Allen, with his impressive history of food writing, culinary reference books, and food history books for general audiences, has outdone himself with a compact, highly useful book about sauces for foodies, students, researchers, and culinary professionals . Unlike James Peterson's classic tome Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Saucemaking (1991)and Raymond Sokolov's The Saucier's Apprentice (1976),which focus mainly on production of classic European sauces, Allen dives into the origin of sauces from early medieval recipes to the evolution of classical French cuisine, to major sauces from other significant culinary traditions. Allen also goes one step further in his sauce book to include what would be defined as sauces in molecular gastronomy: solutions, suspensions, gels, composites, and foams. The book includes clearly written sauce recipes that anyone can make, black-and-white photographs of popular sauce brands, and eleven pages of notes and references citing primary source material, classic culinary reference books and food history books, and articles from well-regarded culinary publications. This volume belongs in large public and academic libraries with culinary collections and in community college libraries that support culinary arts programs.

Choice Reviews

Extensively researched and annotated, this is a must-read book for any creative professional chef, culinary instructor or inspired home cook. It will broaden the reader’s view of the sauces that now enrich the culinary cultures of every nation as well as spark a host of new creative ideas.

We Are Chefs: Magazine of the American Culinary Federation

A truly comprehensive world tour of sauces, with recipes for every sauce you can imagine (and some you can't). This book is a lively and engaging fresh take on what sauces are and how to define them, with scientific principles and a healthy dose of humor, a century after Escoffier.

Maryann Tebben, author of Sauces: A Global History; Head of the Center for Food Studies at Bard College at Simon's Rock