What a treat! For her new PBS series, Child invited 26 chefs into her own kitchen in her Cambridge home to show their stuff while she cooked with them and asked questions. Although this is the companion volume to the series, it stands on its own as a collaboration between some of our best chefs and our longtime favorite chef of all. Child's guests include not only talented restaurant chefs but also such luminaries as cookbook author and authority Carol Field (The Italian Baker. Menus are quite complicated, with Child often emphasizing that a particular dish is for those who "love to cook," but she and her staff have made the recipes accessible to home cooks. There are ahead-of-time notes, suggestions for less-complicated substitutions, and lots of boxes on techniques and ingredients. Throughout it all, Child's inimitable voice and indomitable enthusiasm comes through, whether she is describing how to make a particularly complicated dish-"rapidly prepare the following, juggling pans and spoons and cooking everything all at once"-or explaining an unusual technique for pastry dough that fascinated her. An essential purchase, of course.
