David Burke's New American Classics: Brilliant Variations on Traditional Dishes for Everyday Dining, Entertaining, and Second Day Meals

Those who are already fans of David Burke's spectacularly popular New York restaurants--davidburke & donatella, and David Burke at Bloomingdales's--will rejoice in this personal and detailed cookbook which turns American classics into haute cuisine. Choosing thirty-seven standard recipes, including meatloaf, roast chicken, and macaroni and cheese, Burke applies his magic touch, creating gourmet fare out of standards, then developing a second, more modern recipe, and finally creating a third recipe for "second day fare"--with the leftovers. Posting one hundred seventeen recipes organized into thirty-seven groups of three recipes and one group of six recipes, Burke gives new life to American favorites and their variations. Burke is a creative and imaginative chef, and the recipes and their photographs reflect this. As a professional, Burke uses these recipes as his mainstay, and their preparation is his joy. If you are a dedicated "foodie" with plenty of time, the desire to spend that time in the kitchen, and the metabolism that allows you to digest extremely rich foods, then this cookbook is one that you will treasure. Recipes for duck, partridge, pheasant, and quail exist side by side with those for barbecued chicken, spareribs stuffed with asparagus and served with corn crepes, and salmon "leaves" cooked with shrimp, grapefruit, and basil. The preparations are clearly described, the recipes are exact, and the list of ingredients, with sources, is clear. This cookbook is not for everyone, however. The recipes are all very labor intensive, often with many time-consuming steps and separate preparations on the way to one spectacular meal. Frequently, a recipe will depend on your having small amounts of sauces left over from a previous preparation, and you are on your own for substitutions if you do not have these and do not have the time to make them. Most of the recipes are not make-ahead preparations, requiring time in the kitchen to put them together before presentation, a limitation if the chef is also the host/hostess. And some ingredients--quail eggs and salmon pastrami (for which there is a recipe), for example--are not readily available in the corner supermarket. Heavily dependent on lots of butter, eggs, cheese, and heavy cream, these recipes may all be delicious, but they are loaded with saturated fats, and no ingredient substitutions are suggested. A fantastic cookbook for those who love to cook and who can tolerate an extremely rich diet, David Burke's cookbook will keep you enjoying interesting and imaginative foods for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if you have the time to make them. n Mary Whipple

`David Burke's New American Classics' by, of course, David Burke with co-author, culinary pen for hire, Judith Choate is a great foodie cookbook and if you appreciate good food and cookbooks, stop reading this now and scroll up and order yourself a copy instead of wasting any more time reading my thoughts on this truly worthy cookbook! I can generally recognize very good and very bad cookbooks after about two or three minutes of reading the table of contents and the introduction. I could tell this book was worthy of consideration even before I opened it, based on an appearance by Burke to promote the book on the Today show a few days ago. Being an inveterate watcher of both talk show food segments and Food Network shows, I have become jaded to most conventional rehashes of typical dishes where the segments are little more than shuffling swapouts. Due to the fact that lamb is one of my very favorite things to eat, Burke got my attention in that his segment was a new take on doing filleted leg of lamb. Having just done a leg of lamb for Easter with less than spectacular success, I was quite willing to listen to new ideas, and Burke hit the nail on the head. His solution is to easily fillet the rolled leg of lamb meat into its easily identified component muscles, saute the seasoned pieces almost as if you were doing a beef fillet, then pan-roasting the seared pieces to the correct temperature, requiring not much more than 10 minutes. I was hooked. Then I opened the book, and found the whole book to be chocked full of such ideas. Burke's first attraction was the fact that his Table of Contents listed every major recipe rather than simply the usual tired chapter headings. This Table fully revealed his strategy of offering three variations on 39 classic American recipes. The first recipe of the trio is a traditional dish, although not necessarily simple or easy dishes and not necessarily the most familiar traditional fare. It is more likely that the traditional recipe will be a tradition of great American restaurants than great American home cooking, although there are exceptions. The second recipe of each trio is a contemporary take on approximately the same ingredients. The contemporary dish is always different enough from the classic that it is worth having and making both recipes without risking a boring `oh, that again' from your family or even yourself. Most contemporary dishes are also `restaurant grade' and not necessarily original to Chef Burke, but most are well within the capabilities of an experienced home cook. The third recipe concept alone is worth the price of the book, in that it gives a recipe for remaking the leftovers from one of the two earlier recipes into an entirely new dish. The recipes for the leftover French toast and pancakes alone may be worth the price of the book, as I constantly find myself making a standard recipe for either and am left with about twice as much as I can serve at the time. Speaking of pancakes and