Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making

by James Peterson Wiley, 640 pp., $49.95

Know someone who longs to attend culinary school but can’t take the time away from life to do so? Well, for the truly motivated, here’s alternative access to some of that instruction. Weighing in at 4 pounds and 600-plus pages, James Peterson’s doorstop of a book offers at least a semester’s worth of self-paced study about sauces, that cornerstone of classical European cookery. Both encyclopedic and methodical, this is a user’s manual designed to teach aspiring serious cooks and to serve as valuable reference for the professional chef.

Originally published in 1991, the first edition garnered international acclaim, was translated into French, and was awarded the James Beard Cookbook of the Year. This latest edition includes the fundamental information from previous versions but wraps it in larger contexts of food history and practical application – you learn not only where each sauce comes from and the cooking techniques used to make it but why it’s made as it is and how to use it in recipes both classical and modern. What is a liaison, and how does it work? What is a nage? How does butterscotch differ from caramel?

Peterson, a former restaurant chef and culinary instructor at the French Culinary Institute and the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, is grounded in the sauces of France and Italy, and the text reflects this. But there’s plenty of information about sauces from other cuisines, from Vietnamese and Japanese to Greek, Spanish, and Mexican. This is a serious investment for serious cooks.

This article appears in December 5 • 2008.

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MM Pack is a food writer/historian and private chef who divides her time between Austin and San Francisco. A regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Edible Austin, she’s been published in Gastronomica, The San Francisco Chronicle, Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, Nation’s Restaurant News, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, The Dictionary of Culinary Biography, and Southern Foodways Alliance’s Cornbread Nation 1.