Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, comprehensive, clear. A real "must".
Review: A well written book. Well planed and clear, in an easy way shows the wide spectrum of sauce making. A real must in every kitchen of the "enthusiastic cook".
Rating: 
Summary: Inaccurate Facts
Review: Everyone's heard the old adage about "where there's smoke, there's fire". If I discover inaccuracies in a text that I know are inaccurate, it makes me wonder how much of what is stated in the text about matters I don't know about is accurate!Example 1: He states that a peppercorn when ripe is pink, and that is soaked in water to remove the pink shell to reveal the white peppercorn. This is not true. The "pink peppercorn" is not related to black pepper at all. (Ref: The Professional Chef, 5th Edition) Example 2: He states that tomatoes were introduced into Italy in the 1600's. I had always heard that it was Thomas Jefferson who ate tomatoes when no one else would because tomatoes are related to the Deadly Nightshade (Belladonna) family and were generally thought toxic. Jefferson introduced them to the Italian Ambassador who brought them back to Italy in the 1700's. Example 3: He gives a recipe for Chutney sauce which requires Mango Chutney as an ingredient. However, there is no Mango Chutney recipe in the book that I could find! OK, Example 3 is an omission rather than an inaccuracy, and yes, I'm not positive which story in Example 2 is historically correct. But Example 1 alone would cause me to be skeptical, because it is so widely known that pink peppercorns are not a member of the black pepper family. Actually, white pepper is inside black pepper, and breaking off the outer shell reveals the white peppercorn. Green peppercorns are merely just that: green when they're ripe. Also one recipe, I forgot which one, called for 1 Basil, and left out the unit of measure. Haven't tried any of the recipes, but just reading through some of them, they appear to be fairly sound. The proof will be in the tasting. DR
Rating:
Summary: Inaccurate Facts
Review: Everyone's heard the old adage about "where there's smoke, there's fire". If I discover inaccuracies in a text that I know are inaccurate, it makes me wonder how much of what is stated in the text about matters I don't know about is accurate! Example 1: He states that a peppercorn when ripe is pink, and that is soaked in water to remove the pink shell to reveal the white peppercorn. This is not true. The "pink peppercorn" is not related to black pepper at all. (Ref: The Professional Chef, 5th Edition) Example 2: He states that tomatoes were introduced into Italy in the 1600's. I had always heard that it was Thomas Jefferson who ate tomatoes when no one else would because tomatoes are related to the Deadly Nightshade (Belladonna) family and were generally thought toxic. Jefferson introduced them to the Italian Ambassador who brought them back to Italy in the 1700's. Example 3: He gives a recipe for Chutney sauce which requires Mango Chutney as an ingredient. However, there is no Mango Chutney recipe in the book that I could find! OK, Example 3 is an omission rather than an inaccuracy, and yes, I'm not positive which story in Example 2 is historically correct. But Example 1 alone would cause me to be skeptical, because it is so widely known that pink peppercorns are not a member of the black pepper family. Actually, white pepper is inside black pepper, and breaking off the outer shell reveals the white peppercorn. Green peppercorns are merely just that: green when they're ripe. Also one recipe, I forgot which one, called for 1 Basil, and left out the unit of measure. Haven't tried any of the recipes, but just reading through some of them, they appear to be fairly sound. The proof will be in the tasting. DR
Rating: 
Summary: extremely inaccurate and ill-researched
Review: I was given this book as a gift, and as a professional chef in Washington, DC, I was very disappointed. The inaccuracies and bumbling research do not warrant a reader's funds nor time. In my opinion, this book is useless to both professional and pedestrian cooks.
Rating:
Summary: It is the BIBLE
Review: Knowledge, organization and clear. Excellent resource.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent recipe resource.
Review: The book doesn't go into depth about anything but sauces. It has great pictures and good suggestions for professionals. I really like it.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent recipe resource.
Review: The book doesn't go into depth about anything but sauces. It has great pictures and good suggestions for professionals. I really like it.
Rating:
Summary: Inaccurate Facts
Review: The book presents hundreds of interesting sauces but is not organized in a way that allows you to know what sauce to use and when. Rather than index sauces to match foods, this book presents a small blurb of suggested foods next to each of 600+ receipies. For example, I opened the book at random to a sauces that was recommended for crab cakes. But if I wanted to prepare crab cakes and was looking for a sauce, I would have had to read past 200 pages and 300 recipies before I found this one. The publisher could have spent a few hundred dollars to create an index of sauces that would have increased the value of this book ten fold. Too bad they didn't.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Sauces--Bad book
Review: The book presents hundreds of interesting sauces but is not organized in a way that allows you to know what sauce to use and when. Rather than index sauces to match foods, this book presents a small blurb of suggested foods next to each of 600+ receipies. For example, I opened the book at random to a sauces that was recommended for crab cakes. But if I wanted to prepare crab cakes and was looking for a sauce, I would have had to read past 200 pages and 300 recipies before I found this one. The publisher could have spent a few hundred dollars to create an index of sauces that would have increased the value of this book ten fold. Too bad they didn't.
Rating:
Summary: Not just your average 'recipe book' cookbook...
Review: This book is more of a detailed textbook than a cookbook. It goes into a detailed history of how sauces developed over the last few centuries - dating all the way back to the Roman feasts. Better yet, it doesn't give mere recipes - it details the hows and whys of good sauce making. This book may be too detailed for an amateur cook to use. It's not the sort of book that you simply take a recipe and use, not unless you're already well-skilled in the saucier's art. It does take the time to explain all the french cookery terms that make up the vocabulary of the text, and if you're willing to actually take the time to learn all the skills Chef Laurousse is teaching, you'll be a far better chef for it.
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