As generous as she is accomplished, Amernick wants home cooks to be able to do what she does; even in the introduction, she explains that she regrets the organization of her 1992 book, Special Desserts
, which required page-flipping between recipes to produce some of her more complicated pieces. The new book compensates by risking repetition: for instance, listing ingredients and technique for pastry cream twice in five pages, with a very minor variation—two tablespoons coffee extract for Coffee Eclairs after Robert and two tablespoons Pear William plus heavy cream for Custard-Filled Babas with Pear William. Some cooks will be delighted with the scheme and fascinated by the nuanced differences in the repeated recipes; others may feel babied. Similarly, readers with a feel for history will cherish anecdotes from the author's years in the White House kitchen and her fond relationships with bygone culinary stars, while those in a hurry to get baking may skim the interstitial matter. But everyone—newcomer and seasoned pro—will find solid and sometimes revelatory information about such basic matters as oven temperature. And the triple chocolate terrine she devised when working for Jean-Louis Palladin at the Watergate restaurant is a simple (though tricky) classic that's worth the price of admission. (Apr.)
