Anne Willan's Cook It Right: Achieve Perfection With Every Dish You Cook

The founder of the La Varenne cooking schools demonstrates how to achieve and recognize the perfect state of "doneness" in a wide variety of foods, with the help of comparison photographs and more than two hundred taste-tempting recipes. Tour.

British cook Willan may be the most persistent teacher in the cooking world. Her latest effort is an exhaustive, well-illustrated volume specifically tailored to the American market. Through carefully worded text and color photographs, she explains how to make foods turn out right every time. The book's photographs not only show the perfect kitchen product, but also help identify problems caused by undercooking or overcooking. Tips for rescuing these failures are also noted. The recipes themselves function as roadmaps, leaving it up to the imagination and technical skill of the cook to produce from their own personalized variations. Willan's latest assumes less knowledge on the cook's part and is decidedly less Francocentric than her earlier comprehensive instruction manual, La Varenne Pratique (1989). Mark Knoblauch