The Saucier's Apprentice: A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home [Hardcover]

One or two or three caveats: if you make the "mother sauce" espagnole, and then the demi-glace, following his recipe, you are going to need at least *two* enormous, restaurant-sized kettles. I had one very large one to start with and at some point in the proceedings had to go out and buy another one. He wasn't very clear about this.

Plus, he consistently understates the *time* needed to do these recipes, perhaps because he doesn't want to frighten the reader away. He says, for instance, that to make the espagnole-demi-glace, you can do it easily over a weekend in bits and pieces, stepping away from the kitchen occasionally to pass the time with "Fanny Hill" (he's also a wonderfully witty and amusing writer into the bargain). But he is seriously wrong about this particular recipe, the most important one in the book. I am a very experienced cook, and I work fairly quickly, and I undertook this recipe with my French wife, another serious cook, plus occasional help from my mother, *another* very serious cook, and it essentially took *three* days to end up with, as I recall, 18 1-cup frozen portions of demi-glace. Plus there's an *enormous* amount of shopping to do to get the various ingredients -- even in San Francisco it necessitated several trips to wholesale meat markets and latino markets on Market Street for some of the more recondite items. You're never going to find all those bones and pig rinds at your local Safeway....

Also, you need to have a *strong* person around to lift and carry a 20- or 30-gallon stock pot loaded to the very top with 10 pounds of bones, 10 pounds of meat, lotsa veggies, and gallons of water. This is never mentioned by him.

This book is *not* for the neophyte or the dilettante, although most of the white sauces are a snap to make compared to the basic brown one. If you're only interested in white sauces, a beginning cook could use this book easily....

Whatever my caveats, however, this is still a 5-star book. And, as I said, he's a wonderfully witty writer.

As for the book, it's pretty straightforward. It starts with a brief history of French sauces and then it pretty much goes right into the sauces. There are 5 mother sauces (Sauce Espagnole, Hollandaise, Béchamel, Velouté, and Tomato) and from these 5 you can make hundreds and hundreds of little derivative sauces. For example, take Sauce Espagnole (Brown Sauce). If you combine equal parts of Brown Sauce and Brown Veal Stock and let that reduce, you've got Demi-Glace (Half-Glaze). Now if you sauté some mushrooms, shallots, add some white wine, Madeira, some demi-glace and tomato, you've got Sauce Chasseur.

Here's another example. Take Velouté, add some mushroom liquid and a liaison, and mount the sauce with butter and you've got Sacue Allemande. Now take Sauce Allemande and add three simple ingredients and you've got Sauce Aux Champignons.

There are about 70 pages devoted to just brown sauces. The two most time consuming mother sauces to make is Sauce Espagnole and Velouté. Both require stock, however, Velouté is easy to make since it only takes 30 to 40 minutes to make once you have the stock. Sauce Espagnole, on the other hand, takes about 6 to 8 hours to make. Plus you need brown veal stock which takes anywhere from 8-11 hours to make.

As you can see it's pretty time consuming but if you take one weekend to make enough stock, once you're done you can freeze them in ice cube trays and take them as you need them. Remember the derivative sauces are really quick and simple, it's the mother sauces that take the most time.

If you're serious about cooking, I highly recommend this book.