TDG: Brain Surgery Self-Taught

[Fat Guy]

Suzanne Fass reviews it here.

+++

Be sure to check The Daily Gullet home page daily for new articles (most every weekday), hot topics, site announcements, and more.

[nerissa]

Well done!

[Jinmyo]

Good job, Suzanne.

Poor Jenny.

Still, it's the kind of book I'd recommend to her. That's just the kind of person I am.

[Fat Guy]

I agree with all the objections Suzanne raises from the hypothetical perspective of "Jenny," but I have a somewhat different overall perspective. My take on this is that it's a pretty good reference book. It's sometimes the only book I have that gives a decent explanation of a process or ingredient. In that sense I use it like an American version of Larousse, although it's of course a different concept. Certainly, nobody could ever learn to cook from the book, but if you're an advanced amateur it might be worth having around. I used the previous edition for a long time, and the new one is a nice update.

[Suzanne F]

After I sent off the piece, I finally read Burton Kaplan's review from Wine Lovers' Page, which I downloaded about a month ago. Boy, am I glad I waited! He says the book "clearly affords amateur cookaholics the best dissertation in English on culinary technique since Escoffier." And: "Tack-sharp color photography..." -- yes, if you only want to see the finished dishes in the front. Well, the photos of techniques ARE excellent, albeit sometimes on the small side.

Fat Guy is right about the prospects of this one being a good reference. But for that it could be half the size, leaving out the extra recipes. It is clearly a class text, with those recipes the equivalent of exercises in a math or grammar book. And that was what I wanted to get across: that one can't simply pick it up and learn to cook. Hell, I can hardly even pick it up, period (6 pounds 12 ounces!).

But even as a reference, it strikes me as so ... middle-American. More P.F. Chang's than Congee Village. I know I'm spoiled by all my books on specific ethnic ingredients or ingredients in general, which are more exciting and, taken all together, far more comprehensive and useful for my style of cooking. But I have to remind myself that P.F. Chang's has probably introduced more people to something almost akin to Chinese food than all the restaurants in Chinatown. Which they should be applauded for doing. (Don't hate me, Jinmyo )

[maggiethecat]

Am I the only one who will have now Dawn Upshaw singing "Poor Jenny, smart as a penny" rolling aroung the ole cranial cavity all day?

Terrific review, Suzanne. And it brings us back to the question brought up in cookbook threads here. " I can't cook, can you recommend a good book?"

Maybe the answer is always no. If you don't know anything about cooking, maybe a book can't teach you.

And this one certainly won't.

[Suzanne F]

Gee, thanks a lot, Maggie. No, actually now that you mention it, I've got Lotte Lenya in German and Judy Collins in English, singing "Pirate Jenny" from Threepenny Opera. Or maybe Nina Simone (now THAT is the scariest version I ever heard!)

Anyway, I do believe that one could learn from the right book -- and the one I mentioned at the end (The New Cook, by Mary Berry and Marlena Spieler) might be it. Or maybe James Peterson's Essentials of Cooking . Alas, I can't do a "review" of either, since the former came out in 1997, and the latter in 1999. But I might try a "compare-and-contrast" at some point. There's at least one member here to whom I want to give a copy of The New Cook, for him to play with and report back on. Of course, right there I'm stacking the deck, since eGullet members know food, even if they don't know how to cook it. But, hey, life is unfair.

[gknl]

867-5309 is in my head now.

Nice work! I got a good sense of the book's shortcomings, especially for someone trying to learn at home with no outside guidance, but also it's probable utility in the right circumstances. I have his book The Chef's Art which I flip through every once in a while, mostly to look something up, but thought was well-written. This book seems to be a more detailed version of that, is that close?

Shouldn't you have added "any resemblance is purely coincidental" to your disclaimer though?

I do think a look at books aimed at beginners would be interesting, especially since I went through that with my sister trying to get her to learn on her own instead of my trying to talk her through it on the phone. I'll have to ask her which ones she tried and which ones I gave her.

[mrsadm]

OK, so what is a good book for a "beginner", or maybe someone who can cook a lot of basic stuff - knows how to saute, braise, roast and basic techniques -- how does a person like that (e.g. me) go beyond the basics?

Last year I heard an interview on NPR with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. After they married, her husband bought a copy of "Escoffier" and taught himself to cook, and was considered very good at it.

So do I get a copy of Escoffier? Is that "better" than the Culinary Institute Book?

I have been using Julia Child's "The Way to Cook" and find it a little boring, frankly. I also have a lot of cookbooks with recipes, but I don't seem to be able really improve my ability by cooking from them.

I bought Jacques Pepin's video set on Cooking Techniques where he shows how to chop up a rabbit. Like I'm going to even find a whole rabbit in my grocery store!

This is all very frustrating. Any ideas? ... thank you.

[Jinmyo]

mrsadm, I was going to suggest Pepin's book The Complete Techniques.

[Brad S]

mrsadm, I was going to suggest Pepin's book The Complete Techniques.

Great book.

Although you should be willing to spend $150 or more for it now as it has become somewhat of a collectors item.

Suzanne, just wanted to thank you for your excellent review.

Well written and insightful.

Edit,Jinmyo....I am thinking you meant "La Technique"?

[Jinmyo]

Brad, Methode and Technique have been combined in a new edition: The Complete Techniques. Great great book by a culinary saint. Much blessings flow from it.

[Suzanne F]

Mrsadm -- for an absolute beginner, I think one cannot do better than Mary Berry and Marlena Spieler's The New Cook, available on Amazon, among other sources. I just adore that book. It's got very clear instructions, and pictures of almost every ingredient, piece of equipment, and technique a beginner might need.

I have not looked at Ms. Berry's other books, of which there are many, but if they are anything like The New Cook in thoroughness and clarity, they'd be great for someone who already knows the basics.

I also like Peterson's Essentials of Cooking, which I had not seen before I wrote about Glorious French Food. If I had, I probably would have said, "Get Essentials and then everything in Glorious will be a snap."

And yes, Brad, Pepin's Complete Techniques is easily available.

[Nick]

From the article - " I have no doubt that in conjunction with good teaching, the material in The Professional Chef can turn someone into a competent cook for a mid-level restaurant or country club. But for a home cook, working alone, no."

Suzanne, I've got to disagree with you on this one. I'm a home cook and have had the Pro Chef for going on a year now. It has become my favorite cookbook as I stumble my way (hopefully) into better cooking. While much could have been left out - particularly the many pages on identification of cuts of meat, fish, spices, etc. - when you get to page 234, one starts getting down to the nitty-gritty.

For those of us that haven't had the opportunity to cook professionally, much can be learned from that page on. For instance, on page 239 a photo is shown of roux at its proper consistancy (in addition to the instructions for making it.) I'd say that photo would be helpful to people that had never made a roux before. Ah yes, you can see the bottom of the pan as you stir it and it gets to its proper consistancy. Then on page 328 we have a photo of broth garnished with julienned vegetables which beneath notes, "Broth garnished with julienne of the right length for the spoon." That's something to think about.

And I challenge anyone to make a better corn chowder than what you'll get by following the recipe on page 341.

All in all, I have been really happy that I bought the Pro Chef. And I think that while it is a bit disorganized, particularly the index, it's a worthwhile addition to the kitchen of any serious home cook.

[Stone]

Having recently purchased "The Professional Chef" and Peterson's "Sauces", I think there must be a consipiracy to hide the food. Where are the pictures? I thought TPC did a better job, although Sauces has a nice photo section with some techniques and recipes provided in a series of pictures. But even for the section on kitchen implements, photos would have been very helpful.

[lala]

Why on earth reveiw a professional level book as if it were meant for home use? You have to get through the entire reveiw to get to her conclusion that the Pro Chef isn't meant for home use. It's just a specious reveiw.

[Suzanne F]

Why did I review it as I did? Because, if you read this and many other food discussion boards, a great many people who simply love to cook look to purchase textbooks on the misguided assumption that they CAN use these books to become better home cooks. That's what I said in my first two (admittedly very long) paragraphs. Sorry if you were disappointed that I didn't state flat out not to try this at home until the end. I was trying to build up tension. And anyway, I thought I was telegraphing that conclusion pretty much from the get-go. Sorry you didn't like the review, or the way it was written, or whatever.

In any case, Welcome . You must have done quite some digging to find that review; I hope you'll dig around here a lot more for topics that interest you -- whether you agree with the stated opinions or not. In fact, this is a site that thrives on a lively interplay of opinions.

(Did I put that nicely enough, FG? )

[alanamoana]

i think pepin's "techniques" is also available in video format (from pbs type stations where they originally aired his program). i love to read about cooking, but watching jacques pepin "live" is really worth the money. he's so comfortable in the kitchen and makes things easily understood.

[project]

That's an EXCELLENT book review with a LOT of really good,

perceptive, and useful points.

I'm torqued at cookbooks in general, and Ms. Fass makes very

clear many of my objections.

Alas, as clear as her objections are, it's tough to find a

book for which such objections do not apply.

Maybe Ms. Fass would like to write a book?

It may have occured to others by now that the world of

cookbook publishing is on the verge of a massive revolution

which should essentially result in the rewriting of all of

cooking as new books. The key reasons are, in cooking, as

well as in many other fields, (1) a picture is worth 1000

words; (2) a good motion picture of the work as done by an

expert is worth perhaps 100 still pictures; and (3) computers,

digital motion video cameras, HTML, Web browsers, and DVD are

providing grand new means of 'publishing' cookbooks with lots

of good motion pictures.

I'm optimistic; I believe it can be done. But that's only on

MWF. On TTS, I'm pessimistic.

My conclusions about cookbooks are that (1) they necessarily

are 'published' by 'publishers'; (2) 'publishers' publish

'books' by 'writers'; (3) mostly in the publishing world, the

'writers' write in the sense of literature, belle-lettre,

drama, fiction, with the goal of communication, interpretation

of human experience, emotion with passion, pathos, and

poignancy; (4) actually providing information, meeting the

criteria so well described by Ms. Fass, for teaching skills

and crafts, effectively, so that people, e.g., Ms. Fass's

Jenny, can actually learn actually to do things, well, are

strange, foreign, not understood, and unwelcome.

So, from these 'publishers', we get communication of an

experience in the south of France, in the hills of the

Piedmont, in the Black Forest, in small shops full of exotic

spices in Hong Kong, of weathered faces of fisherman, farmers,

and vintners, of European upper classes in three star

restaurants in Paris, etc. So, we get enticed, stimulated,

aroused, etc. but do not get fulfilled -- we don't actually

learn dip squat about how to do the corresponding cooking in

our kitchens. We get frustrated, a little like the evening

with the date eager to jump into the backseat who then

insisted on "NO!".

These publishers are just doing what they know.

The producers of the TV cooking shows are from much the same

culture and seek mostly just to entertain, not to instruct.

It's all part of some general attitude of serving a mass

market where the assumption is that the customer is an idiot,

the customer is wildly overly emotional, the customer would be

hopeless at actually learning anything, the book is sold by

its cover, and the cover should make an emotional appeal,

promise fantasy and dreams, and, did I mention, assume that

the customer is an idiot?

Then, after a diligent customer, not envisioned or intended by

the publisher, actually tries, on Saturday morning drives a

few hundred miles shopping and spends $50 on ingredients, on

Saturday afternoon reviews the instructions again, peels,

slices, dices, browns, simmers, stirs, mixes, folds, flushes

the results, calls out for pizza, and on Sunday cleans up the

mess, and repeats this effort a few times, realizes that the

the $50 price of the book was the least of the waste, puts the

book on a shelf, and returns to something they already know

how to do.

Further, even if the goal really is instruction, there are

various problems.

Wiley is not the usual belle-lettre publisher. Their

collection of books has a good fraction of the very best of

mathematics, physical science, engineering, and technology on

this planet. Many of their books are written with great care,

sometimes great pains, by world experts in their fields,

edited with great skill and care, typeset with astounding

accuracy, and contain material of the highest quality and

precision without a hint of 'belle-lettre' fantasy or

emotionalism.

Yet, still there are problems in using such books for

learning.

One of the problems is academic pretense, and the time I

looked at 'The New Professional Chef' I saw the CIA with an

academic disease caused, at its core, by 'physics envy' and

contempt for the merely 'professional'.

My experience with books from Wiley and its main competitors

and with serious writing is in some advanced topics in applied

mathematics. At this point, I'm comfortable, and relatively

productive, working just from the paper both for what is on

the pages and also for moving on to original research.

But, Ms. Fass's mention of teaching is correct: Getting to

this situation was not easy, took years of hard work by me,

and took a lot of hand holding by a lot of teachers along the

way. Also, some of the lessons I regard as the most important

I formulated for myself and never saw on a page or heard from

a teacher.

Some of the lessons that should carry over to cooking should

include:

(1) Sources. Don't use just one source. For anything beyond

boiling water, get at least three of the best sources you can

find and study them all. Then take most seriously the

information that is in common to all three. Also from the

variations in the three, get an idea of the range of

variability, lack of precision, that is inherent in the

topic.

(2) Translation. Realize that a lot can be lost in

'translation'. That is, assuming that the author actually is

good at the topic (not always a good assumption), understand

that what is learned had to pass from their practice, through

their writing, your reading, to your practice. So, try to

guess what inaccuracies might have been caused by these

several steps. Especially in cooking, writers can claim that

what they do needs no measuring cups or spoons, and in their

hands in their kitchen they might be correct. However, it

does not follow that they do no measuring. Further, to

communicate equivalent or even useful knowledge to a reader

years later many miles away, a writer must be much more

explicit in their writing than they are in their cooking, and

here measuring cups and spoons can be crucial.

(3) Sense. Generally there is some 'sense' to what is going

on. The work isn't just pushing items around; instead, for

nearly anything any good, there is "an idea behind it". The

idea is typically a shorter way to better understanding and

may be crucial. Even if the author does not make the idea

clear, assume that there is a crucial idea and look for it.

(4) Quality. It's going to be your time, money, and effort

for a weekend, and for this you need all the quality in your

information sources you can get. Realize that a lot of people

for a lot of reasons, especially just getting their hands on

your money, are just putting 'stuff' on paper with little more

utility than to help chop down trees; beware of such sources.

Get by a wide margin the very best sources you can.

(5) Tolerance. It's not a perfect world out there. At times

you can learn some good things from sources that have some

flaws in some respects. So, suspect flaws and learn to work

around them.

(6) People. No matter how good one is working just from

paper, contact with other people, if only via eGullet, ranges

from useful to important to crucial. Billions of people are

cooking; many millions are eager to learn to cook; thousands

are on eGullet saying what they think about cooking. Don't

just repeat independently the learning others do; instead,

learn from, even if only in some general ways, what appears to

be working for them. Use that knowledge, even if just quite

general, to help guide own efforts in learning.

Always carry a fresh cream pie to throw in case you find any

entertainment TV producers or 'belle-lettre' publishers that

are causing people to flush the results of a lot of time,

money, and effort. And fresh is not essential.

Finally, begin to suspect that digital photography, computers,

and the Internet can revolutionize this sorry situation and

start to see if you can be part of this revolution and make

money from it as well as improving the quality of cooking and

reducing wasted time, money, and effort.

[Jonathan Day]

According to a couple of sources I've seen -- most prominently the Noel Riley Fitch biography -- Julia Child was inclined toward Korzybski's theory of General Semantics (see this site for more details, but be warned that Korzybski's work is a hard slog, may have little overall merit, and in itself has nothing to do with cookery or food), in part because her husband Paul was a devotee of the school.

One result of their devotion to General Semantics was a passion on the part of both Julia and Paul Child to subject everything she wrote about or taught on television to extensive "operational verification"; hence the thorough testing with a wide variety of products (all-purpose flour, cake flour, pastry flour, etc.), and the detailed line drawings and photographs that characterise her work. The result must have been incredibly costly: for example, Child shipped hundreds of pounds of American supermarket flour to France in order to make Calvel's method for French bread accessible to home cooks. She filmed most of her television programmes for free -- again, everything on these was subject to detailed testing and "operational verification". A Julia Child recipe will almost never say, simply, "1 cup of flour": either in the recipe or in the book itself, you are told whether that cup is measured by the sifting-into-the-cup method or the scoop-into-the-bin-and-level-with-the-back-of-a-knife technique. Of course a switch to the better system of weighing flour and other dry ingredients would solve the problem, but it does illustrate Child's obsession with verification and communication.

I don't have insight into the economics of modern cookbook publishing but would guess that, unless you can find an author who wants to give away enormous amounts of time and labour for little financial return, that sort of grinding detail and overall reliability will be hard to find.

Edited October 27, 2003 by Jonathan Day (log)

[Suzanne F]

I don't have insight into the economics of modern cookbook publishing but would guess that, unless you can find an author who wants to give away enormous amounts of time and labour for little financial return, that sort of grinding detail and overall reliability will be hard to find.

Jonathan: thank you for the information and link. It all makes perfect sense to me. And I think you are quite correct in your assumption (quoted above). There are some -- Elizabeth Schneider comes to mind -- who are willing to, and the resulting books are so far above everything else.

Dear project: Oh, my. Thank you. And you may call me Suzanne.

Actually, what I do now is copyedit and proofread (and soon, I hope, index) cookbooks. Someone else does the heavy lifting -- or not, as I fear I find too often -- and I then come in and make it usable. At least that's what I try to do: bring it as close as possible to the kind of book I would want to see, while still keeping the author's style and voice.

Edited October 28, 2003 by Suzanne F (log)

[alan50]

As an intermediate an amateur cook, I love this book, but I use it strictly as a reference work. The techniques and recipes enhance my cooking.

[McDuff]

Am I the only one who will have now Dawn Upshaw singing "Poor Jenny, smart as a penny" rolling aroung the ole cranial cavity all day?

Actually, wasn't she bright as a penny, and her equal will be hard to find? I don't even remember what that's from, but I sure remember hearing it a lot in that apartment there, in the 70's , with all those Sondheim addicts. I do remember that's not him, though.

[Suzanne F]

Kurt Weill, from Lady in the Dark. Dawn Upshaw sings it on a CD of songs by Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim, called "I Wish It So." Some time after that one came out, she did all Rodgers-and-Hart, and eventually an all-Vladimir-Dukelsky CD. Vernon Duke, that is: "Autumn in New York," "April in Paris," "I Like the Likes of You" among others.

alan50, I'm honored that you made your first post here. I do actually find it to be a very good reference book, myself.

[Katherine]

Little bells rang in my mind as I read through this thread. I went up to my attic, to the stacks, and pulled out The Professional Chef: A Definitive Text Book Detailing the Artistry of the Chef, third revised edition, most recent copyright 1971.

The illustrations look like something out of the Gallery of Regrettable Food. I suppose I might be able to use it for some obscure classic recipes, but only after I air it out. Whew!

"International Cuisine

This section, developed from material presented to advanced students at the Culinary Institute of America, is a response to the growing interest in foreign food. These unique menus adapt well for special occasion promotions. Menus for 11 International dinners feature dishes from some 20 countries and the recipes needed to prepare them..."

Menu from "the orient"

Won ton soup

Japanese clam soup (does not use dashi)

Chinese twice-cooked pork

Fried rice basic, and egg garnish

Won ton

Chinese egg rolls

Fried boneless chicken wings in sauce

Clam sauce (for fried boneless chicken wings)

Basic "white" sauce and basic "dark" sauce

Batter for butterfly shrimp

Chinese mustard

Duk sauce

Beef with pea pods (snow peas)

Barbecued sparerib s

Sa-nwin-ma-kin (semolina or farina pudding)

Ginger-orange sauce

That pretty much covers the "orient", I guess. Wouldn't be an "oriental" meal without two kinds of wonton, would it?