A Wonderful Book -- But Be Prepared to Spend Serious Time...
Rating:
5 / 5
If you're interested in the great French sauces, this is the book for you. Julia Child is a wonderful beginning in that direction, and she also has arranged the sauces more or less by family. But Sokolov takes it to the ultimate degree, particularly with his classical renditions of the "mother sauces". The sauces you will eventually end up with are generally far better than you will ever get in any restaurant outside of France. And even in France, in these degenerate days, most restaurants take shortcuts in making the brown sauces.One or two or three caveats: if you make the "mother sauce" espagnole, and then the demi-glace, following his recipe, you are going to need at least *two* enormous, restaurant-sized kettles. I had one very large one to start with and at some point in the proceedings had to go out and buy another one. He wasn't very clear about this. Plus, he consistently understates the *time* needed to do these recipes, perhaps because he doesn't want to frighten the reader away. He says, for instance, that to make the espagnole-demi-glace, you can do it easily over a weekend in bits and pieces, stepping away from the kitchen occasionally to pass the time with "Fanny Hill" (he's also a wonderfully witty and amusing writer into the bargain). But he is seriously wrong about this particular recipe, the most important one in the book. I am a very experienced cook, and I work fairly quickly, and I undertook this recipe with my French wife, another serious cook, plus occasional help from my mother, *another* very serious cook, and it essentially took *three* days to end up with, as I recall, 18 1-cup frozen portions of demi-glace. Plus there's an *enormous* amount of shopping to do to get the various ingredients -- even in San Francisco it necessitated several trips to wholesale meat markets and latino markets on Market Street for some of the more recondite items. You're never going to find all those bones and pig rinds at your local Safeway.... Also, you need to have a *strong* person around to lift and carry a 20- or 30-gallon stock pot loaded to the very top with 10 pounds of bones, 10 pounds of meat, lotsa veggies, and gallons of water. This is never mentioned by him. This book is *not* for the neophyte or the dilettante, although most of the white sauces are a snap to make compared to the basic brown one. If you're only interested in white sauces, a beginning cook could use this book easily.... Whatever my caveats, however, this is still a 5-star book. And, as I said, he's a wonderfully witty writer.
Philosopher's stone of a cookbook.
Rating:
5 / 5
An immensely gratifying experience.
With only modest ingredients (no truffles, foie gras, or caviar required) and more than a little patience and care, this book led me to culinary nirvana. There's nothing flashy going on here, and yet it's all entirely sublime. If 'dinner party recipe' cookbooks are starting to leave you feeling empty inside- here's the remedy. This book on the saucier's art just may be Sokolov's ticket into heaven.
I can't imagine life without it....
Rating:
5 / 5
I have owned this book for over 20 years and still use it regularly. I am not a professional, but I can make suaces on any give day that compare favorably -- or outshine -- what is served in many top restaurants. The book's menus are a bit dated, favoring adaptations of classics, but you miss the point if you doggedly follow them. This book teaches you about making a virtually endless arrray of sauces, using classical techniques. Once you master the "mother" or foundation suaces, there is no limit to what you can imitate or invent. There is real work involved here, and you may need some additional equipment, but you can be smart about it. I make huge batch of demi-glace each winter and freeze it in small portions, which translates into a one-year gold mine of possibilities. This is a great source; I can't imagine life without it.
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