[.ca] French Provincial Cooking (ISBN 1904943713)

La Bonne Vrai Cuisine de France:
This book is unequaled, engrossing, superlative. It remains, despite the four decades since its publication, the finest book on authentic French cooking in the English language. To that extent, it is uncompromising - a quality not likely to endear it to the timid or fadish american cook - but never daunting. The sheer sensuous beauty of the food evoked in these pages is a loving, prolonged essay on one of the glories of western civilization.

Good food, good times:
An enjoyable, anecdotal cookbook that has rightly become a classic. Having inspired a whole generation of post-war cooks, this text remains relevant to readers and cooks today. Still- I wish they'd bring back the original covers. They were part of the charm.

Authentic Cooking of the French Provinces:
I have little that is critical to say about this book: I bought it with certain purposes in mind (to find a few authentic recipes for certain classic French dishes such as Coq au Vin which I first tasted in Manhattan in New York at a young age) and to find a few new ones for French HOME cooking (and not whatever is 'nouvelle cuisine,at that, about which I have only read, in any case), and it has more than fulfilled them. The recipe for Coq au Vin de Bourgogne (which I have yet to prepare but have read carefully and will be making before long), for example, is not just presented in a cut and dried fashion, but the instructions for what Elizbeth David calls "A typical Burgundian recipe, from the Cloche d'Or in Dijon", are given and then discussed by the author as to ways of proceeding, given the difficulties that she has noted, in practice, in making it. (In the case of this recipe she does not just say in her list of ingredients that is made with red wine, but specifies a sound red Burgundy, Beaujolais, or Macon. Since I had never made it, and had viewed making it with some trepidation, I appreciated the fact that not only has she included an obviously excellent recipe for it, but she has, in the course of her presentation and discussion, persuaded me that, even though I know I can't make it adequately well, perhaps if I pay attention to what she writes in this cookbook, and I just follow the(this) recipe(s), more or less, what results may be food which will be (just, at least?) good enough. Of course I was interested in her recipe for Boeuf à la Bourguiginone (which is something which, as of this time, I have yet to make, but had more than planned on cooking at this time, in that I had prepared it to the point at which it could be stored to be completed later, which became necessary, since I got into a car accident recently, and am still recovering from some trauma, so this wonderful dish has to wait until I am truly fine), which is is worth reading and paying attention to, although of that, I have others which are not to be dismissed either. A further remark or two. This cookbook has so many interesting recipes that I haven't had the time to read all that many of them (nor have I owned it that long). One section, not to be overlooked entirely, is on the preparation of vegetables, and I was grateful to read there not only a recipe or two for the lowly leek without its necessarily being the leek in leek and potato soup, or the same in just leek soup, but, the leek as, yes, a vegetable, in good standing, WITHOUT her calling it "the asparagus of the poor"!! Finally, there is a recipe for Escargots farcis for which I cannot find the 'ingredients' for in my area . The 'ingredients" I am referring to are BOTH the shells and the snails which were sold separately in a local chain supermarket in my neighborhood, years ago, on the upper East side of Manhattan. Unfortunately that supermarket is no longer there. I am glad that the recipe for Escargots is included in David's French Provincial Cooking (the cooking of the various regions and provinces of France, not just Provence, is discussed in her wonderful introduction, followed the recipes from the same), since I hope to find them here at a later date. This cookbook, then, is quite a find for me, and it will continue to be in times to come. To some extent this review is premature because I have not actually made, or even read, all that I would like to of her recipes yet, but it seems to be that time anyway, which means that already this has proved to be a wonderfully helpful cookbook (if , for example, you know how to make mayonnaise but haven't done so for a while, and need help, and even calming, along the way, what she has to say in this cookbook is well worth reading and may even help you with all of that), which I highly recommend.

A trailblazer for all cooks:
The truly remarkable thing about Elizabeth David was not so much that she could write enthralling and compelling cookbooks ("Mediterranean Food", "French Provincial Cooking", "Italian Cooking"), but that she transformed a glum, drab post-war England by the beauty of her prose and her ability to evoke the sunshine and brilliant colours of the mediterranean. And, further north, the simple beauty of cuisine bourgeoise, home cooking french style. It was this book that got me started on a lifetime of home cooking. Like all great cookbooks, it can be read and savored without cooking at all. Her ability to evoke time and place is startling -- for example, her recipe for little courgette souffles is wrapped in the story of how she first enjoyed them. Of course, this was in a small country restaurant where the proprietor used his own recipe to make them for her. She talks vividly about La Mere Poulard and her Mont St. Michel omelettes, for which she offers the original recipe. Roughly translated from the french, it reads: "Monsieur, I get some good eggs, I put them in a bowl and beat vigorously. Then I put them into a pan with good butter and stir constantly. I will be very happy if this recipe gives you pleasure". I remember, over 30 years ago, the first time I made her recipe for pork chops "to taste like wild boar". They do indeed, and very good they are. Her recipes for classics like Cassoulet, and Bouillabaisse are vivid and provide the cultural context as well as precise directions. Her description of a bouillabaisse on the beach makes you want to catch the next plane there. She explains the environment of her recipes, their milieu, and their progenitors so that you get right inside the whole theory and practice of french cooking. This is not haute cuisine, though it is not always simple to execute. But her sympathy for the process of cooking and her ability to describe it precisely prefigured writers like Richard Olney and Alice Waters, who owe her, as do we all, a great debt. In any case, she is directly responsible for the appalling culinary assaults I have perpetrated on family and friends for longer than I care to remember. I still use the book, though most of its pages are now stored directly in my memory.

A Fountainhead of Modern American Cuisine:
Elizabeth David is one of foremost writers on food in the latter half of the 20th century and this book has her most celebrated writing. For this reason, I was inspired to write this modest review when I saw Amazon feature the volume as an offering, 43 years after it's first publication in England. It is a coincidence of no small meaning that this book appeared within two years before the publication of Julia Child et al's landmark 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. Child was even worried, when David's book appeared, that it may steal a lot of the thunder from Child and her colleague's effort. The fact is, the two books are very much like the Wittgensteinian 'duck rabbit' optical illusion in that they deal with the same subject but from different points of view. One distinction is that while Child's book is simply a cookbook of French recipes, David's book is a long essay on French cuisine, offering the sketches of recipes more as exercizes to be completed by the reader than as true recipes. In fact, it is one of the most enduring legacies of Child's book that it redefined the detail to which a recipe writer should go in order to adequately communicate the process of preparing a dish. A second distinction between the two is that they deal with two different facets of French cuisine. As David recites from work by Curnonsky, there is haute cuisine, la cuisine Bourgeoise, la cuisine Regionale, and la cuisine Improvisee. David discourses on the third while Child, et al present the second. For many, including such luminaries as Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters, Elizabeth David is the fountainhead of thinking on the French notion of 'la cuisine terroir', sometimes interpreted by the notion 'what grows together goes together'. For David, this is the heart of regional cooking, and the thing which most distinguishes it from cooking at restaurants where clientele arrive at any time of the year or the day and expect to be able to order virtually any well known French speciality. One of the passages which best characterizes David's approach to a lot of cooking is her opening statement on the perfect omelette: 'As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect onelette: you own.' I'm sure this would not work for Daniel Boulud, but it works just fine for me, after having seen about five (5) different, contrary techniques on how to make the perfect omelette. It's interesting to constantly encounter reminders that the book was written before the widespread distribution of Teflon coated cookware, as there is no mention of it, even for egg cookery. I believe the book is all the more valuable for this fact, in that it paints a picture of a cooking style which has irrevokably been changed by technology. A second technological change brought upon the world by the French themselves is the 'robot-coupe' or food processor. It's noteworthy that the device is only mentioned in Notes to the 1985 edition where it is pointed out that the device was a major contribution to both the good and the bad aspects of nouvelle cuisine. As stated above, the recipes are not as much presented as a blueprint to reproduce every dish cited, but rather to illuminate the discourse. One of my favorites is the entry for Salade Nicoise, where not one but four (4) different variations are given, including the variation of Escoffier. The sections on French kitchen equipment and French techniques appear to be quite complete and absolutely essential if you embark on reading a cookbook written in French. The book has a short essay on each of the major culinary regions of France, starting. Almost obviously with Provence which is blessed not so much with great culinary talent as a great source of produce, similar, perhaps to the situation in California where the 'la cuisine terroir' could take root much more easily than in Toledo or Albany. The largest portion of the book is chapters on cuisine by type of foodstuf or type of preparation such as: Sauces Hors-D'oeuvres and Salads Soups Eggs and Cheese Pates and Terrines Vegetables Fish Shellfish Meat Composite Meat Dishes Poultry and Game Left-overs Sweet dishes The book ends with a bibliography which alone is worth the price of the paperback volume. This book begs to be read from cover to cover. The only other writers who come to mind of a similar caliber are John Thorne, M.F.K. Fisher, and Harold McGee. Elizabeth David's books belong in the library of anyone who loves to read and prepare food and this is her best.