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(More customer reviews)`Emeril's Delmonico' by (nominally) the poster boy of celebrity chefs, Emeril Lagasse, is a very nice celebrity chef cookbook. It is certainly more appealing to me than the last three of Emeril's books I have reviewed, and even better than the only one of Lagasse's books, `From Emeril's Kitchens' to which I gave five stars.
Since I have so many different cookbooks, it often takes but one recipe in a new book to turn on my interest. That recipe in this book is the one for turtle soup. I have been pouring over soup cookbooks for months looking for a good turtle soup recipe, but there are none to be found. Even better, Emeril has given us a source for turtle meat and no warnings about these beasts being on any endangered species list, so I suspect the turtle meat source is from farm raised turtles.
My discovering that recipe put me in a good frame of mind to look kindly on this book and once I was settled in, I was pretty happy with what I saw.
For starters, there is a brief history of the Delmonico's restaurant name and its various incarnations in both New York City, where the Delmonico family opened the original restaurant in the 1820's. Yes, that is over 180 years ago! The New Orleans Delmonicos founders have no family connection to the New York restaurant, although the New Orleans founders did ask for and receive permission to use the famous New York restaurant's name. The family that has owned and run the New Orleans Delmonico's sold their name and location to Emeril Lagasse's company in 1997. Emeril reopened the restaurant under his name in 1998, with many recipes carried over from the earlier owners' regime, created by chefs employed by the earlier owners.
In a nutshell, the cuisine at Emeril's Delmonico as represented in this book is a high end synthesis of local Cajun and Creole dishes with fine dining dishes made famous by great restaurants of the past in New York, New Orleans, and other famous dishes such as, for example, the Caesar salad from Tijuana, Mexico. While this is food for `high end' dining, it is not really the same as what you would expect to find from `haute cuisine' shops such as those of Thomas Keller, Charlie Trotter, Alan Ducasse, or Daniel Boulud. The good news here is that while many dishes require a lot of ingredients, some of which may be a bit unfamiliar to the average amateur chef, they should almost always be easy to find, with the possible exception of that elusive turtle meat and crawfish, which I have never seen in the flesh here in the darkest Lehigh Valley, even at our high end megamart.
One very easy way I had to gauge the quality of the recipes was to look at Emeril's recipe for Caesar Salad. It is actually almost identical to my very favorite method from Mark Bittman's `How to Cook Everything', including the use of a coddled egg and anchovies in the dressing. Emeril even goes Bittman one better by writing it up in such a way that the Caesar dressing can be made in advance, necessary for restaurant use. My only concern is that Emeril puts a bit of raw, chopped garlic in the dressing rather than rubbing the cut garlic on the salad bowl. I have made Caesar salad with raw garlic and if one is not very careful, it can be just a bit too strong a bite for some people.
Many of these recipes have lots of different ingredients, which involves a lot of prep work. The recipe for hearty vegetable soup, for example, calls for sixteen (16) ingredients, nine (9) of which require peeling and chopping. Surprisingly, one of the ingredients is a commercially prepared chicken base, even though the book gives recipes for at least two different chicken stocks. The plus side of this picture is that the instructions for making this soup are extremely simple. And, this is pretty true of most recipes in this book. And, while you need some good basic kitchen skills and equipment, you don't need a CIA degree to make these dishes. One of my family's favorite dishes is fried oysters, and Emeril gives us a very nice and simple recipe which should be easy, as long as you know your way around a deep frying rig, whether it be a high end fryolator, a Fry Daddy, or a Dutch oven plus thermometer. This is important, because Emeril doesn't give us the tutorial on making the oil deep enough and gives no more details than to state the temperature of the frying oil, letting it up to us to realize you will need a candy / deep frying thermometer.
Before I had the epiphany over finding the turtle soup recipe, it seemed to me that Emeril was being just a bit excessive in putting in all the recipes for staples such as mayonnaise, but I changed my mind. Even if you don't use them, at least it tells you that at Emeril's Delmonico, they make their own mayonnaise, and here is how they do it. On the other hand, I was more than casually interested in seeing Emeril's own recipe for Worcester sauce. This is probably not something you want to make on a regular basis, unless you happen to be opening `Joe's Delmonico' in New Hope, but if you wanted to entertain and really aim to impress, this is one way to do it.
Emeril, unlike some other celebrity cookbook authors such as Rachael Ray, is someone whose books you have to examine one by one, because he covers so many genres, but this one I recommend to everyone who cooks, especially to anyone with more than a passing interest in old school New York / New Orleans restaurant dining.
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Emeril's Delmonico: A Restaurant with a Past
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