This book lost a star because there is no American barbecue sauce recipe. I believe that barbecue sauce is the quintessential American sauce and it should have been included. You could argue that tomato ketchup and yellow mustard are the most American sauces, but there aren't recipes for those in this cookbook either. You could also say that ranch dressing is the most American sauce of them all, but you won't find that amongst the "salad sauces". The only sauce from the Americas is Mexican salsa and there's not even a chimichurri sauce.

What this cookbook is great for are ALL of the classical French & (mostly western) European sauces, cheffy fine-dining sauces, molecular gastronomical sauces, medieval European sauces!!!, a whole chapter of Asian sauces, and Italian pasta sauces. Many of the sauce recipes have a recipe to show how to use the sauce in a finished dish. Quite a lot of the sauces have suggestions for how they can be improved with all of the chemicals of molecular gastronomy, but the majority of the recipes can be made with ingredients available at your neighborhood grocery store plus an average liquor store if you avoid the recipes that call for truffles and sea urchin.

For me, the book is worth the purchase price for the medieval, renaissance-era, and other historical recipes. That was a pleasant surprise to find in the book! Despite being a book geared toward chefs, the recipes aren't too complicated. ( )

Another masterpiece on the art of cooking from James Beard Award-winning author James Peterson. This is one of the few books on cooking that I continually return to. Making great sauce is an extremely difficult skill, at least for me, yet James Peterson has presented all of the classical sauces in an easy, and accessible, manner. It is a book that I highly recommend to all aspiring chefs. ( )

This seems like a good reference book for sauces. Can anyone suggest others that they think are just as good if not better?

How and why of any sauce you might need. ( )

This is a classic! Very thorough. All you ever needed to know about the basic sauces. ( )