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Letters to a Young Chef
By Daniel Boulud
Letters to a Young Chef drives home an essential
point: skill in the kitchen does not mean being a chef.
You need talent, discipline, a tremendous amount of knowledge,
business savvy, people skills, etc. Ideally, you'll have
spent at least two years traveling the world and you must
work with 20 top chefs—the latter piece of advice
stems from Boulud's Ten Commandments of a Chef.
Unless
you're a young aspiring chef (under 30 for these purposes)
or someone utterly fascinated with the arduous process of
becoming one, you will have not much use for this slim volume.
If, however, you are indeed hoping to become a top toque,
this is the book for you—although a lot of its content
is rather general, common sense. The very small recipe section
also aims at a very specific audience. It
seems as though dishes like Chicken Grand-Mère Francine
and others are tests of mastery of sorts to see, for instance,
how able you are to caramelize meat properly.
Nevertheless,
Boulud is a culinary celebrity, and we have become a nation
obsessed with the celebrity chef. You may want to find out
what advice this culinary aristocrat has to offer to those
that aspire to his echelons. We couldn't have put it better
than Publisher's Weekly when they wrote: "This
book is the Monsieur Hyde to the Dr. Jekyll version of culinary
training presented in Jacques Pepin's The
Apprentice." We, for our part, would rather
eat than read—at Boulud's Daniel that is.
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