The Complete Book of Sauces: Essential Recipes for Cooking, Baking & Entertaining - Perfect for Home Chefs, Dinner Parties & Gourmet Meals

A fantastically useful cookbook, with no pretensions of grandeur. No spectacular colour photographs (I think the only photo is the one on the cover!), but occasional simple line drawings scattered through the text, which surely covers just about every sauce that you've ever heard of and many, many more!Nice-sized text so that you don't have to peer at the page to read the list of ingredients. The paper isn't glossy but matter-of-fact plain and workaday, almost begging to have sauce-fingerprints liberally scattered across the pages. The book is squarely aimed at people who like getting in the kitchen and trying new flavours, rather than at those who like sitting reading glossy coffee-table type cookbooks.The book's categorised into the basic sauce types:- Stocks- White sauces- Wine sauces- Emulsified butter sauces- Mayonnaises- Compound butters- Marinades and barbeque sauces- Tomato sauces- Pasta sauces- Salsas- Salad dressings- Fruit sauces- Sweet saucesThere are both simple and extravagant sauces, all clearly described with the full list of ingredients followed by the technique used to create the sauce. Some ingredients in the more complex sauces will be hard to find, but all of the everyday sauces and ingredients are there too.At the back of the book there's an extremely useful section which categorises all of the recipes according to the food which they best accompany. For example, "Sauces for beef dishes", "Sauces for Egg dishes", "Sauces for Chicken", "Sauces for barbeques" etc. It's an imaginative way of expanding a cook's repertoire in the kitchen and encouraging one to try something a bit different. My only criticism with this section is that it should have given the page number next to each sauce mentioned. Instead, having chosen the sauce you want to try, you then have to look it up in the index. The index itself is comprehensive.This is a book for cooking with, and a great addition to my kitchen shelf. If you're enthusiastic about cooking then you'll be referring to this little number again and again. Brilliant.