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Caprial Pence |
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cookbook
reviews caprial
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Caprial's
Desserts
by Caprial Pence & Melissa Carey
List Price: $32.50
Our Price with Amazon.com: $22.75
You Save: $9.75 (30%)
Review by Joelle Moles
Click
Here to Buy It On Line!
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Review |
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The
question at the outset is this: how does a professional chef
make their methods and recipes truly accessible to the home
cook? A restaurant chef, as we all know, has years of culinary
training, a fully equipped kitchen at their disposal, and a
myriad of tricks and secrets that can make or break even a seemingly
simple recipe. The home cook, on the other hand, has a few hours
of Emeril to their name, a fancy $13 spatula from Sur La Table,
and a great propensity to avoid lengthy instructions altogether.
What does it take to bridge this gap between professional and
amateur? How does one produce a cookbook that is a tasty sampling
of a chef's hard earned repertoire as well as an easy to follow
instruction manual for any Joe or Jill?
James Beard award winning chef, Caprial Pence, and her pastry
chef, Melissa Carey, have co-authored a book of desserts that
successfully brings professional cooking into the amateur's
kitchen. Although us chefs may not find Caprial's Desserts to
be especially challenging, we can certainly take note of the
interesting variations on old favorites and more importantly,
learn a thing or two about authoring a worthy cookbook for the
masses.
Perhaps the single most important point that makes Caprial's
Desserts so successful, apart from the tasty fare (and how new
is that in the pastry world) is the arrangement of the recipes.
A task that could easily have been handled by alphabetizing
or simple categorizing, the organization of the recipes has
been taken quite seriously by Pence and Carey. They chose to
not only separate their recipes into seven distinct pastry and
baking categories, but to accentuate basic master recipes upon
which numerous variations can be made. The effect of such an
arrangement is that the beginning cook is not intimidated by
such professional sounding recipes as Pear-Lemon Gingerbread
with Pear Wine Syrup for it is apparent that they need only
to make a variation on a simple gingerbread master recipe. In
addition, after the beginning cook learns the basic techniques
in the master recipes, which are in themselves based on professional
cookery, they can move onto all sorts of restaurant quality
variations as opposed to moving onto another cookbook altogether
- certainly a move to be avoided when a chef is trying to achieve
a long shelf life for their cookbook.
Of course organization isn't everything, but then again, with
a hundred cookbooks offering perfectly acceptable recipes for
apple pie and muffins, what is going to make a cookbook stand
out? Caprial Pence and Melissa Careys' Caprial's Desserts is
effectively arranged, includes basic recipes as well as unique
variations, and has easy to understand method descriptions.
There is always the argument that technique could be explained
more thoroughly. (Is the home cook going to know that the flourless
chocolate cake will be virtually impossible to remove from the
pan bottom without a parchment circle? Or that frosting any
cake isn't as easy as 'cake layering guru' Melissa Carey makes
it sound?) Yet, perhaps this is just one more lesson that the
home cook is taught about the professional cooking world - so
much is trial and error and should you error, one can always
make a variation. . .
Take a taste of Caprial's cooking, try her Flourless
Chocolate Cake recipe.
March 2002
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