32 Yolks
From My Mother's Table to Working the Line
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
April 4, 2016
Food enthusiasts who have seen the finesse of Ripert’s delicate plates on television shows and have attempted recipes from Le Bernardin Cookbook will be delighted to meet the man behind the recipes. In this engaging memoir, Ripert shares his life as a young boy in Southern France. Ripert refines his palette and learns to treat food like a gift. He watches his mother set the table with exquisite care even for his daily goûter, or after-school snack. At age 11, after the death of his father, Ripert finds solace and inspiration in the kitchen. Ripert begins to cook in some of the finest kitchens in France, under the thumb of some of the most notorious culinary masters; his apprenticeships involve painful, long hours and no social life. After his obligatory military service, he gets back to the line, discovers a particular love for seafood, and dives into his culinary passions with an unmatched drive. He masters some of the most difficult techniques, and eventually follows his dream to the U.S. With his exacting prose and eye for detail, Ripert has created a wonderful memoir about his early days as a chef.
April 1, 2016
The acclaimed French chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin delivers a breezy account of his life in France and Andorra before he moved to the United States in his early 20s. Ripert (Avec Eric: A Culinary Journey with Eric Ripert, 2010, etc.) makes it clear that food was always the warm center of his life, and his descriptions of the meals he prepared or devoured will make even the most ascetic reader hungry. As a boy, the author took refuge in a restaurant in his little town, where the chef indulged him with bowls of chocolate mousse or spoonfuls of caviar while his glamorous mother was off running the boutique she owned. Bored with academics, he left high school to go to a no-frills vocational boarding school, where he learned knife skills and "took naturally to the non-negotiable, army-like rules of the brigade system" in a restaurant. After an apprenticeship where he boned pounds of anchovies and peeled dozens of potatoes every day, working from 8:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night, the 17-year-old moved to Paris, where he learned to transform the "32 yolks" of the title into a proper hollandaise sauce and lived in fear of daunting chefs. Ripert worked first for Dominique Bouchet and then for Joel Robuchon, neither of whom cut their underlings any slack. The author keeps his tone light, even as he describes forbidding work environments, constant anxiety, escalating anger, and the pressures of being low on an aggressively male pecking order. His pleasure in good food--whether he's following his grandmother to a town market, where he "swooned at the fragrance of anise, clove, and mint," or preparing lavish restaurant dishes plated with 90 equally spaced dots of sauce--makes for some vicarious gastronomic thrills. It doesn't take a refined palate to savor Ripert's culinary adventures.
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April 15, 2016
Readers may know Ripert as the meditative host of the PBS series Avec Eric; a fan-favorite judge on Bravo's Top Chef; and the owner of Le Bernardin, a French seafood restaurant in New York. His roots, however, are far from that calm and thoughtful adult. This memoir tells of Ripert's tumultuous childhood in France where a love of excellent food was instilled in him early on. In his preteens, he was taken under the wing of a professional chef. Food and cooking were an escape for Ripert, though the stress of professional kitchens steeped him in almost unmanageable levels of fear and desperation. The militaristic attitude in three-star restaurants, as Ripert describes it, is physically and mentally grueling. Despite the difficulties, Ripert knew cooking was his calling and he likens talented chefs to having the creative genius of composers Wolfgang Mozart and Frederic Chopin. VERDICT Although the loving descriptions of flavors and cooking techniques will make some long for recipes, this narrative sheds light on the carefully controlled chaos behind the scenes at several top restaurants in the 1970s and 1980s. It will appeal to fans of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Joe Bastianich and Mario Batali's Restaurant Man.--Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley Sch., Fort Worth, TX
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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