Confidence in the Kitchen: Sharing Cooking Experiences with Your Preschool Child

Willan, Anne. The Good Cook. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York: 2004.

ISBN: 1-58479-328-7

Scale 1-10 (1 too boring for words – 10 could see and taste as I read it) 

Overall Ratings: Culinary Escapism: 6   Recipe Quality: 8

Anne Willan is the founder of La Varenne Cooking School. The cover of her text boasts that it contains 70 essential techniques, 250 step-by-step photographs, and 350 easy recipes. My overall view of the book is that it’s Betty Crocker on steroids- good, undetectable steroids. To give you an idea of the contents, here are the chapter headings: Essential Flavors, Tips from the Pros, Saucery, Eggscetera, Fabulous Fish and Seafood, From the Farmyard, Mastering Meats, Perfect Pasta and Rice, The Vegetable Story, and Pastry Fundamentals.

The stunning photographs taken by Alison Harris are how-to eye candy. They’re so good, that you could be getting private cooking lessons from Anne Willan herself. The how-to sections cover a wide range of skills from the basics of sharpening a knife, and peeling, slicing and dicing onions to making mayonnaise and hollandaise (and how to save each if curdled) to shaping and baking phyllo dough.

Ms. Willan’s text is thorough.  For example, there are over twenty preparations for chicken along with how-to sections for cutting a whole chicken into pieces, trussing, making chicken stock, and preparing escalopes and creating piccata slices. The index is nine pages long, with three columns of 8 pt. text.

This delightful cookbook offers the basics plus expansions into more challenging recipes and techniques. Since the text provides so much instruction, the escapism rating is just six because having to think about what one would do holds the escape to reality level instead of a true dreamy experience. This is a cookbook I wouldn’t mind having in my own collection which is saying something with my aversion to keeping anything I might have to dust.