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33 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 5 star sauces Jan 31, 2009
By Alleyrat
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
21 of 21 found the following review helpful:
Theory begets Praxis Nov 16, 2009
By Kip Stanton
"Home Cook"
'Sauces' is a well written book and a fascinating read; the organization takes a bit of getting used to. It covers the principles of Escoffier, makes that practical, and does some marvelous delving into contemporary sauces of all sorts.
Being a home chef I'm still absorbing and trying a lot of advice Peterson gives here. I use it to supplement other things I may be working on, because in some way shape or form, it almost always comes down to having a great sauce to go with what you're having for dinner, be it simple or complex. And this definitely helps in that department.
Need a luscious brown sauce for an impressive meal? How about a mayo made with a nice lobster infused oil for a special sandwich or salad? Why not improve the flavor of your tomato sauces? What about thickening your sauces with purees? Unless it's an integral sauce of course, but even then... this is all evolving even as it adheres to tried and true methods, isn't it?
The book appears to be aimed towards the professional reader who may be wondering, aside from the myriad vagaries of saucemaking, how on earth to incorporate these sauces into a service schedule. Seriously, how do you keep your Sauce Americaine alive for hours with all that fresh lobster coral in it? One no longer has to wonder.
It's not a book for everyone, especially if you just want a primer. It does some laying out of steps on the how's, but the concentration is on the why's. If you're looking for an informative and experiential discussion on the art of Saucing, with recipes to boot, then here it is.
It's a great for anyone interested in making better sauces.
17 of 17 found the following review helpful:
A serious book for serious sauces... Feb 11, 2010
By T. Villemure
Like many people in the last generation or so, I did not grow up with sauces. My mother told of the sauces that her mother made back after the depression, but dismissed these as being unhealthy and only useful as a way to stretch small portions of meat for a big family.
However, a good sauce really can tie a meal together. It is a way of taking something good, and turning it into the sublime. It can even rescue something not-so-good and make it quite delicious. How many times have you seen children only willing to eat certain foods that are smothered in gravy or ketchup?
And so we come to Peterson's "Sauces". This is not a book of recipes (although it contains many), but instead a history and a textbook of saucemaking. I didn't think that I was especially interested in sauces of the middle ages, but as I read that chapter I think that it gave me a better understanding of the foundations of sauces. If you are really interested in sauces, this book might be the only sauce book that you'll ever need. It will give you an understanding to become a sauce artist, and not just a sauce technician.
I have only made a small dent in reading this tome, but already it has improved my cooking. I was recently able to put together a delicious mustard veloute that would have been impossible for me before reading this. If you are serious about sauces, especially if you are serious about cooking, then I highly recommend this book. If you are just looking for a couple of quick and easy sauce recipes to enhance your cooking, then I suggest you buy something a little 'lighter'.
13 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 Not bad, but not as complete as it could be Jul 07, 2011
By Athanasius
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.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Not for home kitchens Nov 24, 2011
By ThirstyBrooks
My title was going to be "You're not in Kansas anymore", but the best cooks in Wichita and Kansas City have already read this book, or soon will.
Most of us will recognize we're over our heads when the chicken stock recipe calls for 12 pounds chicken carcasses, a boiling hen, 9 quarts of water, and the appropriate vegetables and spices. Even the best cooks don't keep pots big enough for this in their home kitchens.
For an amateur like me, Peterson's book provides a wide open learning experience. It starts with a short history of sauce making, ingredients, and equipment that's enough so we can follow the recipes that start in Chapter 4. That chapter covers stocks and the next chapter covers liaisons. (If you're a neophyte like me, you'll figure out this category includes binders and thickeners but serves other purposes.)
The remaining 3/4 of the book covers sauce making in detail. Outstanding charts show the relationships among the sauce recipes. They helped me to avoid confusion and to understand the basic principles. Individual chapters narrowed to topics like White Sauces for Meats discuss the relationships between the sauces in detail, explain prep techniques, and give some hints about how the sauces relate to a more complete meal.
This book clearly targets the needs of competitive chefs and food critics who seek excellence. This group cannot be satisfied with any single book, but they'll find this one a good index of the traditional sauces.
The rest of us will find huge opportunities for ideas that seem new to us. While Sauces doesn't decode all of the secret language revealed in Escoffier's Guide Culinaire, Peterson's material is more clearly organized and therefore easier to remember.
Peterson's Sauces belongs on the bookshelf of an adventurous cook.
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