Buy How I Learned To Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs here, one of many top quality Professional Chef Books
books at Chef2Chef. We greatly appreciate your patronage at Chef2Chef and look forward to offering you great products and prices in the future.
Current Page: Cookbook Store : Professional Chef Books : Item 37 of 125
|
|
![]()
|
|
How I Learned To Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs
by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan
Available from Amazon
$10.17
|
Features
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition October 2, 2007
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1596913851
ISBN-13: 978-1596913851
Product Dimensions:
8.1 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Forty chefs representing notable restaurants all over the world offer a bit of humorous history on how they cut their teeth in the kitchen. Many relate their apprentice moments quaking in the shadow of the Great Chef, such as 14-year-old Daniel Boulud's meeting the famous Paul Bocuse for the first time in his restaurant in Lyon and getting smashed on a glass of blanc cassis, or David Bayless's surreal collaboration with Julia Child on camera after admiring her since he was a kid watching her '60s TV show. Most savory are testimony from the trenches in the heat of the dinner rush, as in Jonathan Eismann's hilarious account of toiling in a fashionable New York City West Village restaurant during the high '80s when his drug-addled staff began dropping like dominos around him at the peak hours of service, and Gabrielle Hamilton's attempts in her tiny fledging restaurant, Prune, not to kill her sous chef with exploding wet fava beans frying in deep fat. Despite voices somewhat skewed in favor of male chefs, the stories are entertaining and well chosen by literary agent Witherspoon (Don't Try This at Home) and New York Times contributor Meehan. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Product Review
“Harrowing, hilarious and…inspiring.”—Wall Street Journal
“How I Learned to Cook reassures us that the path to culinary fame is sometimes paved with kitchen fires, exploding fava beans, and unecstatic cherries jubilee.”—Vogue
“A collection of savvy, savory essays by 40 of the world’s best chefs and food writers…who share their early triumphs, travails, and innovations as up-and-comers before they ascended to culinary stardom.”—Elle
“Entertaining and inspiring.”—Chicago Sun-Times
Reader Reviews
This review is from: How I Learned To Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs (Hardcover)
`How I Learned to Cook' collected and edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan is simply a Part II of `Don't Try This At Home' edited by Witherspoon and culinary literary collaborator, Andrew Friedman in the place of Meehan. If the books were movies, they would probably be considered `exploitation' flicks, working off the interest in Tony Bourdain's `Kitchen Confidential' and a host of other culinary memoirs. Not only is there less difference between the books than is suggested by the titles, this second volume shares most of the quirks and slight misrepresentations of the original volume. The following quote from my review of the first volume is exactly true of this new effort: "Two things which are misleading from the title are the fact that some of the contributors are not among `The World's Greatest Chefs' (from the subtitle at the top of the page) and many of the incidents recounted in the book are less about cooking per se than about relations between people in the kitchen, between the kitchen and management, and between the kitchen (back of the house) and the wait staff (front of the house)." We even have a very similar list of contributors, giving us the notion that the material for the two books was collected at the same time, and this second volume is `leftovers'. This is slightly misleading, as I believe the quality of the material in the two books is roughly the same. Note that while several of the contributors such as Mark Bittman, Anthony Bourdain, Marcella Hazan and Tamasin Day-Lewis are not among `the world's greatest chefs', they ARE among the world's most articulate culinary writers! In fact, the party line on Bourdain is that he is actually a much better writer than he is a chef (Witness his self-confessed cheating at the CIA when he sneaked bouillon cubes into his stock making classes). That is not to say we don't have a fair serving of true 'worlds greatest chefs' such as Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Pierre Herme, Michel Richard, Eric Rippert, and Norm Van Aken. Some of the lessons in these essays may be accidental. For example, Mark Bittman's piece says practically nothing about how he learned how to cook, but it speaks volumes about the difference between someone who writes about cooking and a professional cook. I can imagine that if a talented chef such as Tom Colicchio were put into Bittman's position of discovering they had to cook for a party of eight with four hours to go, Colicchio would have handled it in a walk, without even breaking a sweat. The level of true culinary information is also, like the earlier volume, pretty slim. One group of `accidental' lessons is the extent to which those two great teachers, Julia Child and Madeleine Kamman were respected by their counterparts among the up and coming ranks of professional chefs. It also gives a small glimpse into the differences between the unflappable Child and the sometimes petulant Kamman. A third type of lesson is some insights into the vast difference between the qualities of two different kitchens with roughly equal reputations. One example reveals how horrible it was for a Chez Panisse alum to find themselves staging at a Michelin two star restaurant which practiced sanitation poorer than a second rate Jersey diner. One would like to think this kind of thing reported so graphically by George Orwell in `Down and Out in London and Paris' had disappeared with the advent of the Michelin guides and their copiers, but apparently it has not. My final verdict on the first volume is the same as my findings on this one. To wit: "In many ways, this book is the culinary version of `The world's funniest pets'. It's a guilty pleasure which may contribute to your understanding of human nature, but it is not likely to help your cooking one wit. The greatest impression I get from the book is the difference between the professional culinary workplace and the kind of technical, research oriented business office with which I am familiar. ... I do get the sense from this and other sources that the professional kitchen is a human pressure cooker where tempers get as hot as the sautéed sole, about as often as that fish may be ordered. Thus, I found this book remarkably entertaining and informative, but not for the reasons you may gather from the cover or the editors' introduction. If you liked `Kitchen Confidential', you will certainly like this book." On the other hand, if you are really interested primarily in culinary education, invest in Child's 'Mastering the Ard of French Cooking' or Kamman's 'The New Education of a Chef'!
Comment | Permalink |
(Report this)
|
|
|
How I Learned To Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs
by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan
Available from Amazon
$10.17
|
|
|
|
