If You Are a Dessert Person, You Should Seek Out This Book by Richard Sax
His tour de force ‘Classic Home Desserts’ is as great as ever
A few summers ago in downtown Manhattan, I climbed several flights of stairs to the apartment of the pastry chef Meredith Kurtzman. She was selling off part of her vast cookbook collection and I wanted first pick; Kurtzman has good taste, and she is a fantastic cook. Her living room was lined with shelves groaning with cookbooks, from the celebrated to the obscure. I asked her, “If you could recommend just one, which would it be?”
She squinted at the titles and decisively reached for a thick tome with the authoritative name, Classic Home Desserts, by an author I had never heard of: Richard Sax. I regarded the book’s dated serif font and old-fashioned cover image of a berry shortcake with mild skepticism.
“I got this cookbook when I started working in pastry,” she told me. “I learned a lot from it, and the recipes really work.” Classic Home Desserts was published in November 1994. According to Kurtzman, other dessert books of the time focused more on decoration than flavor, but these recipes were…
