The Good Cook : 70 Essential Techniques, 250 Step-by-Step Photographs, 350 Easy Recipes

Rating:
Summary: Help for new cooks
Review: If you've cooked from Anne Willan's books, as I have for some 30 years, you get to recognize her culiary voice as spirited, firm but encouraging, and always food-friendly. Her latest, "The Good Cook" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, comes to the rescue of the beginner in the kitchen.

Text and the 250 useful photos show 70 essential techniques to produce 350 easy and delicious recipes. One is her Last Minute Cheese Souffle. The first souffle I ever made was from her old recipe, which called for a roux of potato flour. She has rethought things, omitting any flour, but retaining the short cooking time at high heat, or only 12 minutes at 400F. The beauty of this is a souffle that doesn't make the guests wait and the host fret. Simply bake it while people are congregating at table.

"Food friendly" means she always cooks so that recipes don't overwhelm the natural taste of the ingredients. No fad fashions for her, no "Texas Tuscan," but her chosen-few herbs applied lightly to taste like themselves and no meats or fish made mysterious by "concept" cooking. From Italy, she got the idea to dress a salad of cooked beets and red onion rings with mint. I had not thought to grill radicchio, nor to season it with ground spices like coriander, cumin and chile pepper.

There are dozen of great tips. A cone of tender artichoke leaves inserted into the tougher globe can be filled with sauce. The milk in scalloped potatoes won't curdle durng baking if the spuds are simmered first in milk and then baked in cream. Like her old friend Julia Child, she believes there's a place for cream and butter. Also from a knowledge of food chemisty comes salvation for root vegetables that make a "damp puree" when baked bythemselves. So, to celery root or turnips or parsnips, add potato for its transforming starch. Be creative with tools, such as using needle-nosed pliers to pluck salmon bones. Pork roasted with milk whitens the meat -- and makes gravy the color of caffe latte. No need for make phyllo when she herself uses the store-bought. One recipe calls for 12 phyllo sheets, each laid at a slight angle to the first "like the hours on a clock." I wish I'd thought of the graphic simplicty of that description.
Submitted by Margo Miller, Boston, Massachusetts.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Textbook for Learning New Techniques. Buy it
Review: `The Good Cook' by leading culinary educator, Anne Willan is one of a very rare breed of books that can act as a good textbook of cooking methods. While I am sure there are some like yours truly who actually open `The Joy of Cooking' or `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' or `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking' and read it from front to back, but around 99% of all cookbooks are, after an initial scan to get a sense of what's in them, meant to be consulted on a recipe by recipe basis.

Some books such as `Cookwise' and Alton Brown's three books are meant to be read from cover to cover and you can do this by skipping all the recipes and get a good foundation in the science of cooking. But, cooking is not really about Science, it's about learning basic recipes and mastering a fairly wide variety of techniques. Thousands of professional cooks do exceptionally well by following the kind of advice given by Daniel Boulud without ever cracking the covers of Harold McGee's `On Food and Cooking'.

The leading volumes in this important field of culinary textbook aside from Willan's works are the Culinary Institute of America's `The New Professional Chef' and Madeleine Kamman's `The New Making of a Cook'. As the titles of these works indicate, they are especially valuable works in that they have been around for a long time and have gone through major revisions as a result of actually using them in culinary classrooms. To further distinguish these select volumes, I will point out that they are different from the excellent books of techniques by Jacques Pepin and James Peterson, in that these works are reference books of techniques rather than the far more common reference books of recipes.

Willan's book is a careful blend of both recipes and techniques illustrated by excellent supporting photography which could easily be both read and cooked from cover to cover. In fact, while the techniques are excellently presented, this book may not be as good a reference as Pepin's classic, but it is far better than virtually every other work I have seen as a TEXTBOOK! And, my reason for saying this is based on more than Willan's skill as a teacher and the quality of her material. It is also based on the fact that the book is easy to read. It's presentation is not too different from taking lessons in cooking from a very wise and experienced aunt who has a grown and married daughter who is also an accomplished cook. References to recipes contributed from Willan's daughter, Emma, are often used as clever devices for introducing shortcuts and modernization of classics as when Willan presents Emma's take on Coq au Vin which can be done in a single day rather than in the traditional three days. For any who are unfamiliar with Willan's credentials, I will point out that she is the founder and one of the principle instructors at a highly respected cooking school based in France which also gives sessions at the Greenbriar Hotel in West Virginia.

The book's contents are organized in a very friendly way which ease you into useful techniques very quickly, unlike the CIA text which starts off with a seemingly endless chapter on the details of making excellent classic French stocks. While this follows the CIA course schedule, it is not suited to maintaining your interest when you need to get a meal on the table tonight.

The principle chapters are:

Essential Flavors which deals with basic pantry recipes such as Persillade, vinaigrettes, gremolata, and garlic bread, with techniques on using a chef's knife and a mandoline, plus recipes for basic salads such as potato salad and cole slaw. After a good deal of such immediately useful recipes and techniques is the obligatory section on stocks that is less fussy than the CIA, but quite correct, thank you.

Tips From the Pros is a grab bag of tips on modern mixing equipment, marinates, brines, and frying.

Saucery will cover just about all your everyday needs with more vinaigrettes, mayonnaise, hollandaise, béarnaise, butter sauces, gravies, and pestos.

Eggscetera covers boiled, deviled, curried, stuffed, scrambled, and coddled eggs as well as omelets, crepes, souffles and mousselines.

Fabulous Fish and Seafood is a bit short for a school based on the French coastline, but it does cover the basics for shrimp, mussels, scallops, and generic fin fish.

From the Farmyard covers poultry
Mastering Meats covers roasting, braising, stewing, steaking, grilling, and medallioning (sic).
Perfect Pasta and Rice covers basic dry pasta dishes plus making fresh pasta featuring daughter Emma. You could do much worse than to learn Risotto making from this chapter.

The Vegetable Story covers lots of new knife skills plus blanching, sautéing, salads and grilling.

Pastry Fundamentals covers exactly those things which the average home cook needs to know, such as a standard pastry crust (pate brisee), biscuits (baking powder and butter, not buttermilk) quiches, phyllo dough (how to work with it, not to make it) and savory pies.

This is just about as good a sophomore level textbook you are likely to find on cooking techniques and basic recipes. It not only teaches, it gives the reader a journeyman's lay of the land for French and Italian cuisine. There are no distractions for wine or name-dropping or storied suppliers or dish histories. This is `Just the Facts, Madam' with a wee bit of leavening with family stories, not too different from what you may hear among your favorite aunt's stories.

Not the least feature of the book is the fact that the author gives tips on the proper serving time for dishes, as when she compares a roast (serve immediately) with a braise (improves with age).

If you know everything there is to know about cooking, this book may bore you. For all the rest of us, I strongly recommend this book for everyone interested in improving their cooking.