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Jill Prescott's Ecole de Cuisine

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Jill Prescott’s Ecole de Cuisine (Canada, UK)
by Jill Prescott
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Publication Date: May, 2001
ISBN: 1580082904

If there is one thing I do not care for, it’s fussiness in the kitchen. Fussiness turns cooking into a chore, and for too many people already, and all too often, cooking is a chore. Fussiness just makes it worse. If you absolutely must have the finest European chocolate, or an unlined copper bowl (newly scoured with salt and a little vinegar) to whip your egg whites to the absolutely fullest volume, or simply cannot compromise and use store-bought, dried herbs to season your stew, chances are, you’re going to eat out more often than you cook.

It is from this perspective that that I have quibbled with Jill Prescott’s Ecole de Cuisine, the companion cookbook to the television series of the same name. The book gives the impression of being very fussy. Prescott, who has studied classical French cooking, has run a cooking school in Kohler, Wisc. since 1988 to teach “professional cooking for the home chef.”

Clearly, she has an opinion on everything. The right chocolate, the right cookware, the right salt, the proper form for vanilla, the best oven, etc., etc. spill out in the first few pages of the book. It is enough to drive even a competent cook into hiding, and make him think that his formerly adequately equipped kitchen might as well be a cave dwelling.

I am all for upholding high standards and for reminding people that the better the ingredients they use, the better their foods will taste. Chicken, beef, vegetable, and fish stocks are a great example. If at all possible, use homemade stock in your cooking. It makes a big difference. But Prescott veers awfully close to suggesting that unless you use homemade stock every time you might as well not bother to cook (I believe her term for canned and bouillon-based stocks is “swill”). In this day and age that seems like a recipe for not selling cookbooks, not attracting television viewers, and not attracting students to your cooking school.

Now, having vented for several paragraphs, there’s a awful lot I like about this book. First, the recipes I followed were well-explained, manageable, and uniformly delicious. In a relatively small book, there is a wonderful variety of recipes — including about a half-dozen each of appetizers and soups, and a dozen each of salads, pasta, seafood, meat & poultry, and vegetable & potato dishes. For some reason, there are about two dozen dessert recipes, but I’m not complaining. From cover to cover, these are recipes a reasonably competent home cook would be happy to make and serve to family or guests night after night.

The techniques and procedures that Prescott teaches seem to take up a lot less space and use fewer words than the same procedures in most other cookbooks, but are clear, straightforward, and effective. Finally, the book itself is beautiful. The photos are mouth-watering and the layout is elegant. This is a book I would be happy to give as a gift (to someone who either makes her own stock or whose self-esteem won’t suffer if she occasionally opens a can).

Unlike so many other TV-companion books, the book stands on its own as a full-fledged, useful cookbook. You don’t need to see the programs to use the book. (I did finally ask for a tape of one of Prescott’s shows, though, to see if she was as autocratic in front of the camera as she is in print. She’s not. In fact, her show is fun — informative, informal, and jocular, with a completely unexpected male harem of cooking students stirring the pots and rolling out the dough.

If you appreciate, or can live with, or can simply ignore Prescott’s opinionated approach to writing a cookbook, Jill Prescott’s Ecole de Cuisine provides a wonderful set of French/Continental cooking lessons and many excellent recipes in a compact volume.

Jill Prescott's Ecole de Cuisine (Canada, UK)

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