The French Cook: Sauces

From the award-winning food writer and author of Mashed, a step-by-step, French cooking class on sauces with an array of recipes to create.

This is the first in a series of French cookbooks that will simplify and demystify French cuisine for all of those who love it and would like to bring it home to their American kitchens without traveling outside their homes.

Here Holly Herrick creates a French cooking course all about sauces, filled with beautiful how-to photography and step-by-step techniques that will have you making sauces like a pro. The book focuses on the five mother sauces of French cuisine: béchamel, veloutés, hollandaise, espagnol and brown sauces, and les sauces tomates. In addition, Herrick devotes chapters to fonds, or stocks, the base of so many sauces, and mayonnaises, a simple, versatile sauce so widely used in classical French cuisine. In addition to the sauces, the book integrates main course ingredients, such as steak or roasted chicken, something more than to be dressed with a sauce, but also something that helped to shape the sauce itself. With myriad variations and derivatives on each basic sauce, this book can transform your next meal into a veritable French feast.

“A balanced selection of recipes for sauce spinoffs and the entrees they are intended for. Standouts include a richer, simpler alternative to bouillabaisse (Lobster Tail, Littleneck Clams and Sea Scallops With a Saffron, Chive, and Butter Béchamel Sauce). Also notable is Veal and Pork Meatballs in a Velouté Sauce, in which herbes de Provence, Dijon mustard and chopped shallots combine to produce what might be described as Swedish Meatballs on Steroids.”—Wall Street Journal