Essential Cuisine [Hardcover]

This man loves his cuisine and loves nature. The photos are simple and stylish but not contrived. There are also many well executed photos of the countryside in the back. The directions are as simple as if you are standing next to a cook who is explaining things to you as they cook. I can't help feeling his intense emotional love of working with food as I read and look through this book. Frankly, it makes the current popular chefs and cooking show hosts look like ... Sorry -- but I'm a chef, and books like this are hard to find.

`Essential Cuisine', nominally written by Michelin starred French chef Michel Bras and his brother, Sebastian, is translated from the French and is published by a very small house, `ici la Press' that I guess specializes in distributing such French material transplanted to these shores.

Like an earlier book `A Chef in Provence' by Edouard Loubet, this book is the perfect example of a foodie's coffee table decoration which will very likely never see the inside of a kitchen or suffer an olive oil stained fingerprint on any of its especially glossy pages. The main difference between Loubert and Bras' efforts are that Bras and company wastes less page space on nice pictures of Provencal gardens, hill, forests, and wildflowers among the recipes. The gallery of pretty pictures is relegated to the back of the book. This is little solace for the $50 price tag for highly impractical recipes.

This does not mean this is a bad book. It only means that it would be a real shame for someone to buy this book under a mistaken idea about its contents. If cookbooks were mapped to magazines on building, carpentry, crafts, and hobbies, Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' would become `Fine Woodworking', Tony Bourdain's `Les Halles Cookbook' would become `Handyman', and Michel Bras' `Essential Cooking' would become `Architectural Digest'. The first two are consulted for serious ideas on projects that an amateur can do at home. The latter is browsed for the pictures and the romance of very expensive venues.

The title, `Essential Cooking' gives the impression of being about basics. The book is about as far removed from being about basics as you can imagine. Unfortunately, it is also devoid of much insight about professional cooking which can be transferred to improving an amateur's cooking practice. But let me spend a few words on telling you what is good about this book.

The very first thing which appealed to me was the somewhat quirky, but highly effective method of laying out the ingredients and procedure for each recipe which typically appears on the left side of a two page spread dedicated to each dish. The translators have done a serviceable, albeit somewhat gross translation of metric measurements into familiar English units. I can't complain too much about these, as even the equivalencies in Patricia Wells' excellent books are often off by about 20%. But, in the world of savory cooking, 20% difference doesn't mean a whole lot.

The next feature that impressed me was the dual table of contents that cross-referenced all the recipes by both primary ingredient and by type of dish. This is really a very European thing, as I see it much more often in French and German books than in books written by Americans.

Other especially good features were the basic advice and basic recipe sections. The basic advice has not nearly enough content to come even close to being a tutorial on cooking, but it does include a few rare pointers centered on taking your time, paying attention to taste, and being organized. The basic recipes are not just your typical stocks and vinaigrettes, as Monsieur Bras' recipes require several unusual pantry preparations. There are some less common but still familiar preparations such as beurre noisette, pate brisee, pate sablee, Italian meringue, and French meringue. There are also some preparations I have never seen before such as aigo boulido, gomasio, grilled lard, huille rance, kefir, long jus, short jus, and nougatine. Some of these preparations are simply unfamiliar names for common cooking techniques. Gomasio, for example, is simply toasted sesame seeds crushed with sea salt. Some preparations are totally familiar to every cook, yet they are generally thought of as nuisances, such as milk skin, that skin that forms on the surface of heated milk.

Other nice features are the short glossary of terms, the very necessary table of substitutions, and the totally unique page of stencils, templates, and diagrams of unusual equipment. The table of substitutions, like many of the pantry preparations is not your everyday sour milk substitution for buttermilk. These recipes use lots of exceedingly uncommon ingredients such as agar-agar, amaranth, bee balm, rau0ram, tansy flowers, and yellow bedstraw flowers. Fortunately, all the stand-in products are very common, such as spinach, gelatin, celery, and basil.

I should also soften my judgment that the recipes in this book are totally impractical for the home cook. There are many ideas here which, with a fair amount of practice, can turn up on your table when you entertain to impress. The chef author is very fond of soft-boiled eggs; something which is very uncommon in American cookery and which therefore, would make a big impression, especially with the ways the author tweaks the presentations. The soft-boiled egg recipes appear under the unfamiliar rubric `mises en bouche', a variation on `amuse-bouche'.

Many other recipes also start with very common ingredients to give us fried bread and Mediterranean tuna with a presentation which would knock the socks off of the most jaded brunch guest. But then, the author goes off the deep end by giving us recipes requiring Banyuls sweet wine, venison, potimarron squash, demerara sugar, candied orange, and juniper berries to yield a leg of venison with licorice-like lemon puree. The presentation of this dish, like all the others, is a knockout.

The texts surrounding the recipes are a combination of childhood memories and somewhat mystical ruminations on things that inspire the chef's cooking.

The bottom line is that this expensive book is totally impractical for everyday cookery, but it does give us a look at the substance and inspirations of French haute cuisine. And, unlike Charlie Trotter's book `Raw', it is not totally impractical. The four stars I give are a compromise between a warning to look before you lay out your cash and a recommendation of the book as very good eye candy and a source of inspiration.

This book as well as his DVD are incredible as others have noted. The concepts and artistry he incorporates into his dishes are mind-blowing. But if you can navigate it, buy the english-language version of this book on the Amazon.fr (French) website. The price, even with the exchange rate, is less than half the price shown here.

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