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2011 Book Review #121: Letters to a Young Chef
Title: Letters to a Young Chef
Author: Daniel Boulud
Genre: Memoir-y, professional advice-y celebrity chef thing
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A series of letters to would-be chefs.
Thoughts: I'm a cooking geek, but I have enough self-awareness to know I probably wouldn't last two days on the line. So while I'm ordinarily resistant to celebrity memoirs, the opportunity to vicariously deglaze a pan full of roasted veal bones does keep drawing me to chef memoirs.
This slim volume showed up in an office book swap (I doubt I would have bothered getting it from the library, and certainly not paying money for it). It's kind of a rehash, if you've read anything else in the genre. It lacks the detailed walkthroughs of The Making of a Chef and the sheer dramatic chutzpah of Kitchen Confidential--there's certainly none of Bourdain's boozy recollections of sex, drugs, and second-degree burns. Instead, you get brief lectures on the importance of heat (without details), travel (without anecdotes), and service (without serious advice). I doubt anyone seriously becoming a chef would find much here they didn't already hear better from elsewhere, and anyone playing tourist will find little of real interest. It's competent enough, I suppose, but boring and not long enough to be helpful.
Author: Daniel Boulud
Genre: Memoir-y, professional advice-y celebrity chef thing
Thingummies: 2.5
Synopsis: A series of letters to would-be chefs.
Thoughts: I'm a cooking geek, but I have enough self-awareness to know I probably wouldn't last two days on the line. So while I'm ordinarily resistant to celebrity memoirs, the opportunity to vicariously deglaze a pan full of roasted veal bones does keep drawing me to chef memoirs.
This slim volume showed up in an office book swap (I doubt I would have bothered getting it from the library, and certainly not paying money for it). It's kind of a rehash, if you've read anything else in the genre. It lacks the detailed walkthroughs of The Making of a Chef and the sheer dramatic chutzpah of Kitchen Confidential--there's certainly none of Bourdain's boozy recollections of sex, drugs, and second-degree burns. Instead, you get brief lectures on the importance of heat (without details), travel (without anecdotes), and service (without serious advice). I doubt anyone seriously becoming a chef would find much here they didn't already hear better from elsewhere, and anyone playing tourist will find little of real interest. It's competent enough, I suppose, but boring and not long enough to be helpful.