Reddit reviews Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1: A Cookbook

For what it's worth, if you want to make sauces, I would ditch Good Eats and spend some time watching Jacques Pépin or Julia Child. Lots available on YouTube and kqed.org. Fewer puppets, more cooking :) A great many episodes of their shows will cover making various sauces.

For example, here's an episode of Julia's The French Chef which addresses hollandaise in exceptional detail. It'll tell you almost everything you need to know about it, and honestly it's just fun to watch Julia Child cook. I say "almost" because I like to cheat by making hollandaise with a blender, and I don't think she covers it in that show. (She does cover it in her book, though!)

Anyway, to answer what seems to be your main question:

> Is water always needed to emulsify oil?

By definition, yes, since an emulsion is fat and water mixed together thoroughly enough that they won't separate (at least for a while). You don't need to always use pure water, but there has to be water from some source (wine or stock, for example) to bring the sauce together. The oil separates into tiny droplets and becomes dispersed throughout the water, and that's the basis for your sauce.

> I have heard TV chefs mention "sauces breaking" or "breaking down" - is there a trick to preventing this? Did I possibly have too much / too little of something?

A given amount of water can only hold so much oil in suspension before the emulsion fails and the sauce breaks. The simplest solution is often to reduce the amount of oil. In the case of your pan drippings, for instance, what you'd do is pour off most of the chicken fat into a separate container. Then you'd take your roasting pan, put it over a low burner (if it's stovetop safe), and pour in some water, wine, or chicken stock. This allows you to dissolve all the tasty brown bits in the pan (fond or sucs) into your sauce. Because you've poured out a good bit of the fat, this sauce will be much more stable than the one you made. You can thicken it with a cornstarch slurry and finish with cream or butter if you'd like.

Another solution is to use an emulsifier, which is an ingredient that helps to keep the emulsion stable. Classic emulsifiers include egg yolk and mustard, but these of course will add flavors or textures that you may not want in the dish. Usually, though, just minding your fat-to-water ratio should be enough.

EDIT: See here for Jacques making a sauce with pan drippings. It's a rib roast, but the same idea applies. He makes the sauce at 13:15.

Julia Child's classic is what alot of people learned with. You'll learn the fundementals of french cooking which is essential for all aspiring chefs.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Volume/dp/0394721780

Julia Child has a series:
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Volume/dp/0394721780

An excellent book for you at this point would be Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques. From the description:

"Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques features everything the home cook needs to perfect: poach an egg, whisk a perfect hollandaise, knead a crispy baguette, or bake an exquisite meringue with the perfection and efficiency of a professional chef. Featured throughout the book, Pepin's classic recipes offer budding masters the opportunity to put lessons into practice with extraordinary results."

It also covers things like knife technique and other fundamentals, which you mentioned.

As far as French cooking goes, although they've been around awhile, two books that are still definitive on the subject are Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Volume One and Volume Two. All three of these books (Pepin plus these two) are foundational to learning about cooking. There are others, but these will give you a very good start, and will increase your cooking skills and knowledge exponentially.

If those aren't enough, you can also check out The Professional Chef, which is a fantastic book of recipes and techniques put out by the Culinary Institute of America. It's a bit spendy, but worth it if you want to learn. The Amazon links are provided for reference; if money is an issue you can quite easily find all these books used.

Julia Child - Mastering the Art of French Cooking

maybe it isn't the end all be all, but it's a damn good start.

I can recommend two cook books.

1. mastering the art of French cooking by Julia Childs
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-French-Cooking-Volume/dp/0394721780
   
   
2. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook. A personal favorite.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Smitten-Kitchen-Cookbook-Perelman/dp/030759565X
   
   

When I get stuck in a rut, I usually check what's in season and then see if there's an interesting way to cook it. I still lean very heavily on Julia Child for recipe inspiration. I also hit the internet and search for 1-2 recipe ingredients and a cooking method.

My copy is at least 10 years old, but the information is still solid today. The Professional Chef.

I would also contend Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is an excellent source for understanding basic flavors, mother sauces, etc.

This is where you start:

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child

Wait! I don't want to get into the fancy French cooking that is incredibly complex! I'm just a beginner!

Relax.

It's not what you think. French cooking is assembling building blocks of very simple components. You can use them simply in recipes. Later, when you master them, you can assemble your knowledge into the complex.

Start with your Mother Sauces.

The roux, or bechamel, is butter, flour and milk. Without knowing more than that, you could probably make a roux right now. Practice and learn and you will knock it off without even thinking about it.

After that, you can add other ingredients to the roux and make things more interesting.

You also need to know the basics for vegetables and meat. Learn to blanch vegetables. It's not hard and doesn't take very long.

Blanch a nice broccoli. Pour that roux you learned over it. Now you have something wonderful to eat.

Learn how to sautee a chicken breast. Add mushrooms and a spice or two to a roux and put that on the chicken. Wonderful.

Once you get the Mother Sauces down and can prepare meats and vegetables in several different ways, you will be eating very well.

Further, you'll be able to cook from ingredients you have at hand. Say you go over to the apartment of a significant other. You will be able to go into the kitchen and use what's on hand to prepare a good meal.

If you go to a market and find they just got in a fresh shipment of something terrifically fresh that's on special, you can buy it and quickly plan a meal around it.

So get to work on your Mother Sauces. You'll learn them quickly and then you'll keep learning more and making better and better food. Soon enough, you will have a reputation as a great chef and everyone will want to have dinner with you.

Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything the Basics is really good for beginner stuff. Thug Kitchen's new book is also a great starting place for learning how to cook cheap and healthy.

My all time favorite cookbook is Mastering the Art of French Cooking which is a great intro to French techniques. The recipes themselves are not always cheap and healthy, but the skills you learn are super super useful for any type of cooking. It is by far the cookbook I have learned the most from.

I really enjoyed it - we did it old-school with a whisk, bowl, pot of simmering water. Took time but wasn't actually that difficult. Really liked that I got it lemony as I like and very smooth.