Pros: A gorgeous cookbook, well-written recipes for superb dishes
Cons: No shortcuts, demanding recipes, and you pay dearly for many color photographs
The Bottom Line: Recommended for the most serious home cooks or for coffee-table cookbook collectors. Not for those who want thirty-minute gourmet meals.
lyagushka's Full Review: Nancy Oakes, Lisa Weiss, Pamela Mazzola - Boulevar...
"Sumptuous" is the word that comes immediately to mind when perusing this jewel-like cookbook. Boulevard, for those of you who don't reside in the San Francisco bay area, is one of the city's premier restaurants. Opened in 1993, it's been chosen as San Francisco's favorite restaurant by the Zagat survey for the last seven years.
No shortcuts have been taken or offered in bringing the daily fare of this west coast treasure to readers and ambitious home cooks. What that means is that preparing the recipes in this book requires a high degree of confidence and expertise from the home cook, as well as the ability to acquire some rather hard to find ingredients. This could be considered a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the reader and the reader's inclinations. Those looking for quick tips and methodology watered down to the level of the average home cook will be disappointed. Those who buy cookbooks as coffee table ornaments without any intention of cooking the recipes will be pleased. Habitues of Boulevard who want a chic souvenir of their meal here, and can splash out for a $50 cookbook will probably be happy. And those few cooks with the experience and the drive to prepare some of the recipes will be thrilled to have a detailed road map to some exceptional food. If you fall into the first category, I'd advise you not to shell out for the Boulevard cookbook.
The recipes herein are presented as they would appear on the restaurant's menu. There is a separate section for starters, which includes soup, salads, and other appetizers. After that follow the "entree" sections (subdivided into fish, poultry, and meat) and then the desserts and the "pantry basics." This differs from most other cookbooks in that the starches, vegetable side and the sauces are incorporated with a specific main course. For example, here's one of the starters: Maine lobster tail with black pudding, potato mousseline, fennel and leek relish and blood orange jus. That's just a starter, mind you. An example of a full entree would be: fire roasted Angus beef fillet with blue cheese fritters, herb salad, white corn and chanterelles, heirloom tomato hearts and a roasted tomato beef jus. This recipe requires you first to investigate and prepare the pantry recipe for roasted tomatoes in order to prepare the jus.
Even with professional training as a chef, I confess that I felt daunted by the general level of many recipes in this cookbook. It's not so much that I felt unsure as to whether or not I could prepare these recipes; after all I live in the bay area, where every kind of ingredient is easily available, and I can honestly say that I've forgotten more about cooking than most people ever know. The question was whether or not I would be willing to give up an entire weekend to prepare one of these meals single-handedly. Cooking at home is a vastly different proposition than cooking at a restaurant with a battalion of prep cooks and professional equipment at your disposal.
In the end, I decided to tackle bits and pieces of various recipes, something the authors suggest as a possibility in the introduction. Truffles don't exactly make me swoon, so when I wanted to try the Boulevard recipe for black truffle pappardelle, I substituted fresh sage and parsley leaves for the much costlier truffles. I learned a lot from this recipe, which calls for far more egg yolks than I normally use when making fresh pasta. The results were almost too rich for my blood, not that I'm complaining. It was obvious why the portions they recommend per person are small.
I also tried several of their pantry recipes. These are recipes for basic items like aioli or fish fumet that are used as ingredients in other recipes throughout the book. (That's part of what makes the entree recipes so daunting even to those with plenty of technical knowledge under their belts.) The aioli recipe produces such a garlicky, rich condiment that it seems a shame to camouflage it in an ordinary sandwich. It was delicious, and there was never any concern that it would sit around long enough in my home to go bad.
Although the recipes are very well written, there isn't a great deal of hand holding in the Boulevard cookbook. And those who insist that recipes should be fully visible on a single page will be disappointed. Since each main course dish consists of several different recipes, there's no avoiding the need to turn pages as you progress through the recipe. If the recipe you're trying to prepare contains one of the pantry ingredients, you'll really need to dig into the book to finish the dish.
It is possible to read this cookbook just to glean ideas. There are a few bits and pieces scattered throughout the book that aren't really difficult things to prepare, but nonetheless present a striking appearance that can jazz up a more modest plate. For example, the heirloom tomato hearts I mentioned above are just large cubes of differently colored heirloom tomatoes, each one cut from the center of one fruit, with the trimmings being used for something else. Stack together a few of these cubes from tomatoes of different colors and you have a dish that looks interesting and different. Garnish them with a little salt and olive oil and you've got a dish fit for the gods, provided the tomatoes are actually ripe. So even the less ambitious cook can find something to use in this book. Whether such small tips would be worth the steep cover price, I don't know.
Many full page color photographs accompany the intricate recipes in this tome, lending a lavish feeling to the book. My one quibble with the book is that quite a number of these pictures, which must have a lot to do with the hefty $50 price tag, show neither finished dishes nor the steps taken to prepare a dish. Instead, many of them are pictures of the restaurant itself or its staff. This contributes to the sense that this was intended as a souvenir cookbook, rather than something that would actually be used to instruct readers in cookery. The fact that quite a few of the recipes include smaller black-and-white photographs to illustrate techniques for certain recipes only adds to this appearance. Also, the prospect of marring such beautiful pictures with messy hands seems a shame.
You may be tempted to think of this as a coffee-table cookbook, and for those who like such cookbooks, that's fine. But many of the the restaurant's mainstays and the chef's signature dishes really can be prepared by following these recipes. For anyone who relishes the idea of preparing meals of Boulevard's caliber, who doesn't mind making the effort to source the ingredients, or putting in the long hours in the kitchen to make it happen, this cookbook will be a pirates' treasure map to some culinary high adventure. As a cookbook, I would recommend it only to the most serious and dedicated home gourmets. As coffee-table food porn and vicarious gourmand gratification it does pretty well too. If you live to make your dinner guests swoon with delight, you should definitely pick up a copy of this cookbook.
I can also recommend these cookbooks:
• The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook - a trustworthy guide to all the fundamentals of home cooking
• Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian - suitable for slightly more experienced cooks & essential for vegetarians
• Indian Cooking - an excellent cookbook by Jaffrey for beginner cooks, includes many meat dishes
• Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone - Deborah Madison's compendium of vegetarian cookery - great dessert section
• Cooking with Pomiane - a deliciously nostalgic review of culinary history, narrated by a great wit
• Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America - accessible and delicious recipes for nibbles or a hearty meal
• The New Best Recipe - 1000 canonical recipes, perfected
• The Bread Baker's Apprentice - superlative, expert instruction for mastering yeasted breads
• Baking With Julia - Julia Child's award-winning "bakebook", covers all type of baked goods
• Dim Sum - a thorough introduction to these tasty Chinese morsels
• Nigella Express - quick recipes for those who really like to cook
• The Good Egg - fresh & tasty recipes based on the incredible, edible egg
• The Wellness Encyclopedia - an excellent reference guide to the nutritional facts on most anything you could put in your mouth
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