Lesley Chesterman - Make Every Dish Delicious: Modern Classics and Essential Tips for Total Kitchen Confidence

Make Every Dish Delicious

Modern Classics and Essential Tips for Total Kitchen Confidence

Lesley Chesterman

Foreword by Naomi Duguid

To my sister, Lorraine, my mother, Sylvia, and my grandmother Lillian, the three women who always encouraged me and inspired me in the kitchen

Lesley Chesterman is a food and media rock star in Quebec, in both English and French. Apart from her twenty years of influential and informative restaurant reviews in the Montreal Gazette, she had a weekly reporting gig on Radio-Canada for a decade and continues to make countless other radio and television appearances as judge, commentator, and reporter. Lesley is so well known and so respected in French-speaking Canada that Chez Lesley, the award-winning French edition of this book, sold more than 20,000 copies thus far.

And now, at last, the English-speaking world has access to her wit and kitchen wisdom. At last, I say, for Lesley is a brilliant home cook and one of the most deeply knowledgeable food people I know. Shes fueled by a deep curiosity about food and guided by her excellent palate.

We first met when I was on a book tour in Montreal about twenty years ago. I spent an afternoon cooking in her kitchen as we chatted about my book and many other things; the result was a long article in the Montreal Gazette. But better than the publicity for the book was the friendship that took root. Over the years since, weve spent time together in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, in the kitchen and at the dinner tabletalking, sometimes disagreeing, learning from each other, and laughing. When Lesleys around, the conversation is lively, opinionated, and informative.

A generous teacher, she wants us all to enjoy cooking, and to be confident in our kitchens. Shes been a big help to me, most recently by explaining the mysteries of flan and custard, the technicalities of which I really did not understand.

Whats special is the energy Lesley puts into everything she takes on. Her recipes are tested and retested until she is satisfied that shes figured out how to squeeze the maximum flavor from her ingredients. Once the dish is where she wants it, she writes the recipe and explanations so clearly that theyre easy to follow and reliable. This urge to get it right means that her recipes, like the food at her table, are a real pleasure for cook and eater.

Naomi Duguid, 2022

Ten years ago, when I was approached to write a cookbook, I laughed. The last thing the world needs is another recipe for carbonara, I told the editor who contacted me. Ill never forget her reply: Maybe not. But I think they might like your recipe for carbonara. Perhaps she had a point, because carbonara, like so many dishes, is a recipe I have worked on tirelessly to get right. All those hits, misses, and little adaptations Ive made over the years have transformed that classic into a very personal dish. That quest for fitting a recipe into my dream of what it should taste like extends to most everything I make.

How long have I been on the quest for delicious? Forever. Not that I was telling my mother her baby cereal wasnt right (You call this oatmeal?), but for as long as I can remember, I have been trying to figure out how to make the most of a dish. And once that interest took hold, I tackled everything from quiche to croquembouche. Not only was it fun and challenging, I got to feed my friends, family, and myself along the way. I was hooked.

This food fascination of mine turned into a career. In the early 90s, I attended cooking school for three years and became a professional pastry chef. For someone who found broccoli exciting, imagine my thrill at making chocolates, ice cream, and croissants from scratch. Wed make spongy genoise cakes, pipe delicate cookies, ice birthday cakes, and roll up thousands of cocoa-coated truffles. This opportunity to create something beautiful out of simple ingredients was endlessly stimulating. Somewhere along the way, though, between making sugar paste flowers and hundreds of mousse cakes, I realized a lot of the desserts I was making as a pastry chef looked great but didnt always taste great. Pastry making is so entrenched with technique, alas, that the flavour often gets lost along the way.

At the height of my pastry chef years, I headed to Los Angeles to eat at Campanile, a restaurant co-owned by chef Nancy Silverton. A week before I had been immersed in nougatine, multitiered wedding cakes, and finicky French pastries. But at Campanile, the dessert I ordered was a sourdough molten chocolate cake served with vanilla bean ice cream. I scoffed at the presentation. With no quenelles on the plate, fruit fans, or sugar roses, it looked like something a home cook would make. But after the first bite, I had an epiphany. Silvertons cake didnt look like much. But what it lacked in looks, it made up for in spades with taste. The sophistication was in the incredible flavours: intensely chocolate and boldly vanilla. The hot and cold temperature contrast was amazing, and the textures, from the crisp shell of the cake to the lusciousness of the ice cream, had me transfixed.

That dessert changed my whole outlook on food. All the innovative techniques and Marie-Antoinette presentations are pointless if the food isnt delicious. The challenge in a dish isnt making it pretty, but finding the balance between flavour, texture, even temperature. I dont think I made another sugar flower from that day forward. From then on, my only goal was finding a way to make every dish delicious.

From 1998 to 2018, that mindset continued when I worked as the fine-dining critic for the Montreal Gazette. I was fortunate enough to not only taste the food of some of the worlds greatest chefs but to share my impressions with readers as well.

Comparing home cooks to chefs is like comparing the tortoise to the hare. Chefs live and breathe cooking. Most begin their profession at a young age and work long hours in a competitive environment. Their creativity is on call constantly, having to entice customers with every morsel on that plate. To do that, they rely on complex techniques, exquisite ingredients, expensive machinery, and a team of hands to help them realize their vision. Its a huge challenge.

That said, their goal is the same as that of the best home cooks: to serve food that will make people happy. But despite all the hoopla and posh surroundings, chefs dont always succeed. Some overthink it, some underthink it. Even at the highest level of cooking, finding that perfect balance of flavours isnt all that different from deciding how much sugar to add to your morning cup of coffee.

The longer I worked as a restaurant critic, the faster my interest in fancy food waned. Dont get me wrong: I love meticulous knife cuts, the snap of well-tempered chocolate, a perfectly balanced sauce, and a flaky-as-all-get-out croissant. But the priority must be flavour. We cant all cook like chefs, but anyone can make a delicious meal.

When planning out this book, I thought of it as a sort of guide to get novice cooks into the kitchen and offer experienced cooks new recipes to play withwith plenty of suggestions and hand-holding along the way. My goal was to offer a well-rounded repertoire of dishes you could make for many occasions. The recipes are both sweet and savoury, because the sweet really do require specific instructions, and as a former pastry chef, I couldnt resist! Nothing here is too complicated, though I do understand words such as easy and advanced are relative to ones cooking experience.