Elements of Cooking or Slow Food Revolution

Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef's Craft for Every Kitchen

Author: Michael Ruhlman

Americans are on a roll in the kitchen -- we've never been better or smarter about cooking. But how does a beginning cook become good, a good cook great?

Modeled on Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, The Elements of Cooking is an opinionated volume by Michael Ruhlman -- the award-winning and bestselling author of The Making of a Chef and coauthor of The French Laundry Cookbook -- that pares the essentials of good cooking into a slim, easy-to-take-anywhere book. It will also stand alongside a handful of classics of the kitchen, just as Strunk and White's book sits on the desk of every writer and every English student.

Not only does this book deconstruct the essential knowledge of the kitchen, it also takes what every professional chef knows instinctively after years of training and experience and offers it up cleanly and brilliantly to the home cook.

With hundreds of entries from acid to zester, here is all the information -- no more and no less -- you need to cook, as well as countless tips (including only one recipe in the entire book, for the "magic elixir of the kitchen") and no-nonsense advice on how to be a great cook. You'll learn to cook everything, as the entries cover all the key moves you need to make in the kitchen and teach you, for example, not only what goes into a great sauce but how to think about it to make it great.

Eight short, beautifully written essays outline what it takes not merely to cook but to cook well: understanding heat, using the right tools (there are only five of them), cooking with eggs, making stock, making sauce, salting food, what a cook should read, and exploring the elusive, most important skill tohave in the kitchen, finesse.

The New York Times - Sam Sifton

Ruhlman's Strunk-and-White-style guide to the language and grammar of the kitchen is a great help, particularly to anyone—most of us, really—whose brow would furrow if a date pointed to a menu and asked brightly, "What's salpicon?" (Oh, darling: It's a French term for diced meat or fish bound with a sauce and used as a filling.) A deeply opinionated rundown of the essential knowledge all cooks and food people need

Publishers Weekly

Ruhlman's slim 12th book, inspired by Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, would more accurately have been titled "Selected Elements of French Cooking." Organized in dictionary format, the book offers short definitions of culinary terms most likely to be encountered in a Continental restaurant kitchen: à la ficelle, jus lié, lardo, mise en place, oblique cut, oignon piqué, rondeau, roulade. Entries for ladle, rolling pin and other common implements seem almost superfluous, while international items such as wok, tandoor, udon and cardamom are nowhere to be found (though to be fair, nam pla, kimchi and umami are included). An opening eight-page section announces, with finger wagging, that "veal stock is theessential" and discourses on eggs, salt and kitchen tools. Ruhlman (The Soul of a Chef) is an elegant writer and the entries he does include can be useful and sometimes entertaining. The real problem is the idiosyncratic, highly personal approach: you just don't know what you'll find in this book and what you won't. (Nov.)

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Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Dining and Living

Author: Carlo Petrini

Founded in Italy in 1986 by charismatic Italian gourmand Carlo Petrini, Slow Food has grown into a phenomenally successful movement against the uniformity and compromised quality of fast food and supermarket chains. With nearly 85,000 members in 45 countries around the world, Slow Food has developed from a small, grassroots group into the most influential gastronomic movement in the world. Known as the "WWF of endangered food and wine," Slow Food not only focuses on a slower, more natural and organic lifestyle that complements nature, but also works to preserve dying culinary traditions, conserve natural biodiversity, and protect fading agricultural practices threatened in this age of mass consumerism. The book takes the reader on a gastronomic journey through the practices and traditions of the world's ethnic cuisines, from the artisanal cheeses of Italy to the oysters of Cape May and the native American turkey. It includes testimonies from Slow Food representatives—such as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse—illustrating exactly what they are doing—and what still needs to be done—to preserve them.