How I Learned to Cook: Culinary Educations from the World's Greatest Chefs

This is a hilarious and sometimes heart rendering book of short stories written by the world's most famous chefs. Each chef describes the way they became interested in cooking. Some fell into the profession and a certain incident made them realize they wanted to cook for a living. Others were motivated by family. It's a great read, even on the beach. After I read this book I took notes on the publications of the chefs I liked and ended up in the bookstore reviewing 8 or 9 cookbooks. I bought 2 of them.

If you love food, insights into the human experience, gossip, or just a good story, this is a delightful light read. It's perfect for reading while commuting by bus or train, indulging in literature over a good meal, soaking up while soaking in the bathtub, or delving into at bedtime. Each story is a delicious little truffle of personal experience. Some will appeal more than others to each reader, but with so many amusing and moving stories, some are bound to resonate with you. There are even useful life lessons such as Anthony Bourdain's discussion of how to pick the right dish to make for a cooking segment on a morning news and talk show (hint: Steak au Poivre is not as good a choice as it may seem on the surface), or the sudden lightbulb moment that taught Mark Bittman how to stop piling stress on himself in order to entertain guests, or (perhaps my favorite) Gabrielle Hamilton's discovery of the difference between being a talented home cook and learning to be a chef. The hardest part for me was the same trouble I've occassionally had with a box of good chocolates: restraining myself from eating it all in one, decadent sitting. For best results, read one or two bites at a time, then let your mind savor them.

I'm actually enjoying this collection of anecdotes more than I did "Don't Try This at Home" -- this is more down-to-earth and not as outrageous as the stories gathered in the first book. An excellent keep-in-the-car book for when you have five or ten minutes to kill, you can knock off a couple more chapters. This would make a great gift for someone who likes to cook or who likes to eat, and who doesn't like to eat?!

This is a fun book. Not interviews with chefs but 5-7 page chapters written by each of them. Not so much "how I learned to cook" (which would probably be boring, anyway after about the 5th one), as "some of my adventures/experiences as a chef". I agree with the other review for the most part, but wanted to post my 5 star response based on different expectations. If you enjoy reading the experiences of some of the best chefs (and food writers) around, and enjoy a mixture of emotions (from Rick Bayless's sweet and heartfelt reflections on how Julia Child affected his life to Tony Bourdain's entertaining experiences trying to demonstrate recipes while hawking books on tv), this is a fun read--with information about food and techniques and "how to get from here to there" somewhat embedded throughout i. \ A fun glimpse into the personalities and experiences of many familiar names (nicely organized alphabetically--Ferran Adria kicks it off). I enjoyed this book very much.

`How I Learned to Cook' collected and edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan is simply a Part II of `Don't Try This At Home' edited by Witherspoon and culinary literary collaborator, Andrew Friedman in the place of Meehan. If the books were movies, they would probably be considered `exploitation' flicks, working off the interest in Tony Bourdain's `Kitchen Confidential' and a host of other culinary memoirs. Not only is there less difference between the books than is suggested by the titles, this second volume shares most of the quirks and slight misrepresentations of the original volume. The following quote from my review of the first volume is exactly true of this new effort: "Two things which are misleading from the title are the fact that some of the contributors are not among `The World's Greatest Chefs' (from the subtitle at the top of the page) and many of the incidents recounted in the book are less about cooking per se than about relations between people in the kitchen, between the kitchen and management, and between the kitchen (back of the house) and the wait staff (front of the house)." We even have a very similar list of contributors, giving us the notion that the material for the two books was collected at the same time, and this second volume is `leftovers'. This is slightly misleading, as I believe the quality of the material in the two books is roughly the same. Note that while several of the contributors such as Mark Bittman, Anthony Bourdain, Marcella Hazan and Tamasin Day-Lewis are not among `the world's greatest chefs', they ARE among the world's most articulate culinary writers! In fact, the party line on Bourdain is that he is actually a much better writer than he is a chef (Witness his self-confessed cheating at the CIA when he sneaked bouillon cubes into his stock making classes). That is not to say we don't have a fair serving of true 'worlds greatest chefs' such as Ferran Adria, Mario Batali, Rick Bayless, Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Pierre Herme, Michel Richard, Eric Rippert, and Norm Van Aken. Some of the lessons in these essays may be accidental. For example, Mark Bittman's piece says practically nothing about how he learned how to cook, but it speaks volumes about the difference between someone who writes about cooking and a professional cook. I can imagine that if a talented chef such as Tom Colicchio were put into Bittman's position of discovering they had to cook for a party of eight with four hours to go, Colicchio would have handled it in a walk, without even breaking a sweat. The level of true culinary information is also, like the earlier volume, pretty slim. One group of `accidental' lessons is the extent to which those two great teachers, Julia Child and Madeleine Kamman were respected by their counterparts among the up and coming ranks of professional chefs. It also gives a small glimpse into the differences between the unflappable Child and the sometimes petulant Kamman. A third type of le