Product Description

On Cooking is essentially an entire cooking course contained within an 1152 page book. This encyclopedic culinary book covers every imaginable topic from identification of foods, to demonstrating how to properly hold a knife to techniques and procedures (like cutting vegetables and grilling meats to roasting poultry and preparing sauces) and most importantly, creation of successful recipes. Many of the 750 recipes have step-by-step procedural photo sequences to assist the aspiring home chef. The recipe variety and complexity are one of the book's hallmarks. Basic recipes from collard greens and meatloaf to classic dishes like Crabcakes Benedict, as well as, new-style cooking like Duck Prosciutto with Fresh Mango being fine examples of the depth and breadth of recipe content.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #316591 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1200 pages

Amazon.com Review
On Cooking is a celebration of the culinary arts that will benefit anyone considering cooking as a profession, as well as serious amateur cooks who want to improve their skills--particularly in butchering and charcuterie. Wolfgang Puck, Mark Miller, and Alfred Portale are just 3 of the 30 chefs who share with us their combined wisdom and know-how.

This mighty encyclopedia covers a wealth of subjects, including nutrition, food safety, and standardizing a recipe. The book does assume a fair amount of culinary knowledge and expertise when it comes to proper textures, cooking times, and accurately judging "doneness." There are recipes for more than 700 dishes, including classics such as Turnedos Rossini and Crabcakes Benedict--as well as the basics for making great sauces, stocks, soups, pastry, and so forth. New-style cooking also features prominently, with a delicious recipe for Duck Prosciutto with Fresh Mango being a fine example. On Cooking: Techniques from Expert Chefs is quite an achievement.

From Library Journal
Similar in scope and approach to the Culinary Institute's The New Professional Chef (LJ 8/91), this textbook/reference was put together by Phoenix cookbook author Labensky and caterer Hause. Like The New Professional Chef, it begins with an introduction to the food service industry, then covers equipment and kitchen staples, with the bulk of the book devoted to all aspects of professional cooking and baking. This volume includes 1250 color photographs and 5500 recipes, in contrast to Chef's 700 recipes and 900 color photographs plus illustrations. Many of the recipes in Labensky and Hause's work come from a variety of professional chefs, and it shows. While one should expect that yields for stocks and other basic preparations be large in a text of this sort, home cooks attempting to use the recipes may be frustrated by serving sizes that vary from recipe to recipe, serving from one or two people to ten to 16 or more. The color photographs and step-by-step technique shots give this value as a reference, so special collections may want to consider; those that already have The New Professional Chef, however, can skip it.
Judith C. Sutton, Sutton's Place Cuisine, New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"This book is simply the best one of its kind. A masterful collection of recipes and step-by-step procedur3es, accompanied by brilliant food photography and lore, it is a must for every kitchen - home or professional." - Noel Cullen, Certified Master Chef, President, American Culinary Federation

Customer Reviews

Simply blown away by how much info is in this book!
I'm a culinary arts student at the Art Institute of California, and total foodie, and I take my cooking very seriously. This book goes into explicit detail for each and every ingredient and cooking method. I'm not kidding when I tell you that there are three paragraphs and a chart to tell you how to boil water. That may seem like overkill, but now that I've been following the various guidelines of food preparation, I notice a subtle improvement in everything I make. If you're the kind of person who walks down the spice aisle of the grocery store for fun (like me!), or if you can't get enough kitchen gadgets (like me!) then you'll enjoy this book. Caution: don't read this one on an empty stomach!

Culinary Arts.
One of the many neat features of studying at Cornell University is that, even if you're not enrolled in its famous School of Hotel Administration, you can attend one of the cooking and wine tasting classes organized especially for non-Hotel School students, and get at least a flavor of the five star culinary instruction provided by the chefs teaching at that school. (That is, you can do so if you're willing to get up an extra hour or two early on the morning of non-Hotel School student enrollment, and if you're lucky enough to beat the crowds or at least slip in as a substitute participant.) In addition to numerous recipes and pieces of valuable advice, information and memories - particularly of the last night, on which we had to put together a four-course meal, fine dining style, complete with menu, garnishments and perfectly laid table - Cornell's "cooking class" has enriched my kitchen by two items I have since found it very hard to do without: A professional grade chef's knife, and Sarah Labensky's and Alan Hause's "On Cooking," which we used as our textbook.

Much more than that, however, "On Cooking" is in fact a near-complete reference on everything related to the culinary arts, from the history of cooking to new foods developed in the 20th century, from sanitation and safety to nutritional values, from recipe writing to menu composition, from knifes and other pieces of equipment to edible kitchen staples, from the principles of cooking to various techniques and food presentation - and of course, on every conceivable kind of food, from coffee, tea, spices and condiments to dairy products, stocks, sauces, soups, red and white meats, charcuterie, fish and shellfish, eggs, vegetables, potatoes, grains, pasta, salads, fruits, sandwiches, hors d'oeuvres, canapes, breads, pies, pastries, cookies, cakes, custards, creams and frozen desserts. Along the way, numerous tables, diagrams and pictures illustrate and exemplify the given information, making it easy to digest and memorize. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography and recommendations for further reading, and a detailed glossary of essential culinary terms.

Recipes are chosen to match individual chapters, and provide both a practical application and a more profound understanding of the respective chapters' subject matter. They include everything from American and international classics (assorted muffins, scrambled eggs and eggs benedict, focaccia, club, Reuben and other sandwiches, minestrone, French onion soup, gazpacho, New England clam chowder, Cesar, Roquefort, Thousand Islands and other dressings, various mayonnaises, coleslaw, cobb salad, Asian chicken salad, salade Nicoise, potato salad, Thai noodle salad, spanakopitta, grilled portabella mushrooms, carpaccio, lemon curd, hummus, various salsas, guacamole, pesto, hollandaise, bolognese, barbecue, bordelaise, bearnaise, Madeira, mornay, tartar, bechamel and other sauces, various stocks, broths and consommes, polenta, various kebabs, pilafs and risottos, paella, falafel, quiche lorraine, pizza, cannoli alla siciliana, macaroni and cheese, fettuccine Alfredo, clams casino, gravlax, oysters Rockefeller, fillet of sole bonne femme, matzo balls, duck confit, chorizo, chicken cacciatore, coq au vin, chicken curry, pico de gallo, chicken and veal fricassees, osso buco, chili con carne, Swedish meatballs, assorted burgers, meatloaf, T-bone, pepper and other steaks, cassoulet, chateaubriand, tournedos Rossini, beef Stroganoff, entrecote bordelaise, boeuf bourguignon, Hungarian goulash, ratatouille, baked beans, spaetzle, gnocchi, hush puppies, roesti potatoes, gratin dauphinois, baked potatoes, crepes, applesauce, New York cheesecake, sabayon, frangipane, assorted pies, tarts and tortes, various meringues and sorbets, creme brulee, chocolate mousse, chocolate angel food cake, sponge cake, brownies, ladyfingers, Madeleines, toll house cookies, gingerbread cookies, buche de noel, and spiced cider) to more unusual dishes such as:

Chilled cherry soup
Perfumed shrimp consomme
Beet vinaigrette
Shallot curry oil
Walnut pesto
Nopal cactus salsa
Pink peppercorn beurre blanc
Crayfish butter
Zucchini bread
Potato cheddar cheese bread
Salmon and sea bass terrine with spinach and basil
Salmon croquettes
Grilled red snapper burger with mango ketchup
Tex-Mex turkey sausage
Sauted pork medallions with red pepper and citrus
Marinated loin of venison roasted with mustard
Roast pheasant with cognac and apples
Stuffed wontons with apricot sauce
Wild rice and cranberry stuffing
Goat cheese ravioli in herbed cream sauce
Spicy sweet potato and chestnut gratin
Grits and cheddar souffle
Potato-ginger puree
Cilantro puree
Grilled seckel pear with sherry bacon vinaigrette
Balsamic raspberries
Figs with berries and honey mousse
Kirsch mousse
Pistachio citrus cheesecake
Chocolate flourless cake
English muffin loaves
Oatmeal stout ice cream
Quince jam

At 1100+ pages a veritable brick, despite its size "On Cooking" has become as much a key part of my kitchen as my chef's knife, my tea infusers, and various other pieces of equipment. I don't harbor any intentions of becoming a professional chef (nor any aspirations to even remotely that level of culinary skills), but I love to cook, and this is one of the cookbooks I'd be least likely to part with - ever.

"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." - Robert Burton, British author (1621).

Also recommended:
Around the World Cookbook
Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day
Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant: Ethnic and Regional Recipes from the Cooks at the Legendary Restaurant (Cookery)
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian: More Than 650 Meatless Recipes from Around the World
Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006

Great resource
I view this book as one of the essential resource books any serious cook should have. If I had named it, I would have called the book "On Food" because it is not just about cooking food, it actually gives you encyclopedia type entries to describe an enormous number of items in each chapter (e.g. fish, vegetables, meats). It will tell you where your food came from, in which seasons it is freshest, how best to prepare it and will follow each of these up with a number of recipes. Do not look to this book to be a cookbook, though. Is is more important to view the book as a resource to help you figure out the best types of preparations for that item you found at the market but have never used before. It is a great tool to just sit down and learn about cuts of beef and why some parts of the animal are great for one type of preparation versus another. That said, there are recipes and they are good, but to focus on them would be to overlook all of the education you can get from this book. This is used as a textbook in cooking schools, and the set-up is like a textbook, but a lot more interesting than the ones you had in college or high school because you can eat after you learn.