The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen [Paperback]

This last year, I discovered the writing of foodie Michael Rulhman, and his experiences in both the CIA and getting to work with such culinary greats as Thomas Keller and Michael Symon.

There are three essential sections to this slim volume, each one providing understanding to any cook, no matter what their experience level is. It's not exactly a book to sit down and read through as you would a regular book, except for the opening section. Instead, this is one to have nearby when you're reading through a cookbook, and you come across a term that you don't know, for example, a chiffonade or daube, or when you want some clarification on just what is poaching or why is a confit is so desired by foodies. No, it's not that massive tome, Larousse's Gastronomique, but it's quite a bit lighter and easier to go through than that chef's bible.

Ruhlman starts off slowly, after an opening essay by Anthony Bourdain. He gets right down to the very basics with a collection of eight essays on why you need to have knowledge of a variety of tools and ingredients, namely: Notes on Cooking, From Stock to Finesse. The language is geared for the average cook, who has never set toe into a professional kitchen or culinary school, but do want to improve their own skills at cooking.

The eight essays are as follows:

Stock: Ruhlman gets pretty darn rhapsodic about stocks; how to make them, how to ruin them, and while you don't really need to make your own, it's still a good idea to try. He also takes some of the mystery out of making them, such as how to actually 'skim' the stock, and get rid of that pesky raft. What I really liked about this one is his recipe for veal stock -- it's one that I will have to try soon.

Sauce: And yes, you can make them too. This is where stocks come in very handy, and how to get the most out of the techniques.

Salt: Why it's important, and despite the constant railings of those who wish to ban it (along with that other necessity in the kitchen, fat), how to learn how to use it. I agree with Ruhlman here, don't use it for a while and see how much you suddenly start craving it.

The Egg: I love eggs, both as ingredient and tool. Ruhlman shows here how the egg can leaven food and make it rise, bind things together, and work wonders. He also includes a nifty little set of instructions on how to prepare eggs in the most basic ways, from boiling to poaching to scrambling.

Heat: Dry heat, moist heat, and poaching, along with a few other refinements. Once you start learning how to manipulate heat, and learn how to do it, you can pretty much learn to cook anything.

Tools: Ruhlman maintains that you really only need five tools -- a chef's knife, a large cutting board, a large sauté pan, a wooden spoon, and a large nonreactive bowl. Ok, I'll buy that, but realistically, you need to have a few more things in there -- for me, it's serrated and paring knives, thermometers, various pots and pans to stew, braise and roast in, and suchlike. Almost every chef who's written a book on cooking has a list of these sorts of things, and one thing they all seem to agree on is that each tool should be able to cope with a variety of tasks, and ban the expensive gimmicky item to the depths of the cooking store that's selling it. Most average kitchens are already cramped, and those flashy designer ones to usually be found in Vulgaria never get cooked in anyway.

Sources and Acknowledgements: Fifteen really good books about cooking. I won't list them all here, but I was surprised and inwardly pleased by how many of them I already have. One thing I should warn the reader about -- throughout this book, Ruhlman continually refers back to Harold McGee's exhaustive text by stating See McGee in the text; I have to admit that I agree with him a bit, no one has done more research into the world of why and how cooking does work than McGee. The book is huge and moderately expensive, along with other tomes that he cites, but yes, they really are that important if you want to move from being an average everyday cook to the person that can cook very well.

Finesse: A tricky term, that Ruhlman tries hard to explain, but never really quite gets there. I can appreciate what he is trying to do here, but I was also left feeling unsettled a bit as I read. Most of the time I don't have the energy to knock out an amazing meal -- if I can get everyone fed and the house cleaned, that's usually enough for the day. But I can certainly respect him for trying.

The Elements of Cooking A to Z
This is the main guts of the book. There's a wide variety of topics here, most of them French, and a few new ideas and fads -- like foam -- that have been creeping into the American culinary world. Depending on how much you are obsessed with food, you'll probably find quite a few new ideas and tools to learn more about, which is where the third section of the book will come in handy. Ruhlman's writing style here is articulate and while he does get clever in a few spots -- especially with the slang found in restaurants -- it is writing that I wish most culinary writers would contain. It's clear, free of fancy jargon, and 'cuteness.' It's smart and very useful.

The final pages are given over to acknowledgements and a bibliography, most of which is covered in the opening essays.

So what didn't I like about this book? Well, Ruhlman has a tendency to be just a wee bit snobby in his attitude towards home cooks. Read carefully enough between the lines, and there's just a dash of patronizing to the reader; I guess it really can't be helped, Ruhlman has been able to hobnob with the very greatest of cooks in America, and it shows. Too, he assumes that some of the tools and techniques that he talks about are already familiar to the reader. But these are small nits, and easily taken care of.

Summing up, this is a handy little book to have in the kitchen. Either this one or the recently published What's a Cook to Do? are engaging reads, and perfect for the home cook or budding culinary star in your family. It's lightweight enough to be used easily, and not nearly as intimidating as the more traditional culinary sources.

Four stars overall, and certainly worth the effort to find.

I agree with many of reviewer Rebecca Huston's points. I'm posting my own review here anyhow because I think it might be useful to compare this book to others I've been reading.

Love love love the way Ruhlman writes about food and chefs overall in his other books, so I was excited to get a copy of "The Elements of Cooking." Then I found myself a little disappointed with the eight essays at the start. I looked back at my Alton Brown book "I'm Just Here for the Food" (v2) and decided the sections there on stock, salt, tools, etc. were way more useful in Alton's book. Ruhlman waxes poetic with his opinions... but Alton is vastly more instructive. (Do you want to get truly inspired -- and laugh your butt off -- about stock? Get Bourdain's ""Les Halles Cookbook!")

I did like the A-to-Z part of this for its definitions. However, they weren't very instructive, either. I can't fault Ruhlman for that, because he doesn't claim this is an instructional book. I recently got a copy of James Peterson's new book "Cooking" which doesn't cover all the techniques or terms in Ruhlman's glossary, but it gives step-by-step info and photos on a lot of them.

Bottom line, I suppose, is that there is no perfect book on food, not even McGee's "On Food and Cooking," which I also tunneled through. Which book(s) you like depend on your goal -- be a better cook at home or be more like a restaurant chef? I'm leaning toward Alton for the former and (maybe) Patterson for the latter. Buy Ruhlman's "Elements" for the short and clear opinions and definitions that you can learn in-depth elsewhere, not for overnight-success-at-the-stove details. :)

`The Elements of Cooking' by one half of the modern culinary Johnson and Boswell team, Michael Ruhlman (introduced by the other half of the team, Anthony Bourdain) is a brilliant conception, with some superb ideas communicated, but which falls short of true excellence by a fair measure!
For starters, the book claims to be patterned after a true classic, Strunk and White's little manual of writing, `The Elements of Style' (Elements). Many books have taken the same tack, especially in the field of computer programming technique. The big difference is that programming is very much like writing, and even more amenable to simple rules, while cooking is far more similar to a plastic art, where your ingredients vary from day to day, from source to source, and from season to season. The second slip down the slippery slope of concept is that the book does not consistently follow Strunk and White's pattern. Where `Elements ' is composed entirely of brief lessons on good usage and writing technique, Ruhlman starts out in the manner of `Elements', but a third of the way through converts to the style of Fowler's equally famous writing manual `Modern English Usage'. That is, the book switches from advice by technique to a glossary of culinary terms. And, it is this section which is called the `Elements'. The first fifty pages, which look most like `Elements', are labeled `Notes on Cooking from Stock to Finesse'. Now if this book had followed the `Notes' pattern or the `Usage' style throughout, I would have been far happier. As it is, both sections have a feeling of incompleteness about them.
There are at least two other superficial weaknesses of this book which are truly amazing, given the stature of the author and the publisher (Scribners). It is truly amazing to discover that the book has neither a Table of Contents nor an Index! Now if the book were dedicated exclusively the glossary format, these absences would have made some sense. You find neither in a dictionary or encyclopedia or any other reference composed of small entries in alphabetical order. But then, this book is not entirely composed of this glossary.
The `Notes of Cooking' is composed of sections on a few seminal subjects, and the material in these articles is truly remarkable. They are things every serious cook should read. The list of section titles is:
1. Stock
2. Sauce
3. Salt
4. The Egg
5. Heat
6. Tools
7. Sources and Acknowledgements (15 Good Books about Food and Cooking)
8. Finesse
The single genuine recipe in the whole book is for basic brown veal stock on page 10. Since Ruhlman's objective in this chapter is to correct our ignorance about this philosopher's stone of cooking, this is reasonable, but is a symptom of the fact that Ruhlman is not living up to his subtitle, `Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen'. After such a brilliant start with his discussion of stocks (which, by the way, every novice cook MUST read), followed by the very logical `Sauce' and `Salt' topics, Ruhlman starts to meander. With this title, I would have expected coverage of techniques and recipes for biscuits, crepes, pastry dough, bread, braising, vinaigrettes, salads, grilling, steaming, meringues, omelets. Some of these topics are addressed in passing, but good luck finding them on the fly if it is not in the glossary. As it turns out, there is a superb new book, Alice Waters' `The Art of Simple Food' which does everything Ruhlman should have done. And, if you prefer another suggestion, try Julia Child's last book, `Julia's Kitchen Wisdom', which covers everything I mentioned and more.
There is one advantage to Ruhlman's missing index and table of contents. This book, at least the first fifty pages of `Notes', really needs to be read from front to back. One can do this easily within two to three hours, and you will be richer for the effort (assuming you are really interested in cooking). The sections on stock and `finesse' alone are worth the cost of the book to avid foodies. The notion of finesse is a far, far better expression of what Emeril Lagasse calls `a food of love thing'. Mario Batali describes it as an accumulation of small measures which individually do little, but when many are combined into a whole cooking ethos, your results will be markedly better than the average cook, even though you both used the same recipes and virtually identical ingredients. The notion of finesse is far easier to translate into practice than `love'.
It is also very easy to read Ruhlman's first fifty pages because of his engaging writing style. He presents arcane facts in words which make far more sense than if you read the same thing in Harold McGee's `On Food and Cooking' (One of Ruhlman's fifteen books). In fact, Ruhlman's style is so loose, compared to some of the great culinary writing stylists such as Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher that you start to suspect he is simply phoning it all in to Scribners copy editors. But it is still good stuff. That is, until you get to the glossary. The breezy style continues, and starts feeling a bit more out of place. Then, I start to see small bits of awkwardness in the wording and subtle errors in factual material. The first is exemplified by the clumsy definition of `mandoline', which suggests that a Japanese mandolin is not a real mandolin. The second is in the definition of marrow, which states that it is a fatty connective tissue. It is not that at all. It is the tissue inside the large bones in which red blood cells are produced.
This is one of those times I really wish I could assign fractional stars. I would give this book four and three-fourths of a star. Or, I would give it five stars for foodies and professionals and three stars for non-foodies.