Signed - Jacques Pepin's The Art of Cooking - First Edition

The great chef and teacher Jacques Pepin gives us a magnificent cooking education in this collection of wonderful-tasting recipes carefully worked out so that as we prepare the dishes, we will be mastering a wide range of important cooking techniques. His recipe instructions are interwoven with more than 1,300 crystal-clear color photographs, enabling us to see him at work, guiding us through every step of the making of cach dish. And he shows us how to create just the right accompaniments for every main course so that the taste, texture, and color of the vegetables and garnishes interact harmoniously on the finished plate.

In this, the first of two volumes that cover the art of cooking, Pepin concentrates on Stocks and Soups, Eggs, Shellfish and Fish, Poultry and Game, and Meat. From

"Angry Trout" in Hot Pecan Sauce with hush puppies and a garnish of carved mushrooms, to Shell Roast Napa with tomato coulis and onion custard, to Long Island Bouillabaisse with Rouille Sauce, to Braised Duck with Glazed Shallots and Honey Sweet Potatoes, the recipes reflect Jacques Pepin's classic French training and the delightfully imaginative, eclectic palate that he has developed during his thirty years in America.

Very different from his earlier books, La Technique and La Methode, here the emphasis is on the recipes. One learns by doing. In making hollandaise for Poached Eggs Clamart (poached eggs on croutons with a garnish of peas), we learn what to do if the sauce curdles —seemingly beyond repair—or how to turn the hollandaise sauce into a mousseline to spoon over fresh salmon. We learn how to gut tiny fish for a friture with fried celery leaves, how to fillet catfish and prepare artichokes for a goujonnette with sliced artichoke bottoms, how to cut up a whole rack of lamb for an elegant feast of rack of lamb provencale and then to stuff the trimmed-away meat and braise it for a robust family dish of breast of lamb lyonnaise. We learn to make use of every morsel-scraps for a mousse or for homemade sausage, bones for a stock (fundamental good cooking practices that are too often overlooked in American cook-books). And we learn to appreciate that the art of cooking includes pleasing the eye, as Jacques Pepin's deft hands turn a cucumber into a canoe, a length of zucchini into a fan, or a slice of carrot into a butterfly shape to create an enticing garnish.

A must for every serious cook and aspiring professional, this beautiful and instructive book will become a classic.