Imagine you have just started cooking school. What do you expect on that first day, the first week, the first semester? Yes, you’ll be cooking things, learning recipes, but the school won’t be about recipes. It will be about food and “how to do it” in the kitchen.
There will be a thousand questions:
What is the difference between braising and poaching?
What the number one knife for me to use?
How do I make hash?
How to read a recipe and how to cook from it?
How to make a roux, and why?
How to use a blender to make an egg yolk or butter sauce?
How to poach an egg?
There are no recipes really in The Essential Cook. Just 500 pages of questions and answers and insights, organized into chapters like:
- Combination Cookery: What to Do with Leftovers
- Three Ways to Cook
- Dining: Serving What You Have Cooked So It Tastes Even Better
- Cleaning Up: A Guide to Kitchen Efficiency, Sanitation, and Safety
This book was published in 1989. Very sadly, author Charles Delmar learned he was dying as he wrote it. He wanted this book to be his legacy. If you read the reviews of the book at Amazon, you will see very high praise. People recognize the book for its encyclopedic quality. It’s just the sort of kitchen companion that many of us need.
Who taught you to cook? Anything beyond just watching Mom? Few of us have had the chance to attend culinary school. And Mom, as good as she was, was still an amateur. This book will edge you far closer to being a culinary pro.
You can still find copies of this lovely, but serious book over at Amazon. It’s certainly worth adding to your library. And then, over time, you can choose a chapter at a time, and benefit from insights of a very smart man. We don’t know what path Charles Delmar might have followed, but his legacy is well established with this tour de force.