book: One Perfect Ingredient Signed Edition

book: One Perfect Ingredient Signed Edition | Marcus Wareing ...

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	• One Perfect Ingredient Signed Edition Marcus Wareing Dorling Kindersley H/B, 2008 average customer review:based on 1 review
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The Haphazard Gourmet Girls Find Marcus Wareing Perfect

British Chef Marcus Wareing's new cookery book One Perfect Ingredient three ways to cook it is a beautifully photographed collection of recipes and tips for the Home Chef that is equal parts inspiring and accessible.

Wareing is currently one of the darlings of the London Restaurant Scene. His revamp of The Savoy Grill was the beginning of his ascendancy, and his current project, Petrus, has been awarded two Michelin Stars. The last time we were in London, we dined there twice, and were amazed at the delicious dishes that kept appearing. A former acolyte of our least favorite Chef, Scream Machine Gordon Ramsey, Wareing has transcended what was certainly a tumultuous and unhappy training period and truly come into his own.

Written with cookery writer Jeni Wright, One Perfect Ingredient has a fairly simple concept. Wareing maintains that many Home Chefs get stuck in a rut, purchasing the same ingredients over and over, but then fail to use them in a creative way. Thus the book is a devotional of creative uses of basics; as the title suggests, Wareing chooses one ingredient, then presents three different ways to prepare it, which generally break down into the categories of Savory, Sweet, and Homey. He covers all major classes of Food, from Vegetables to Fish to Meat to Dairy, and also what he calls Storecupboard--canned and pre-prepped foods, which can be wizarded into brilliant delights. The whole Storecupboard aesthetic has been getting much attention in Home Cookery lately, with many cookery book writers (Nigella Lawson, Padma Lakshmi, etc.) devoting much time to presenting recipes for the Haphazard Gourmet who wants to get down and dirty, but doesn't have enough time to chop and mix and make a hellacious mess. And Rachel Ray has built an empire on this concept, but Wareing does it far, far better.

Wareing's recipes are creative and inspired, and fresh and modern, with unexpected takes on popular ingredients--Lemon Olive Oil Cake for Lemons, Pear and Mustard Compote for Pears, Pancetta Prawns for Shrimp, Braised Oxtail With Red Wine for Beef, to name a few (no, this is not that extraordinary a concept--but few Home Cooks these days venture into using Oxtail). The recipes stretch the expected skills of Home Chefs in some instances, but there are plenty of tips in the text on how to achieve success. Each recipe we've tried from the book has been wonderful; in particular we like his take on Ambrosia, an old-school Southern American treat we always make at Christmas--but he uses Double Cream and Fresh Raspberries, while our take is Cool Whip and Canned Mandarins. Wareing's is, obviously, far more sophisticated; it's the difference between a comic book version of Great Expectations and Dicken's actual novel. We also loved the Lasagne with Spinach and Black Beans--which sounds like a questionable combination--but the dish is an amazing, savory/sweet take on Quotidian Italian; and we are big fans of the Roast Pork with Sage, Lemon and Onion Stuffing, which is easy to do, but results in a very impressive dish, as the Pork is trussed and becomes deeply moist when cooked properly.

We also greatly appreciate the fact that because the book is focused on using ingredients that are usually at hand but wasted, Wareing is advocating a conservative, conservationist approach to Food. In these days of rising Food costs and Food shortages, using what you have in an economical, anti-waste way is not only timely, but speaks to the conscience of Cooks everywhere.

A tiny (but easily overcome) problem with the book, for American Cooks, is that because it's published in the UK, by Dorling Kindersley, all weights and measures are in the Metric System. Making the recipes required much head-scratching and double-checking on our part to ensure that we'd got the conversions correct (there's no conversion chart in the book, so we were perpetually consulting that old culinary warhorse, The Joy of Cooking, to do our calculations) (yes, we all failed math in school; figuring out percentages off at couture sales is as far as we go in the numbers department--or as we like to call it, The Prada Theory of Calculation). And a few of the recipe ingredients are very difficult to get in America, other than by mail order. Luckily, the Internet has been invented for that, so we overcame this problem, too.

One Perfect Ingredient is a lovely, highly usable Cookery book, and we know we'll turn to it again and again, when our own recipes fail to inspire us to grand culinary heights.

For more cookery book reviews, visit Eddie and the other Haphazard Gourmet Girls at Haphazardgourmet.blogspot.com.

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