Sauces Reconsidered - (Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy) by Gary Allen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Most cookbooks age poorly as tastes change, but Sauces Reconsidered evades this fate because the structure of sauces is not dependent on fashion. By exploring the fundamental physical and cultural characteristics of hundreds of sauces, we see the connections between, and the d...

Book Synopsis

Most cookbooks age poorly as tastes change, but SaucesReconsidered evades this fate because the structure of sauces is not dependent on fashion. By exploring the fundamental physical and cultural characteristics of hundreds of sauces, we see the connections between, and the distinguishing features of, sauces from any cuisine around the world.

Review Quotes

A truly comprehensive world tour of sauces, with recipes for every sauce you can imagine (and some you can't). This book is a lively and engaging fresh take on what sauces are and how to define them, with scientific principles and a healthy dose of humor, a century after Escoffier.

Allen, with his impressive history of food writing, culinary reference books, and food history books for general audiences, has outdone himself with a compact, highly useful book about sauces for foodies, students, researchers, and culinary professionals . Unlike James Peterson's classic tome Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Saucemaking (1991)and Raymond Sokolov's The Saucier's Apprentice (1976), which focus mainly on production of classic European sauces, Allen dives into the origin of sauces from early medieval recipes to the evolution of classical French cuisine, to major sauces from other significant culinary traditions. Allen also goes one step further in his sauce book to include what would be defined as sauces in molecular gastronomy: solutions, suspensions, gels, composites, and foams. The book includes clearly written sauce recipes that anyone can make, black-and-white photographs of popular sauce brands, and eleven pages of notes and references citing primary source material, classic culinary reference books and food history books, and articles from well-regarded culinary publications. This volume belongs in large public and academic libraries with culinary collections and in community college libraries that support culinary arts programs.

Extensively researched and annotated, this is a must-read book for any creative professional chef, culinary instructor or inspired home cook. It will broaden the reader's view of the sauces that now enrich the culinary cultures of every nation as well as spark a host of new creative ideas.

About the Author

Gary Allen (who was once an illustrator) dreams, talks, and writes about food, which he also loves to cook and eat.
After writing The Resource Guide for Food Writers (1999), he edited Remarkable Service for The Culinary Institute of America (2001). He's contributed articles to Culinary Biographies (2006), and Scribner's Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (2003). He was Associate Editor of, and contributor to, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2004) and The Concise Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2007). He is the author of The Herbalist in the Kitchen and co-edited The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries (2007). His other books include: Herbs: A Global History (2012); Sausage: A Global History (2015); and Can It!: The Perils and Pleasures of Preserving Food (2016). He has contributed many articles to several other food encyclopedias and he occasionally, he writes for magazines, e-zines, and symposia. He was, for years, food history editor at the James Beard Award winning website, LeitesCulinaria.com. He has also published, for nearly two decades, a monthly electronic newsletter about online resources for food writers, which is now part of his blog (http: //justserved.onthetable.us).