla to chocolate products to help bring out its flavor. When these two products made their way to Europe on the conquistador's galleons, the combination fell into disuse, as the combination of chocolate with sugar made a much bigger impression on the early European chocoheads.
I must note at this point that Ms. Gand and her book team at Clarkson Potter dropped the ball in editing this book when they referred to Europe and not the Americas as the `New World'. There are a few other geographical oddities of expression, but none except this one will do anything to spoil your enjoyment of this book.
Since this book is all about having fun with baking, it may not be seen as a `must buy', especially for those who already own several good books on baking and at least one good book on chocolate. This is especially true as Ms. Gand does not even present the technique of tempering chocolate, and none of her recipes require that the home cook do any tempering themselves. She has a nice but short story of how chocolate was distributed around the world and how it's processing evolved over the last 400 years, but a book dedicated to chocolate will have all this and more.
The real hero of this book is not chocolate, but vanilla. Vanilla may be the Rodney Dangerfield of culinary products. Where everyone craves chocolate and saffron has the pride of being the most expensive spice, vanilla languishes as the second most expensive spice and a supporting player to chocolate's star. As a result, vanilla gets little or no special notice in all the cookbooks I've read, even the best ones on herbs and spices. Ms. Gand redresses all these lapses. Her treatment of how to make the best use of vanilla is easily the best to be found anywhere.
For starters, she identifies the very best geographical sources for vanilla bean. But, her biggest contribution for the culinarily fussy may be her technique for coaxing the vanilla seeds from their pods in a way that avoids also picking up strands of fiber, similar to the white webbing which holds the seeds in chiles. Miss Gale predictably warns us against artificial vanilla flavorings and `vanillin flavoring', a blend of natural and artificial vanilla. On the other hand, she instructs us on the uncommon preparations, vanilla paste and vanilla powder, both made from natural vanilla. Another especially valuable bit of information is the source of the very best vanilla products (Nielsen-Massey). Unfortunately, this appears on the page of sources that appears only on page 79 of big brother chocolate's half of the book.
Just as the chocolate recipes are divided up between dark, semi-sweet, light and milk, and white chocolate ingredients, vanilla recipes are divided up between those that use vanilla seeds and those that use vanilla extract. The hallmark application of vanilla seeds on its own is in custards and the world of products derived from them such as ice cream, flans, crème Anglaise, mousse, pastry fillings, and glazes. The most typical use of vanilla extract is baked goods such as cakes, where the flavor is intimately mixed with flour and sugar. I confess the boundary between seed and extract seems pretty thin, and I suspect that the two are pretty interchangeable, except where you want to avoid the sight of the little black specks in your finished goods.
As I said above, almost all the recipes in this book lie somewhere between easy (vanilla flan) and really easy (vanilla malteds) for someone who likes to bake. Like Missy Gand's earlier books, that makes it an especially good resource for baking with kids. That doesn't mean the recipes are quick. It also doesn't mean they have no interest to the hoity-toity among us who like recipes with a pedigree. I can think on two more well bred recipes than the vanilla charlotte (a dish destined to be making a comeback) and the vanilla-scented peach Tarte Tatin. If your guests have seen one too many tiramisu dishes, try the charlotte!
At half the price of the premium baking books, this one is worth every penny.
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