Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making - 3rd Edition

BEST cookbook in years! Far more than just sauces, as the the title humbly sugests. As soon as I got it, I realised it was special & showed it to my mom, (who, btw, is a great cook & has been cooking for years) & she wanted to keep it. I had to order another one for myself. GET IT--you will thank yourself---it completely rocks!

Just a bit unorganized. A lot of history on where the sauces originate and I found it made the book more of a professional cooking class text book. I did find some good recipes. I think if you are interested in learning more than just making the sauce itself, this is the book for you. (It is quite thick).

Incredible reference book for sauces that reads like a great novel!!!!!!!!!! If you are the queen of Hamburger Helper or you think the Olive Garden is fine dining this book is NOT for you.

I am not going to post another review that details the chapters. Many of the reviews repeat he same information and the information is extemely accurate and detailed.

If you are one of the home cooks who enjoys watching cooking shows and experimenting with new cuisines and techniques add this title to your cookbook library.

I would have given this book 5 stars if they would have included more pictures of the finished sauces and perhaps step by step pictures on how to arrive at the perfect complement to an entree.

My son loves sauces and cooking. This book brought a big smile when he opened his birthday present.
He has yet to try any of the recipes, but soon will. Since these recipes are from James Peterson, I am sure they will be delicious.

The whole family was all interested in the food history, included with the recipes, which he read aloud to us.

Can't wait for our next visit and new culinary experiences.

This book is what I have been seeking. An encyclopedia of sauces, easily prepared, to enahnce the flavor of just about anything we conjure up in our kitchens as head cook and bottle washer. It is a great investment, and have learned much already. Take inexpensive cuts, and make taste like the best. Recommend highly!

I bought this as a Christmas present, for my granddaughter, who is in her final year as a culinary student. I'm certain that she'll love it.
The book, itself, looks very impressive (not skimpy)..has beautiful jacket...

This tome on sauce making is easily the most thorough coverage I have ever been exposed to. Well, it's the only one I've been exposed to, and I doubt there is anything as complete as this.

Readable, in-depth, expansive, edifying, and complete.

This is a book that needs to be studied and intellectually digested over a period of time as if one were attending college to become a world class chef. This is professional material and should be treated accordingly.

A prized gift for the professional, the potential professional, and the (really) serious home cook.

That being said, if you want to just whip up a quick sauce in the pan, I'm not sure this will serve your needs. There are dozens of sauce recipes, and they're good, but the idea behind the book is to teach you how to use a particular technique, then apply your knowledge in your own unique way. This is a "get a PHD in sauces", not a whip-it-up-quick index card recipe book.

Twenty muscular chapters include:
1. A Short History of Sauce Making
2. Equipment
3. Ingredients
4. Stocks, Glaces, and Essences
5. Liaisons: An Overview
6. White Sauces for Meat and Vegetables
7. Brown Sauces
8. Stock-Based and Non-Integral Fish Sauces
9. Integral Meat Sauces
10. Integral Fish and Shellfish Sauces
11. Crustacean Sauces
12. Jellies and Chauds-Froids
13. Hot Emulsified Egg Yolk Sauces
14. Mayonnaise-Based Sauces
15. Butter Sauces
16. Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, and Relishes
17. Pruees and Puree-Thickened Sauces
18. Pasta Sauces
19. Asian Sauces
20. Dessert Sauces

A superb instructional manual that will make you an expert if you study and apply some effort. It gets my highest rating and reccommendation for anyone who craves praise for their cooking prowess (like me).

- Alleyrat

A few wonderful sauce recipes, however it definitely is a buy I wish I could take back. The sauce recipes included seem to be written out in complex formulas...when they can easily be simplified and still be just as wonderful. I found my other cookbooks are often of much more use when it comes to learning the basics of sauces. This book is very out-dated.

Haven't yet cooked from this book, but reading through it makes me think that this book will be in use for years. Lots of background info and variations on sauces. I am sauce challenged, so I think I will really enjoy this. Read the review first through Saveur magazine and contemplated buying it for a while. Glad I did.

In general, I like this book a lot. Other reviews have said a lot of good things, so I'll focus on a few problems I noticed in particular. As other reviews have stated, it discusses a wide variety of sauces and gives a lot of information about them. In essence, it is an encyclopedia of sauces, though I don't think it necessarily achieves its goal in being a good instructional book for this variety of sauces.

The one significant problem with this book is that it tries a little too much to be a recipe book in addition to a textbook on sauces. The result is that a lot of space is taken up by recipes (which are quite good). However, I think many readers of this book are interested in sauce technique and background more than lots of recipes that are quite often just ways to use a sauce, rather than recipes that teach you a lot about the sauce.

Why is this a problem? It isn't, if you just want a bunch of recipes that include a sauce. Or perhaps if you're buying this book to learn traditional French sauces and technique, which are explained in greater detail. But I already own books that have that information, and frankly there are other books that cover it better or at least as well (though with different emphasis).

However, once you step outside those first few chapters on classic French sauces and get into other types of sauces -- pasta sauces, salsas, vinaigrettes, Asian sauces, etc. -- don't expect a lot of information other than general background and classification, along with a few recipes.

For example, the pasta sauce chapter is about 20 pages long. After a few pages about pasta that have nothing to do with sauces (a table of shapes, info about serving sizes, etc.), we get a useful list of things to add to pasta along with butter or oil, followed by a few recipes that do this basic thing. Then we get into real sauces, including cream-based sauces (2 recipes), sauces based on preserved pork products (1 recipe), seafood sauces (4 recipes), vegetable sauces (3 recipes), meat sauces (2 recipes), and tomato sauces (1 recipe). The recipes take up about 90% of the chapter, with background to each of these sauce types taking up only a short paragraph or two for each one. And the recipes are far from representative of standard recipes designed to instruct about different sub-types of sauces or potential approaches -- they seem just to be random recipes.

In other words, if you don't already know how to make a good pasta sauce, this book probably isn't going to teach you. It certainly doesn't give you enough information to come up with your own variations or even to produce the standard types of sauces for each type.

These problems are perhaps the worst in the chapters near the end, which deal with sauces outside the traditional French mainstream. But there are similar issues even in the chapters closer to that tradition. (For example, I find the mayonnaise chapter particularly disappointing in its limited coverage of mayonnaise-based sauces outside of classic French variants.)

Lastly, this book has a lot of information that isn't about sauces (concerning equipment, ingredients, etc.). Perhaps this doesn't need to be said, but don't take this information as gospel -- if you want to get good advice about cookware, for example, consult another book more suited to that sort of thing. While some of these digressions are relevant to sauce-making (e.g., kitchen equipment specialized for sauces), there is a lot of general information as well... and it's not always 100% accurate. Again, as with the multitude of random recipes, I feel these digressions could have been left out and replaced with more information actually on the primary subject of the book.

All of this said, if you're looking for a decent introduction to traditional French sauces, with a lot of recipes, this book is pretty good.