La Varenne Pratique

Nation's Restaurant News, Dec 4, 1989 by Michael Schrader

LA VARENNE PRATIQUE,

Anne Willan, Crown Publishers Inc., 225 Park Ave. S., New York, N.Y. 10003, (212) 254-1600, 528 pages, $60.

How is an eel skinned? How many different kinds of soft cheese are there? How are foods coated with aspic? These and thousands of other details of information and techniques are presented pictorially and eloquently in this encyclopedic cooking course.

Willan is the founder of the Ecole de Cuisine la Varenne in Paris, a well-known culinary-arts school. A native of England, she is a Cambridge graduate with 25 years of experience as a food writer and columnist.

The book consists of five parts: herbs, spices and flavors; fish; vegetables; flour, breads and batters; and preserving and freezing. The 22 chapters illustrate cooking techniques, ingredients and recipes by means of 2,500 photographs. The 400 recipes range from the familiar to the exotic.

An extraordinary amount of information is packed into these pages. Little is taken for granted in terms of the reader's culinary know-how. For example, basics like how to scramble eggs are covered as well as frying crepes.

Here the complexities of cooking are elucidated, step by step. It is an extremely useful book, but beware: The recipient may well retreat from Christmas festivities to peruse the tome for many hours. Most assuredly, he or she will return to the group very grateful for this gift.