Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen

Areas that garde covers are parts of my meals that I can greatly improve on. So I may never be a garde but I can apply a number of the principles to improve my food.

This edition is the most informative there is on the garde manger position, and has sure fire recipes. More recent editions dumb down the content to below a college reading level in my opinion.

. This is another great TEXT from the CIA. As with all good textbooks, the focus is on the how and why rather than on the what. The recipes are to illustrate lesson points rather than be the focus of the book. If you want to improve you cold kitchen skills, buy this book.

I recently completed my 4th Quarter as a Culinary Student at the Art Institute. Using the book "Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen" was great text used in our course of Garde Manger. The recipes easy to understand and the outcome of each dish had great results. This book is a great addition to my library as i will refer back to it frequently.

Many of the readers have commented that this book is for professionals only. I happen to disagree with this opinion as there are no prerequisites required to understand the instruction given within. Having said this, if you are not even curious of understading the fundamentals of lets say for example, sausage making, there is no need to buy this book, you can find great sausage at the grocery store without the hassle of making it at home. So this book, yes it is for professionals but also for anybody who wants to understand (and even apply)the nuts and bolts of the cold kitchen. Personally I think that understanding the method that is used to prepare something, gives one a greater appreciation of that something when it is offered to him/her. So for all of you non-professionals, if you are simply curious, about how to make salad dressings, terrines, or bologna for that matter, this book is written in laymans terms and will be an interesting journey into the world of Garde Manger.

One could compare this book, `Garde Manger' by the Culinary Institute of America to Martha Stewart's `Entertaining' like a comparison of Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics to a popular history of 20th century physics. Unfortunately, that comparison does not hold up. The more appropriate comparison would be between a technical work on wood joinery to a glossy `This Old House' imprimatur book on cabinet making. The difference between the classroom and the home kitchen is simply not that large. One can even bend the simile around on itself to say that the laboratory in which new culinary thoughts arise is in the home kitchen and not in the teaching classrooms of the Culinary Institute of America.All this playing with comparisons is simply meant to make the point that while this book is presented as a textbook by the most prestigious culinary training institution in the country, it's material is simply not that different from a book with more obviously commercial origins.This book does have a lot of material you will not find in a Martha Stewart or Ina Garten or Paula Deen book. High on the list of interesting background information is the history of how the French Revolution may have been a major contributor to the rise of restaurants and the great strength and variety in French cuisine.The real story here is cold food and how it is prepared and served in (French) restaurants. On this subject, this book is a delightful source of both recipes and Alton Brown / Shirley Corriher type background. Honestly, the true culinary counterpart to Feynman's lectures would be Harold McGee's oft quoted books on food science.This CIA book gives a wealth of recipes for salad dressings and other cold sauces, cold salads, sandwiches, cured and smoked foods, sausage, forcemeats, cheese, hors d'oeuvres, appetizers, condiments, and basic recipes (spice mixes and the like). One thing that immediately endeared me to the book is its treatment of vinaigrettes, which easily outdoes even Martha Stewart's better than average treatment. This material is worth the price of admission. Another service it supplies, with the authority of a teaching institution, is to simplify some culinary terms. For example, it always bedeviled me to know the difference between, for example, a relish, a salsa, and a chutney. Turns out that they simply are three different words for the same basic preparation. Like `plains', `veldt', and `pampas', they are different words for the same thing reflecting three different ethnic sources.The chapters on curing and sausage may interest fewer readers than most, but there is much you can get from these chapters even if you never make a sausage. I was particularly struck by the fact that government regulations require that pork used in sausage making be `certified'. That's a little fact that people like Emeril and even Alton leave out of their little how to shows on sausage making. As a great believer in serendipity, I believe you never can tell what inspira