I have owned this book for over 20 years and still use it regularly. I am not a professional, but I can make suaces on any give day that compare favorably -- or outshine -- what is served in many top restaurants. The book's menus are a bit dated, favoring adaptations of classics, but you miss the point if you doggedly follow them. This book teaches you about making a virtually endless arrray of sauces, using classical techniques. Once you master the "mother" or foundation suaces, there is no limit to what you can imitate or invent. There is real work involved here, and you may need some additional equipment, but you can be smart about it. I make huge batch of demi-glace each winter and freeze it in small portions, which translates into a one-year gold mine of possibilities. This is a great source; I can't imagine life without it.

I'm a culinary student here in New York and I picked up this book on the advise of my chef-instructor. I'm glad I listened to him. This book inspired my instructor to become a chef and to make almost every sauce in the book.

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.

The saucemaking of classical French Haute Cuisine is a profession in itself, and there is a 'theory' or method behind it's madness. One begins with a 'sauce mere' (the mother sauce), then converts it in a series of steps (involving the addition of new flavors, the straining of spent ingredients, and concentration by simmering), finally 'finishing' the sauce with the addition of delicate herbs or flavorings that would be lost with continued heating. For example, the sauce mere 'demi-glace' (brown sauce thickened with flour and flavored with herbs and wine) is converted to sauce Robert by concentrating with more wine, and then finishing off the heat with butter and mustard.

This is the best book I've seen on the subject. Serious saucemaking is time consuming, but if the sauce meres are made in quantity and frozen in portions, the final assembly of nearly every sauce in the book may be accomplished as your dinner vegetables steam - by understanding the theory of progression from one sauce to the next, and devoting perhaps one Saturday every few months to keeping an eye on a stock pot, one may enjoy the sophistication of classical Haute Cuisine with the convenience of bottled substitutes. The initial chapters discussing the history of Haute Cuisine is a treat in itself. Most of the 100+ sauce recipes are followed with the recipe for a single classic example dish where it is featured.

When served with a fine sauce, your family and guests will close their eyes and savor every bite of your meal. Nice...

It is a shame that this book has been let go out of print. Someone ought to get to Penguin or Dover and ask them to bring it back to availability. The text is fascinating, and, rather like good science fiction, makes you stop and rethink your assumptions about "the way things are." Our assumptions that the food on today's tables and menus has always been much the same are fascinatingly wrong. The authors treats several places in both the "new" and "old" worlds as to the effect of ingredients imported after 1492, and then looks in more detail at several of the seminal products, such as corn and potatoes. Particularly if you like "ethnic" cuisine, you will never look at a recipe or menu in the same way again.

This is a very readable and entertaining history of the revolution in cuisine with the introduction
of foods from the New World. It includes some marginal political history necessary to
understand the subject, but is filled with interesting anecdotes. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the evolution of cuisine or just a good read.

Raymond Sokolov has written an extraordinary biography of A.J. Liebling, who was one of the most brilliant and elusive of the "New Yorker" legends. Writing about a writer is hard enough, but writing about this one required not only a thorough knowledge of his work (hard to find, some of his work) but a true ability to enter the man's head, as they say, and tell some of the story from that perch. A. J. Liebling was brilliant and a true connoisseur of all the things he thought were important: food, wine, friendship, writing.

Liebling joined the "New Yorker" in 1935, and wrote for it until his death in 1963. He was hired by Harold Ross and his editor was William Shawn. Both in his personal and his professional realms, Liebling was disordered and off kilter, often battered and turbulent, and generally quite exciting. He did not actually finish high school, but was accepted at Dartmouth, from where he was twice expelled for failure to meet the minimum attendance at chapel, so that he did not finish his studies there, either. But he wrote a great deal at Dartmouth, and at the insistence of his father he enrolled in courses at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia, where he managed to stay for a couple of years; while at Columbia he was assigned to cover police stories, and this lead him to serve as an assistant to well established newspaper reporters and to learn the mechanics of the trade.

He married three times, lived in France (wrote many "Letters from Paris") and reported World War II in detail (starting in 1939). He participated in the Normandy landings on D day, whence he produced a particularly memorable piece concerning his experiences on a landing craft. He was there when the Allies entered Paris, and this caused him to write afterwards: "For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody was happy."

Liebling was probably the first to take advantabe of the penumbral area in which fiction and reality are barely discernible from one another, and to exploit it in his writing. Capote followed.

He wrote about writing, too, in his classical "Wayward Press" columns of the "New Yorker." He was, in fact, the first serious critic of the press, a job he clearly relished. In people he gravitated towards the odd, the slightly weird, and the eccentrics who had found niches in life from which they they sometimes prospered, often not: in other words, the low life. In New York and London and Paris he consorted and maintained society with strange people, in relationships that spanned decades. These people thought highly of Liebling and what he stood for; what he stood for contained much decency and a total lack of pretension. He spoke to people by remaining silent and letting them speak, something which appears easy but is not. He wrote about the many things he got to understand from these poeple, using clear, simple prose. He was meticulously accurate in his work, aided in this by a formidable memory which allowed him to quote verbatim hours of conversation, long after it had taken place.

Sokolov's biography of A.J. Liebling is as complete and exacting as no doubt his subject would demand. It contains a bibliography, an index and chapter notes. This is an enhancing book: one feels better after reading it.

This book would be a great gift for anyone who enjoys food and travel. Sokolov's visits with regional cooks, gardeners, and farmers throughout the United States has resulted in a book which is soul food for the curious reader. Somewhat akin to Blue HIghways by William Least Heat-Moon, this book's focus is on our culinary heritage. This unique history is brought to life by the author's skills in storytelling, research, and writing. His experience as food editor and critic for the New York Times enliven the text. Browsing through the pages of this book allows the reader to discover the secrets of harvesting morel mushrooms in Michigan, processing wild rice in Minnesota, cultivating wild lowbush blueberries in Maine, diving for abalone on the Pacific coast, or preparing traditional blue corn tortillas according to Hopi grandmothers. Over 100 authentic recipes are included. These time consuming predecessors of commerical methods and fast foods relay nostalgia for the past. Like arts and crafts which are vanishing, these regional foods live on in memory and the knowledge continues to be passed from mother to daughter and father to son. The book is enhanced by beautiful colored photographs of a salmon roast in the northwest, a clambake in Massachusetts, Cornish pasties in Upper Michigan, and wild persimmons in Indiana. Poetry, line drawings, and humor are scattered like seasonings throughout the chapters. A thorough index and an index of recipes provide the dollop on a book to be savored and delved into time and again.

This is a terrific book and, as far as I can tell, it's been completely overlooked. I don't know why it hasn't received more critical attention.
The author, a Fullbright scholar, former Food editor for the New York Times, and Leisure & Arts editor for the Wall Street Journal, is extremely well-read and eloquent in this concise but thorough book that details the world's grains. From oats to grits, farro to quinoa, it's all there, with recipes from around the world to illustrate how each is used.
Note that even though it's about grain, normally the province of vegetarians, this is not necessarily a vegetarian's cookbook. Many of the book's recipes include meat.
This book could be especially useful for those who've decided to cut back on meat and change the focus of their diet to grain, but it would be handy on any cook's shelf. I turn to it again and again as both a reference and a cookbook. It's fully indexed, well organized and highly recommended.

Having read numerous fascinating and interesting works by Raymond Sokolov, I was unpleasantly surprised by the quality of the recipes in With the Grain. Not only are some almost identical recipes repeated numerous times with only minor adjustments - (there were no fewer than six recipes for stuffed grape leaves in six different chapters!)- but some recipes omitted ingredients or made blatantly dangerous suggestions. The Jambalaya recipe on page 126 calls for 6 pounds of chicken to be browned and set aside; but the reader is never informed when to add the chicken back into the recipe. The recipe for Orzo with Chicken Breasts and Red Peppers requires that the marinade, in which raw chicken has been sitting in for six hours, be strained and used as an uncooked dressing on the Orzo pasta. As my marinade was filled with raw chicken blood, I found this not only unpalatable but a clear example of unsafe food handling. How could an editor let that one slip through? Were these recipes not tested? To his credit, Mr. Sokolov did add some interesting historical facts and excerpts from other sources, but his recipes did not satisfy my hunger for easy to follow directions. If you are looking for a grain cookbook that has safe, easy to follow recipes in addition to "nourishing food for thought", I would recommend Nutrition Secrets of the Ancients by Dr. Gene Spiller and Rowena Hubbard. If you want to read Raymond Sokolov at his best, pass up With the Grain and pick up a copy of his earlier book, The Saucier's Apprentice instead!.