Cooking to the Image

Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook offers readers a fascinating perspective of a culinary Art that demonstrates taste as not simply a means of creating flavor, but also a cultural context larger than the Professional kitchen. Itprovides future chefs with the prerequisites to cultivate a professional viewpoint of plating by considering the different ways a chef looks at food. Its goal is to provide a map of how a chef creates a plate of food by considering such questions as:

• Where in the menu is this food item to be placed?
• What food is selected? How is the food prepared? How will it be served?
• How is it presented in relationship to other food on the plate?
• How much will it cost?

Plating exposes a chef’s deepest beliefs about what food is, and how food should be. Structured as a design process, Cooking to the Image: A Plating Handbook outlines how personal creativity and professional traditions fuse to create successful plated presentations of food.