Make Every Dish Delicious

Montreal food critic Lesley Chesterman was once asked to write a cookbook and first turned the idea down, arguing that the world hardly needed another carbonara recipe. An editor answered that readers might still welcome her version, and that reply stayed with her. She had long been refining dishes like carbonara, returning to recipes again and again to make small adjustments or larger rewrites. This book gathers the results of that lifetime of tinkering.

The book opens with chapters on setting up a kitchen and pantry and on core ingredients and preparations such as eggs, butter, stocks and vinaigrettes. It also walks through technical tasks, including making an omelette, deep frying at home and using salt properly.

The recipes move from savoury to sweet and include modern classics: a streamlined carbonara, a pain de campagne, salt-baked bass, a standing rib roast, a Black Forest cake and a Gascogne apple tart. Other recipes cover no-knead bread, pizza dough, an easy chicken Kiev, a côte de boeuf for two and a chocolate megamousse.

Every recipe is presented as dependable, repeatable and appealing, suited to cooks of any level who want to feed friends and family with confidence. The book was shortlisted for the 2023 Taste Canada Awards in the recipes category.