Review: A Linguist Pastry Chef?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 19, 2013
I bought this book thinking that it would be something similar to Jacques Pepin'sThe Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchenonly from a pastry chef's viewpoint, but I was disappointed.Instead of a personal, behind the scenes look at the training and routine of a pastry chef in France, it spent as much time on the oddities of language, specifically Japanese, and communication as it did enlightening the reader on the preparation of puff pastry.The author touches briefly on her background as a student of modern languages but doesn't really explain why she tossed aside an education from a prestigious university to spend her days plunging her arm into a vat of chocolate mousse for a living. (I certainly hope her arm was clean.) Instead she choses to ramble about her relationship with her Japanese co-workers at the bakery, learning their language, and bits and pieces about her prep work in the kitchen and difficulties with some specific tasks.I would have been much more interested in reading about her training, how and why she made the career change, why she chose a Japanese bakery over a traditional French one (she *was* in France, after all), and similar baking and bakery-centric stories and reflections. It would have certainly made for a more interesting and enjoyable book.Not recommended unless you are interested in anecdotes about learning the Japanese language in a bakery setting.