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Cooking with Verjuice

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Author: Maggie Beer
Publisher: Penguin Global
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$18.00~~
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

2 reviews
Sales Rank: 628884

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 168
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.4

ISBN: 0143000918
Dewey Decimal Number: 641
EAN: 9780143000914
ASIN: 0143000918

Publication Date: August 22, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes, was once a staple of French provincial cooking. It lends a gentle acidity to food and is lemony but not harsh on the palate, fresh but not too tart. Its balance of acidity and sweetness make it a marvelous ingredient, particularly in sauces and dressings. Maggie Beer is renowned for her love of regional produce and for championing traditional methods. After working for years to perfect her verjuice, she now sells it commercially, and her interest in the product has encouraged other grapegrowers to produce their own versions. In Cooking with Verjuice, Maggie reveals all you need to know about verjuice and offers countless tips and recipes.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

A very nice culinary discovery of an old ingredient. June 13, 2006
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

`Cooking With Verjuice' by Australian culinary writer and vineyard co-owner, Maggie Beer is more than a cookbook, but less than a book on `an indispensable ingredient in the kitchen'. The `more than' is the book's history of verjuice and how Ms. Beer's vineyard came to produce verjuice as a supplement using excess grape product when conditions were not good for winemaking. The real foodies among us, especially those who lust after owning their own vineyard can learn a lot from this side of the story, but I suspect that constitutes a very small percentage of the total audience for the book.

That verjuice is NOT an `indispensable' ingredient in the kitchen is announced by the fact that I simply cannot find the product among the 43 different varieties of vinegar at my local megamart, Wegmans, the last time I checked (to my far flung correspondents, I recognize that it may be there now, but this would be a very recent addition!). It is certainly not stocked by Walmart, Giant, Pathmark, or any other big food change in southeastern Pennsylvania (I didn't check Whole Foods, since that is too far away to simply satisfy my curiosity!). But never fear, when I checked Amazon.com for verjuice, there were at least a half dozen different brands from both the United States and France, especially `Verjuice Central', the southwestern corner of France.

What verjuice is, to me at least, is a tasty ingredient which is needed to make authentic French provincial dishes and as a replacement for vinegar and lemon juice in vinaigrettes and other sauces where people have a low tolerance for high acidity. It's really a shame that the acidity level isn't printed on Verjuice packages, as this would give an excellent gauge for how a give quantity of verjuice will taste on the tart scale compared to a 5% apple vinegar or a 7.5% white wine vinegar.

This brings me to my biggest complaint about the book. While this is not onerous to an American who is familiar with both metric and conventional kitchen measurements, I do find it annoying that the recipes in this book mix the two. Larger volumes are given in milliliters (ml), while smaller volumes are given in teaspoons (5 ml) and tablespoons (15 ml). In almost every other regard, this is a very nice little book, if a bit pricy with a list price of $18. If you can get a copy for less than half this price, it is well worth the cost.

For someone who has over 500 cookbooks, I often find that a book carries its weight for me if it provides me with but one unusual fact or recipe. In the case of this book, it is the enumeration of verjuice's affinities for other foods where it carries the day for me. While the primary impression one gets from tasting verjuice is of very mild vinegar, one also gets a strong hint of apples and of fruit in general. This makes verjuice an excellent companion to other fruits and to nuts (especially walnuts), mushrooms, pork, and game meats.

One small attraction of the book is its rather charming use of Australian terms which, with just a little reflection, we Yanks should be able to figure out, such as when the author refers to crayfish as `yabbies'. By far the most useful feature of the book for sure is the first chapter of recipes for sauces and dressings, where verjuice shows its ability to replace vinegar in many classic preparations, especially a verjuice version of `mock beurre blanc', called a `warm seafood salad', with no butter calories or cholesterol.

If you are interested in verjuice recipes, but you don't want to go out of your way to get this book, then an even better book is the new edition of Paula Wolfert's `The Cooking of Southwest France' which includes many classic verjuice recipes, although not necessarily as many as you will find in this book.

A very nice foodie read!

5 out of 5 stars

Great exploration of an unusual ingredient March 29, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

If you've found your way to this page, you probably already know that verjus is the juice of unripe grapes. It has a mild acidity, not as strong as lemon or vinegar, and with a hint of wine.

Because I kept running across recipes that called for verjus, I finally bought a bottle from Williams Sonoma (which I think you can get via Amazon). Naturally, after that, all those recipes seemed to disappear (does that happen to you too?); the bottle sat unopened for quite a while. So, since this book was reasonably priced and promised an overview of this unusual (and somewhat "in") ingredient, I sprang for it. I'm rather glad I did, but there are a few caveats.

The author, Maggie Beer, turns out to be the manufacturer of the verjus I purchased, and is from Australia; I've seen verjus sold directly by California winemakers, so hers isn't the only choice. She gives a short history of verjus, which is interesting but doesn't go on too long; a short explanation of its manufacture; and a background on how she got into the business. The rest is divided into sauces and condiments; vegetables; fish and shellfish; poultry; meat; and desserts. Obviously, verjus is a flexible ingredient! No photos, alas.

Most of the recipes are appealing, and they are indeed chosen to show off verjus' virtues. So far, I've only cooked one: chicken breasts with rosemary, pine nuts, and verjus (which also has raisins, not mentioned in the title), with her suggested side dish of soft polenta. Delicious. It was quite simple to put together, and took less than an hour start-to-finish. I now have my eye on Almond and Garlic Soup with Grapes, and a filet of pork with sage and verjus. None of these are very elaborate or complex recipes, but they all feel slightly special.

The caveat is that this is an Australian cookbook, and is not "translated" for American cooks. I dare say that most of us can cope with ingredients in milliliters or kg (my measuring cups have multiple measures, and I'm sure yours do). What throws me off is the different names for some ingredients; from context I can figure out that "yabbies" are like crawfish, and that "chook" is another word for chicken, but I haven't yet figured out what a "scotch fillet steak" is (filet mignon?). Also, of course, the ingredients reflect the common foodstuffs of the area: more lamb and rabbit than we see here, for example.

Somehow, this makes the book charming. And now that bottle of verjus is open, I'm sure to use this cookbook again!

I recommend this book, especially if you like to try new ingredients. I think it's also be a fun gift for a foodie friend; it's inexpensive, and you can be fairly sure your friend doesn't already have it on his bookshelf.

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