Product Description

Winner of the 1991 James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award.

"James Peterson has done for sauces that which Escoffier did for the cuisine of La Belle Epoque...Sauces is a manual for the professional cook and, as such, it will rapidly become a classic and indispensable reference."—Richard Olney, from the Foreword.

"...another cookbook that can stand among the best reference works."—Gourmet Magazine.

"This is a book I wish I had written myself...Every few decades a book is written that says all there is say on a subject, or has all the information and passion that sets the standard for professional and amateurs alike. Sauces is one of the best culinary books of this century in English."—Jeremiah Tower, Stars Restaurant.

The ultimate reference for sauce making is now better than ever. This updated and expanded edition includes more than 500 recipes, including traditional and contemporary versions of almost every sauce imaginable. You'll find classic white and brown sauces, both starch-thickened and flourless; popular meat and fish sauces made with drippings and juices; sauces based on egg yolks, including bearnaise, hollandaise, mayonnaise, and their variations; sauces made with butter, including the beurre blanc-based sauces that revolutionized modern cookingl vegetable purees, dessert sauces, and many more.

The new edition features all-new chapters on Asian sauces and pasta sauces, plus nearly 50 new recipes, many that cater to lighter, contemporary fare. And a new 32-page color insert clearly and brilliantly illustrate the fundamentals of good sauce making. More than just a compendium of recipes, Sauces explains how and why the ingredients of a sauce are combined.

James Peterson is a chef and cooking instructor. He is also the author of Fish and Shellfish and Splendid Soup, which was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6384 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 752 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780470194966
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review

The winner of the James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award when it was first published nearly two decades ago, Sauces is, in the words of Mark Bittman, "the single contemporary reference on the subject that is both comprehensive and comprehensible." Through two successful editions, it has established itself as a modern cookbook classic—and an essential reference for every serious cook.

James Peterson trained as a chef in France, and the book offers a thorough grounding in the art of classical French sauce making, from velouté, béchamel, and demi-glace to hollandaise, mayonnaise, and crème anglaise. But Peterson also presents a wide variety of lighter contemporary sauces—including pan sauces, purées, and vinaigrettes—as well as sauces from around the world, including salsas, pasta sauces, and Asian-style dipping and curry sauces. Best of all, he includes recipes not just for sauces, but for finished dishes. These recipes give Sauces a broader scope, showing how good cooking and sauce making are intimately related—and demonstrating how a correctly prepared sauce can transform a well-cooked dish into something truly sublime.

Now, with this new edition, Peterson has thoroughly revised and expanded Sauces to make it even more indispensable. You'll find more than sixty all-new recipes for dishes that showcase the leading role of sauces in cooking, such as Chicken Tagine with Harissa Sauce, Osso Buco with Julienned Vegetables, Lobster à la Nage, and Gold-Plated Chicken with Ginger, Saffron, and Almonds. There are intriguing historical recipes from medieval and seventeenth-century Europe as well as broth-based classics such as Pot au Feu and Bollito Misto. And, by popular request, Peterson at last includes a recipe for traditional American Roast Turkey with Giblet Gravy.

This new edition has been completely redesigned to make it easier to use and includes more than thirty beautiful new color photographs of finished dishes with sauces. If you're a fan of the book's previous editions, you should note that Peterson has not cut any recipes for this edition, and that he has reinstated the popular sauce charts that appeared in the first edition.

Lively, erudite, and authoritative, Sauces remains the definitive modern work on the subject. And with this edition's additional recipes—there are now a total of 440—it is now even more valuable as a general cookbook. You'll find all the techniques and know-how you need to master the art of sauce making, and you'll also discover how sauces can take your cooking to a whole new level.

Exclusive Recipe Excerpts from Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making

Béarnaise and Hollandaise

Coq Au Vin

Pear-Butterscotch Sauce

Review
"...bound to become a culinary icon...Any serious cook will want to own this book." (MostlyFood.co.uk, November 20th 2008)

From the Publisher
Sauces, winner of the1991 James Beard Cookbook-of-the-Year award and the ultimate reference for sauce making, is now available in a new, update and expanded edition. With more than 325 recipes in all, this book includes all-new chapters on Asian sauces and pasta sauces, plus new recipes that cater to lighter, contemporary tastes.

Customer Reviews

A cookbook that actually teaches how to cook.
I've been dabbeling in sauces for a number of years in my home kitchen. In my considerable collection of cookbooks none attempt to teach a culinary subject with the thoroughness of this effort. The book assumes a general knowledge of cooking, such as what temperature to roast your chicken at, and focuses on the theory behind what your sauce should do. While the book contains many recipes, they are presented as illustrations of various types of classic sauces. The author encourages the reader to experiment and fine tune their sauce efforts by illustrating the classic techniques and recipes.

In all my years cooking and collecting cookbooks this is the first cookbook that I have read cover to cover. While you can simply peruse the recipes and use the book as a reference it really shines when read in its entirety. If one is really interested in French sauces and the theory and technique behind them, this book is all that will ever be needed on the subject. And if you're wondering what kind of sauce to make with those lamb chops tonight...

Breathtakingly thorough
"Sauces" is a book for professionals and serious home chefs and is the first book I've seen that compares and contrasts both classical and modern sauce-making methods. The author emphasizes the importance of quality stocks in sauce-making and points out that a stock appropriate for older, roux-based techniques is often inappropriate for more modern, reduction techniques. This explains why the stocks formulated in, say, the French Culinary Institute's "Salute to Healthy Cooking" are so much more concentrated than those in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and other classic French cooking texts. Peterson also includes methods for pan-prepared (integral) sauces that offer the professional and home cook alike a rapid way to prepare an impressive array of fine foods.

Easily the most important recipe reference for your kitchen
`Sauces, 2nd Edition ' by leading food teacher and writer James Peterson is high on my list of important, valuable single subject cookbooks which should be in the kitchen library of any serious amateur chef or professional chef in training.

The very first impression is the very large number of named sauces listed in the table of contents. And, it should be no surprise at all that almost every one of these sauces has a French name, even if the sauce is based on a non-French ingredient such as Sauce Hongroise based on paprika and Sauce Porto based on Port (originating in Portugal). Of the chapters covering eighteen different kinds of sauce, only one, the chapter on `Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes' has even the slimmest majority of recipes with a non-French cant, with its large selection of Spanish and New World salsas, south Asian chutneys, Greek mint lamb sauce, and American cranberry sauce.

The book opens with a short history of sauces, which becomes more interesting the more you know about Medieval and Renaissance cooking. The book even gives something missing from books on medieval cooking, the outline of an actual recipe for the ubiquitous verjuice, which was the Medieval and Renaissance source for sour tastes, which could be prepared from either grapes or apples. Just for fun, Peterson gives a few samples of Medieval and Renaissance recipes. The most interesting observation I found for culinary history was the statement that in the Middle Ages, sauces were thickened by pureeing meat, which is not at all surprising, as Medieval nobility looked down on all vegetable products (such as flour?) and preferred animal ingredients and spices in their dishes. The high point of the last three centuries for sauce making was the advent of more broadly based cookbooks for regional and bourgeois cooking and the systemization of classic sauce making by Antonin Careme, the `father of modern French cooking' (See Ian Kelly's biography of Careme, `Cooking for Kings').

After the historical chapter and two better than average chapters on equipment and ingredients come the fifteen (15) chapters of recipes on:

Stocks, glaces, and essences
Liaisons: An Overview
White Sauces for Meat and Vegetables
Brown Sauces
Stock-Based and NonIntegral Fish Sauces
Integral Meat Sauces
Integral Fish and Shellfish Sauces
Crustacean Sauces
Jellies and Chauds-Froids
Hot Emulsified Egg Yolk Sauces
Mayonnaise Based Sauces
Butter Sauces
Salad Sauces, Vinaigrettes, Salsas, and Relishes
Purees and Puree Thickened Sauces
Dessert Sauces

The quality and authority of this book, especially with the added weight of a second enlarged and corrected edition is such that it is much more useful to state why you need this book rather than try to criticize it or find improvements.

First, this book is the very best reference I can think of when you need a sauce and don't remember how to make it or want to improve on the last time you made it. This use is valuable even if you never make any sauces other than vinaigrettes, marinara sauce, gravies, and bechamel sauces for Mac and cheese or creamed chipped beef. This book is my standard reference for all such purposes and it has NEVER let me down! The existence of this book always makes me wonder why restaurant chefs always include a chapter of pantry recipes for stocks and sauces. Except for the really finicky writers such as Judy Rodgers (Zuni Café) and Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Bouchon), Peterson's recipes will be about as good as you will find in any restaurant chef's book. So, you may prefer coming to this book even when an author gives us his version, as this will mean that all your stocks and sauces will be made from a common point of view and a common palate. This book is better than any other source in that it simply has everything you can possibly need.

Second, this book gives excellent recipes for sauce-based dishes, especially for seafood such as lobster, shrimp, salmon, clams, and scallops. For many fish dishes, the sauce is the dish, as cooking the fish is usually no more than the ten minutes it takes to poach, broil, bake, sautee, or fry the little critter(s).

Third, the book is an excellent source when you need alternatives. You need a fancy sauce for lobster, but you don't have time to create a stock from lobster shells and go through all the other steps needed for a good shellfish sauce. If you really need to impress, consider a homemade remoulade or aioli (variations on mayonnaise), which can be done in a few minutes in a food processor with eggs, oil, and a little mustard, plus flavorings.

Fourth, this book is simply the very best source I can think of to enlarge your repertoire of basic dishes and elements of dishes which can be swapped in to change a simple steamed vegetable into an elegant side dish. I am constantly pleased with the power of serendipity, that chance encounter with a great, easy recipe which enables you to cook up a yummy dish without having to consult a cookbook, let alone remember in which book the recipe was. My very first use of this book produced such an encounter when I was looking up the recipe for beurre blanc and discovered beurre citron (lemon butter sauce). This encounter also revealed that there is a considerable mystique connected with beurre blanc, as it is considered difficult to make. As I make it regularly as a dressing for fish, I can assure you that it is relatively easy and worth the small difficulty involved. It is also interesting to learn from this book that beurre blanc was also one of the sharpest weapons of Nouvelle Cuisine in banishing flour based sauces from restaurant sauces. So, with one fell swoop, you can be trendy, healthy, and haute cuisine with a single recipe. Wow!

If you wish to be a serious cook, you need this book!