Cookbook Review: Guy Savoy's Simple Recipes for the Home Cook

Okay, so during the pandemic, I'm not going to restaurants.  Which, if you know me, is remarkable.  I'm the kind of guy that goes to a bar for lunch to get a burger and a couple beers while I think about where to go for dinner.  So instead, I've been cooking lavish dinners at my house.  Sometimes it's trying new things out, sometimes it's dabbling in a cuisine I know nothing about, and sometimes, it's checking out a new cookbook.  

Well, this one's not new, but it's new to me.  It came out in 2003.  Amazon wants $45 for a new copy, which seems high, so I wonder if it's out of print.  I got my copy used for like $20, but it's been sitting on my to-read pile for about 6 years.

The Concept: Conceptually, the book's actually pretty frustrating.  Guy Savoy is a Michelin 3-star guy, and I, the reader, don't necessarily care about his home cooking recipes.  Like, I get that the trend of cookbooks telling you exactly how to make 3* food is relatively recent, but maybe if there was just a little more high-end gastronomy, it would have been cool.  Just don't get this book thinking you're getting a look into a Michelin-level Parisian kitchen, because it sure isn't that.  However, I love French country cooking, too, so what the hell?  Let's do this.

The Specs: The book has 6 chapters, with between 4 and 24 recipes in each.  It's a manageable size at just under 200 pages, and I read it in a little under a week, just in my spare time.  

What's Good: Well, it's great for inspiration.  There are so many dishes that sound fantastic, and seem really fun to try.  The creamy lentils with sauteed duck foie gras seemed awesome, and I really want to try out his sardine escabeche method, subbing in some of the local bluefish I always catch when I'm trying to catch red drum.  If I ever find a source for veal kidneys, I'd love to try them in mustard sauce like he does on page 102.  It's not all difficult, involved dishes with hard-to-source ingredients, either.  There is a recipe for a salad of haricots verts with a creme fraiche vinaigrette that looks really nice, and a simple pumpkin soup.  The photos are ok (not great), and a solid half of the dishes get one.  (A photo for every dish is ideal, but some is better than none.)  Bottom line, this is a decent book to thumb through when thinking about menu design, and it has more to it than just classics.  It also gets bonus point for having a chapter entirely on gratins.  That's a first for my cookbook collection, and who doesn't like gratins.

What Stinks:  The recipes have... problems.  I cooked a total of 5 dishes out of the book, and there was at least 1 issue with each one, and I will get into specifics later.  The general problem seemed to be that Savoy (and his writer, the normally reliable Patricia Wells) skipped a lot of steps in the recipes.  They were rarely more than one page long, and usually with a lot of negative space.  The trouble is that Thomas Keller proved that we don't have to tolerate authors that only show some of their cards, and now books like this strike me as absolute bullshit.  There is no WAY to adequately communicate how to make pot-au-feu in 11 sentences, and yet Savoy and Wells do exactly that.  I call shenanigans.  Teach me, don't tease me.

Recipes Tested:

Steamed Green Asparagus with Sauce Lauris: This recipe consists of a method for steaming asparagus and a nice little mayonnaise-y sauce with creme fraiche and paprika to dip.  (Apparently, Lauris is a town known for asparagus production.)  This was the closest thing I found to a problem-free recipe, but it's also one of the simplest in the book.  The only issue is that the steaming method outlined was wonky and hard to follow.  It has you dropping a tied bundle of asparagus spears into 2 quarts of boiling water, which doesn't seem like steaming, it seems like blanching.  But that can't be right, because it said to cook the asparagus for five minutes, which would yield baby food.  So I just blanched it like a regular person.  The sauce was easy and great.

Gratin of Purple Artichokes: Easily the best recipe I tried, but still a little peculiar.  A bed of sauteed mushrooms sits beneath a layer of artichokes glazed in cream, thyme, and veal stock.  This is then topped with a handful of bread cubes (not croutons, mind you), and shavings of parmigiano reggiano, and crisped in the broiler.  This was a great dish.  Since it was Thanksgiving, I supercharged mine by using a mixture of enokis and chanterelles instead of the button mushrooms the recipe called for, and added a little truffle butter to the mushroom layer.  You should do this too, if you choose to make this dish.  The problem with this recipe is that he has you spend all sorts of time glazing the artichokes in cream and veal stock, and then, when you've got this amazing pan of reduced, rich, flavorful goodness, it expects you to just throw it away.  The book just says to lift the chokes out of it and put them into a baking dish.  Why?  What's the point?  And I didn't miss a step, either.  They specifically say it's a 'dry' gratin.  I just put that in there anyway, and it was awesome.  And for the record, I'm a big fan of the fresh bread cubes over a gratin.  They toast nicely in the broiler, but stay a little yielding.  It's a trick I will be stealing.

Sausage and Potato Gratin with Bone Marrow:  Man, this one was really, really excellent, and completely maddening.  A bed of sauteed cabbage and onions, topped with a layer of potatoes and sausage, topped with slices of bone marrow, and broiled until the marrow gets melty.  The marrow, however, was a victim of this book's habit of giving you nonsensical instructions.  First, it just calls for 7 ounces of bone marrow, which, if a reader can get it at all, will certainly be a daunting task to get it out of the bones, a challenge the book offers no help on.  Then, the book lays out this little gem:  "Place the marrow in a saucepan and cover with cold water.  Bring to a boil.  Remove from the heat and drain."  Like, in what universe does this not just yield rendered beef fat?  The picture has nice slices of marrow resting on top of the gratin, but there is a 0% of achieving that result by following these instructions.  If I wanted to drizzle the gratin with beef fat, I could have accomplished that a hell of a lot easier by just melting a piece of fat cap, and not spent $13 on goddamn marrow bones.  As it is, I'm kind of a badass, so I was able to scrape up the marrow into little plastic-wrap torchons, and ice it, and get my nice slices, but I'm not that much of a badass, because I left it in the broiler too long, and it just melted away to nothing.  I'll own that.  I don't get angry when I screw up, but I HATE it when a poorly written recipe leads to struggle town.  Having said that, this was just a fantastic dish.  [Also, just want to send a shout out, I used Tank Johnson's delicious Holy City Hog sausage for this dish.  Spicier then a French guy would have been ok with, but I wanted to try it out.  5/5 for flavor, 3.5/5 for texture.  It was a little mealy, which means it was a little smeared, either in the grind or the stuffing.]

Rabbit Stew: In this case, the 'stew' was actually a true civet, with the sauce thickened with liver, which I had never tried, so I wanted to give it a go.  This was another case of a recipe that should have had a few more steps than what was printed.  First, it called for a 4-5 pound rabbit, which is insanely large.  Then, it asks you to ask your butcher to cut it up for you.  First, that's completely chickenshit for a cookbook.  Lazy.  Second, it doesn't say how many pieces to cut it into.  (I went rear leg, foreleg, and cut the saddle in two down the spine, and once across.)  Third, where in the USA is there a butcher that has rabbit any way other than frozen, if they have it at all?  Explain to me the scenario wherein I walk into a butcher shop, and walk out ten minutes later with a perfectly cut-up rabbit.  It's just not possible.  At any rate, the recipe said to stew the pieces for an hour, which isn't nearly enough time to get it tender, but postponing dinner a couple more hours wasn't really an option.  And I was using 1.5# bunnies.  What if I'd found a big one?  How tough would that have been?  Also, the sauce didn't really thicken.  I think I'd have needed more liver to make it work, but again, bad recipe.  I don't have good data on how big the liver in a 5# rabbit is, but maybe a hint at how much liver to liquid to use would have been, you know, helpful.  Also, a strangely annoying recipe.  Just weird extra steps.  Like, you marinate the rabbit in wine, thyme, and mirepoix.  Then, the next day, you strain the marinade, pick out the thyme and bay leaf, pick the rabbit pieces out of the vegetables, sear them, then add the veg back, saute that for a while, add the marinade back, and add a new bouquet garni with thyme and bay leaf.  Like, there has to be a more efficient way to do that.  They just had you going around your ass to get to your elbow.  

Raspberry Clafoutis:  Now THIS was what I wanted.  A nice, simple, well-written recipe that didn't piss me off all that much.  I mean, yeah, it pissed me off.  The recipe called for 4 cups of berries, so, like a quart.  I didn't have that many berries, and my baking dish wasn't that big, so I only used 2 cups or so.  I still made a full recipe of the batter, just in case.  And it wasn't NEAR enough.  This was no big deal, since I had plenty more ingredients, and the batter took like 10 seconds to make, but it's another careless recipe-writing mistake.  Irritating.  Either the amount of berries called for was comically high, or the amount of batter yielded was comically low.  At any rate, never mind, because this dessert was fantastic and original!  A flourless clafoutis!  The batter was just creme fraiche, eggs, sugar, and liquor!  That's really handy, what with gluten allergy being de rigueur these days.  It was light and rich, which is the perfect combination.  What a revelation!  (And just so you know, the ratio was 6 eggs, 8 oz. creme fraiche, 1/2 C sugar, and 1 oz. liqueur, so there, now you con't need to buy this damn book.  Butter and sugar a baking dish, add berries, pour that over, and bake at 350 till mostly set.  Delicious.)

The Verdict:  This book was frustrating.  The recipes were lazily written and riddled with inaccuracies.  Furthermore, they were badly hurt by a total lack of make-ahead instructions, meaning putting out a dinner with 2-3 dishes in one night was like juggling chainsaws.  With most of the dishes, I felt like I could have made better food, more easily, by just having the dishes described to me and figuring out how to make them myself.  But the worst thing about this book is that I'm nagged by this question: Who, exactly, is this book for?  The recipes are too dumbed-down to be interesting to a professional chef, but so poorly written that any amateur that picks this up is simply bound to have problems.  It works well enough as a source of culinary inspiration,  but I could have just gone online and looked at the menu at Restaurant Guy Savoy for zero dollars, in five minutes, and saved both money and time.  For a book showing how Michelin-level food really works, check out the Big Fat Duck Cookbook.  For a good book of French country recipes, read the excellent Country Cooking of France, by Anne Willan.  Hell, for a book showing a Michelin-level chef doing food you can be inspired by,  but do at home, read Gordon Ramsay's Passion for Flavor.  Bottom Line, there isn't one thing this book does that some other book doesn't do better.  Save your money.  2/5

Technical/Nerdy Bonus: The rabbit stew used a 24 hour red wine marinade.  It didn't say to cook the alcohol off, like we all learned in the French Laundry Cookbook.  I split the stew in two batches, to see if it made a difference.  There wasn't much difference at all in the two rabbits, the one marinated in raw wine and the one marinated in cooked.  I mean, they both kinda sucked, but they sucked in exactly the same way.  Inconclusive.

-JS