Amadan na Briona

I am not a "foodie" and I'm a lousy cook, but I love cooking shows, the Food Channel, and interesting books about food and cooking. This is not an interesting book about food and cooking.

Ruhlman is a writer who went to chef school (at the Culinary Institute of America, America's premiere cooking school) to write about it, but one of his teachers told him he wasn't a real chef. This pissed Ruhlman off, so he decided to prove he could become a real chef, and he went through the whole program with as much determination as any of the other students.

This could be an interesting saga, especially written by a professional writer, but instead it reads like the journal of a cooking school student. He tells us about his classes, his teachers, his services, now and then rambles a bit about brown sauce or tells us something about one of his fellow students, and just keeps going like that all the way to the end. There are no interesting facts or surprising revelations about food or cooking school, just a very dry, matter-of-fact account of the industry. Ruhlman's writing is journalistic and without personality.

I suppose if you're thinking about going to cooking school, this is a good book to get a taste of what it's like. But compared to, for example, Trevor Corson's The Story of Sushi or one of Anthony Bourdain's books, this book was just dull.