The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern (Claudia Fleming)

A beautiful new edition of “the greatest dessert book in the history of the world” (Bon Appétit), featuring 175 timeless recipes from Gramercy Tavern’s James Beard Award–winning pastry chef.

Claudia Fleming is a renowned name in the pastry world, acclaimed for having set an industrywide standard at New York City’s Gramercy Tavern with her James Beard Award–winning desserts. With The Last Course, dessert lovers everywhere will be able to re-create and savor her impressive repertoire at home.

Fleming’s desserts have won a range of awards because they embody her philosophy of highly satisfying food without pretension, a perfect balance for home cooks. Using fresh, seasonal ingredients at the peak of their flavor, Fleming creates straightforward yet enchanting desserts that are somehow equal to much more than the sum of their parts. She has an uncanny ability to match contrasting textures, flavors, and temperatures to achieve a perfect result—placing something brittle and crunchy next to something satiny and smooth, and stretching the definition of sweet and savory while retaining an elemental simplicity.

The Last Course contains 175 mouthwatering recipes that are organized seasonally by fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs and flowers, spices, sweet essences, dairy, and chocolate. In the final chapter, Fleming suggests how to combine and assemble desserts from the previous chapters to create the ultimate composed desserts. And each chapter and each composed dessert is paired with a selection of wines.