Product Description

Elevating the mundane to the magnificent.

Mayonnaise Hollandaise Bearnaise is a comprehensive guide to more than 200 classic and favorite sauces from around the world. This wide-reaching and easy-to-use cookbook contains 155 savory sauces and 45 sweet ones, all arranged in alphabetical order for quick reference, and with serving suggestions.

There's an elegant Red Wine Gravy to complement a Sunday roast, a Garlic Mayonnaise to liven up salad, and a stylish Mango Salsa to add kick to barbecued ribs. The recipes include classic sauces such as Hot Chocolate Fudge, Brandy Custard, and Raisin Butterscotch.

Whether dressing up a meal that needs a finishing touch or transforming bland to brave, these recipes are essential to turning simple food into spectacular fare.

About the A Cook's Book of... series

This new series of books offers classic and contemporary recipes for specific food selections in everyday cooking. Designed to become well-thumbed references for the busy cook, each title features 200 recipes for sauces, dressings, beverages, vegetable sides, and other cuisine staples. The books are illustrated and organized for easy use, and feature serving suggestions that make best use of each recipe. Presented as value-priced hardcovers, this is a comprehensive series destined to become a favorite kitchen resource.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1447193 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-19
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

About the Author

Murdoch Books is an international book publishing company, based in Australia, that typically publishes high quality, illustrated non-fiction in Leisure and Lifestyle categories. Their food titles, such as the Cooking series, are renowned for their accessibility and reliability. They also produce books on gardening, craft, do it yourself, and, most recently, health.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Magic of Sauce

Imagine a world without sauce. There'd be no gravy for roasts, no pesto for pasta and, minus the vinegary kick of a salad dressing, lettuce would be a bland proposition indeed. Take away the zing of salsa, the tang of garlic-rich aioli and the piquant hit of an unctuous horseradish cream, and dining is dull. Sauces add finesse. They finish a dish, offering up flavors and textures that complement what's already on the plate. They elevate good, easy food (a perfectly chargrilled steak, a simple, leafy salad, a wedge of warming pudding, for instance) into a memorable meal. Whether an uncomplicated affair (a pile of berries reduced to a suave purée at the flick of a processor switch perhaps, or an undemanding melt of chocolate, cream and butter) or a somewhat more ambitious, simmered-for-hours concoction, the rewards of sauce-making are great. Quite simply, with sauce, the dining table is a far more interesting place to be.

Sauces are universal, traversing cultures and climates; they come to us from the four corners of the globe. We've the French to thank for sophisticated emulsions (think of opulent hollandaise or the cool, velvet touch of mayonnaise), useful roux (impossible to make classic macaroni cheese or lobster mornay without one of these) and the lush cream- and butter-based substances that spoon perfectly over fish or chicken. Greece offers up skordalia, a tantalizing amalgam of garlic, mashed potato and aromatic olive oil while Mexico has given the world rustic, punchy salsas. Pungent flavors (chili, soy and fish sauces, exotic spices and herbs) spike myriad combinations from South East Asia, and what would one possibly serve with roast turkey had the New World not shared its cranberry sauce?

Sauce-making has suffered the reputation of being a tricky culinary discipline to master, but really, this is undeserved. Very little is needed in the way of special equipment, and modern kitchen devices (food processors, blenders and electric beaters) have minimized the slog involved in puréeing, sieving and emulsifying by hand. Required skills run to basic whisking, stirring and skimming and, occasionally, the exertion of a little patience. The rewards of expanding one's sauce repertoire are great; sauces, fundamentally, are quite delicious things. 'A well-made sauce will make even an elephant or a grandfather palatable,' quipped one nineteenth century wag; and while this theory doesn't beg testing, it is true that a sauce, whether it is smooth and silky or thick and chunky, will elevate even everyday dishes to memorable, impressive feasts.