Author(s): Cordon Bleu, Rose Elliot
Publisher: DK ADULT
Publication Date: 1994-09-15
Pages: 160
Review: This cookbook, along with its excellent photography, demystifies french cookery techniques. The photography compliments each step involved in creating these fabulous recipes. It leaves no room for error from the kitchen to the dining table.Le Cordon Bleu Classic French Cookbook is excellent in its content and presentation. The beautiful photography details the cookery techniques essential to the success of French cuisine. The recipes’ format is complete and international in appeal. I like the use of both US and metric measurements. The side text offer interesting historical insights into each recipe. I have had the previlege of studying cooking as a hobby with renowned teachers at prestigious cooking schools in both New York City and Mexico. As I have a predilection for cooking and love entertaining at home, I am always looking for new opportunities to increase my knowledge and expertise in the kitchen. This cookbook will transport any reader right into the “classroom” of the prestigious cooking school of Le Cordon Bleu.
Price: $24.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Carole Clements, Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen
Publisher: Lorenz Books
Publication Date: 1998-11
Pages: 256
Review: I wholeheartedly agree with the reviews that have already been posted. This is a GREAT cookbook. Almost every recipe is worthy of serving to company, which is the highest compliment given in our household. We have donated French dinners to charities using the recipes in this book and the response from the public is fantastic. You will wow your friends and family with the dishes from this book.

The book is well planned and has beautiful photographs. If you only buy one French cookbook, this is the one!I own quite a few gourmet cookbooks. You know, the kind where you really have to put some effort into the cooking to turn out a dish you would receive somewhere in some great restaurant from the left bank of Paris. So finding this cookbook was heaven sent. This cookbook is my prized possession. I have referred it to everyone I know. If you really like cooking well, but you want simplicity, this book is for you. The pictures are so beautiful. I am not a fan of cookbooks that don’t show you the photograph of the intended end result, or the visual steps during the preparation. This cookbook is loaded with all that, plus photographs of the French countryside, people, and history. I love that extra background info. I have prepared a lot of dishes from this book and the outcome has been superb. This book teaches you the basics you need for fine French cooking.

The book divides the contents into sections: soups and salads; vegetables and side dishes; eggs and cheese, fish and seafood; poultry and game; meat dishes ( the stews are delicious!!); pastry and cakes; and desserts (oh my God, you MUST try the Rich Chocolate Cake recipe…it is a chocoholic’s dream come true. I must have been asked for this recipe a thousand times.)Bon Appetit!I’ve had this cookbook for over ten years now, and I still refer to it monthly and for cooking inspiration. I absolutely agree with other reviewers that it is the best french cookbook around. The step by step pictures and instructions make this cookbook invaluable and make even complicated dishes doable. Owning over 100 cookbooks, this is the one that I turn to most often. One can turn out a marvelous French dinner and not spend a huge amount of time preparing it. I have yet to try a recipe that isn’t excellent and I have prepared many of them. Highly recommend this book. Not being able to buy a new one now, have ordered used to give as gifts. They have all arrived in excellent condition.My daughter bought this cookbook in Paris and brought it home for Christmas. After looking through it, I decided I had to have it myself as there were too many recipes I wanted to try and I couldn’t write them all down. Now, whenever I show the book to any of my friends, they have to order it too!

The recipes are clear and easy to follow. The pictures are lovely. The dishes I have tried so far are pure delights to the tongue! It is fun to just sit and look through it and plan a dinner party! I take a yearly trip to Paris to visit my daughter and this book helps me cope with my ordinary life the rest of the year!
Price: $30.00   Buy This Book

Author(s): Richard Olney
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Publication Date: 2004-03-01
Pages: 456
Review: This book is a great addition to Olney’s classic Simple French Food.Looking back to 1970, the year this book was first published, puts its sophistications in context and underscores the enormity of its contributions. America was deep in culinary ignorance, eating out of cans and supplementing that metal-tinged blandness with gut-busting mountains of artificial ‘foods’. America was lost somehwere between the post-war meat-and-potatoes era and the chemical concoctions of the 80s and beyond. Small glimmers of possibility illuminated the occassional suburban cocktail party, when hostesses under the influence of Julia Child trotted out a few hotel-food hors d’oeuvres, and a few ethnic enclaves still held up a candle of flavor, but America was largely a culinary wasteland. Servings were large, everything was bland, and mealtime had become TV time. Without flavor or family, American meals were effectively dead.

It was into this lunar food landscape that Richard Olney introduced several revolutionary ideas at once in The French Menu Cookbook. I should say that he RE-introduced these ideas, because they had existed, with varying degrees of sophistication, for as long as people had eaten, but an industrial food system had interrupted that great cultural memory. This book’s structure is its message: the food is introduced not by category, but by course within menus, and the menus themselves are organized by season. For those of us who have heard the gospel of seasonality and regional availability and freshness from Alice Waters and Paul Bertolli, at al, it can be easy to forget that this idea is still, 36 years after The French Menu Cookbook, radical, and so against the grain of the industrial food complex as to be almost an act of treason. But Richard Olney’s way with food started that revolution at possibly the most inoportune moment in Americna history.

A sample menu says it all:

An Informal Spring Dinner

Hors d’oeuvre of Crudites

Shrimp Quiche

Coq au Vin

Steamed Potatoes

Wild Green Salad

Cheeses

Flamri with Raspberry Sauce

all of the above matched with appropriate wines.

Notice the careful development through the courses, the constant shifts of flavor to keep the palate alive, the seasonal ingredients… All of this was deeply shocking at the time.

But there’s one more big surprise: this book is every bit as good today as it was in 1970. It doesn’t feel even remotely dated, like Julia Child’s books do. Maybe, in hueing so faithfully to the principles of freshness, seasonality, and regional availability, Olney tapped into something timeless. And so this book was a classic the day it was published, and remains one of the most sophisticated, satisfying, and inspiring cookbooks ever published.

Very highly recommended.
Price: $29.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Thomas Keller
Publisher: Artisan
Publication Date: 2006-09-30
Pages: 696
Review: I’ve been taking these books out of my local library for over a year. I finally decided that I needed my own copies, and wanted the slip cased set.

These books are worth every penny. This is the best quiche recipe I’ve made. No matter what filling I choose it always gets rave reviews. Try the buchons they work fine in mini muffin pans if you don’t have the timbale molds. Think of these as food porn the photography is luscious. If you like to cook buy these books…The French Laundry is the best cooking book I’ve ever purchase each recipe is detailed in exceptional for chef’s and home cuisine.

the Bouchon is a good one but not as good as The French Beautiful book, should be in everyone’s library who loves to cook. The French Laundry is not for the everyday cook to find something for dinner but it will inspire you to look at food as a creation and work of art, not just something you ingest.Excellent recipes from 2 restaurant I can barely afford to visit and the few recipes I have tried so far are excellent and very close to what I enjoyed at Bouchon. Can’t wait to impress my friends and family with French Laundry!I have mixed feelings about this book - it falls somewhere between the entertaining textbook and philosophical essays on the haute cuisine. I am down-to-earth person and like straightforward answers, so the narration was sometimes boring (no, his anecdotes are not that funny)and the book too wordy.

If you are looking for useful tips on how to improve your dishes, you will find a fair amount. However, many recipes are simply too sophisticated and time consuming to try them at home. And don’t expect perfect results with the veal or poultry from the supermarket - it all comes down to farm-fresh, organic or grain-feed ingredients you need to hunt for in obscure places.

WARNING! If you are a healthy eating nerdy, forget the book. The dishes are bathed in butter, lard, salt and so on. I don’t mind, and personally i don’t believe you can make splendid meal using vegetable and arab gum spray instead of beurre monte. :-)
Price: $100.00   Buy This Book

Author(s): Susan Herrmann Loomis
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Publication Date: 1996-01-10
Pages: 560
Review: My husband first bought a copy of this cookbook at a yard sale. I didn’t look at it right away, fearing another overblown, complex and difficult French cookbook. Mais non! Most of the recipes are fairly easy and reflect the fresh, authentic nature of country French cooking. We now keep this cookbook at our house in Southwest France, in Wisconsin AND in Florida. This is the only book of which we have three copies!! The recipes are a delight (Loomis’ gougeres are the best and have several quite helpful hints that no other chef has given).

The food and the stories capture the essence of rural France–making the cooking, wherever you may be, pure delight a la Francais!I served for two years in southwestern France as a Mormon missionary. When I came home to Calgary, Alberta I pined for the simple, fresh, unpretentious food I’d grown used to eating in rural France. Luckily the French Farmhouse Cookbook was first published about four months before I got home, and when I stumbled on it by accident in a bookshop I was overjoyed.

Not only are the recipes authentic and accessible, but the stories Ms. Loomis tells about how food is raised and grown — how seriously the farmers and growers view their work — ring absolutely true to my experience living in France. I’ve never found another North American book so true to real French family food.

Especially useful are recipes for small things that one can take for granted at any supermarket in France — creme fraiche, sucre vanille, quatre epices, etc. — but that are hard come by in most US or Canadian stores. You can substitute other ingredients (sour cream for creme fraiche) but it’s not quite the same; the effort the author took to include everything needed to reproduce the authentic experience is another reason this is my favorite French cookbook. I can’t recommend it highly enough.My wife is French, her sole and all-absorbing passion in life is cooking. She has two armoires filled with cookbooks, including all the classics. This is her favorite. All of the recipes she has made from this book have been exquisite. Two thumbs up, and all eight fingers! This is a must-have!

Bon Appetit!The stories about the actual farms and farmers who provide the recipes and ingredients in this wonderful book are fascinating. Nothing is taken for granted, and meals are extensively discussed and savored. Memorable is the story accompanying the recipe for Duck with Prunes in which the cook providing the recipe explains apologetically that the recipe is from another region of France, but “we love it so much, we cook it all the time.”

The farmers’ pride in the quality of their produce and livestock, and the care with which Susan Herrmann Loomis specifies exactly what kind of oranges, or chickens or asparagus are to be used in each recipe inspire a very unAmerican way of viewing cooking and eating, in which only the finest ingredients are perfectly cooked. The descriptions of the walnut farms, the Bresse chicken farm, the vanishing family farms are evocative of a great foreign film. After reading this book cover to cover, I feel as though I’ve had a course in French rural culture–with refreshments. Highly recommended!This is one of the most practical and most referred to book on my cooking shelf. This book is extremely practical because Loomis uses easy-to-find ingredients and the recipees for entrees can be made in 30 minutes or couple of hours (but most of that is waiting time). The instructions are detailed but to the point and tips are delighful. There is also a good diversity in the complexity of the dishes but most are relatively simple, as they were farm-house cooking, meaning either they had to be put together very fast before dinner, or tossed into the oven or stove before doing the days’ chores, and to be enjoyed at night after a long stewing/braising/etc. The dishes (esp the basque region dishes) are very flavorful and bring out the best flavors in the ingredient. Highly recommended for enhancing/inspiring your home cooking.
Price: $18.95   Buy This Book

Author(s): Thomas Keller
Publisher: Artisan
Publication Date: 1999-11-01
Pages: 336
Review: I cook a lot - both formal and informal fare. The book has some great information and nice ideas, but in reality there are problems with many of the recipes either in the instructions or in the actual outcome. For example, the tomato sorbet tasted like ketchup sorbet. While the verjus sorbet was delicious, it melted very quickly and was thus hard to serve. Also, the crowd I served the verjus sorbet with poached peaches to agreed that the dish was too acidic and needed other elements to balance it out. Another example of a problematic recipe is the striped bass with artichoke ravioli recipe. In this recipe it there were editorial errors and lack of direction. It also seemed unnecessarily laborious for the result. In all, you need to be prepared to labor without too many expectations because you can’t be sure what the final outcome will be.A wonderful read, beautiful photos, and recipes of culinary refinement that can be duplicated in your own home. Worth every cent - even better when on sale! I bought this as a Christmas gift for my mom, and she was more than thrilled when she got it. I would suggest it for Mother’s Day or Birthday gifts. Not everything in it is completely out of an average person’s budget, although there are several recipes that call for some out of reach ingredients, but there are some substitutes available for most of those.For the most part good. However, extremely disappointed in the large amount of information on foie gras. Told quite a bit EXCEPT how extremely inhumane the preparation of this brutal ‘delicacy’ is.Anything by Thomas Keller is a must-have for the serious French cook. This is definitely not the cookbook for the beginning home cook, as most of the recipes are multi-step–time-consuming for some. The recipes are unique, fresh, and simply delicious. The written instruction is clear and easy to follow. As an aside, I bought The French Laundry and Bouchon together, which saved me some money because I got free shipping from Amazon, not to mention the prices of both books was considerably cheaper then prices in book stores.
Price: $50.00   Buy This Book

Author(s): Julia Child
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: 2002-08-06
Pages: 480
Review: I purchased this one to replace a disintegrating old copy of the mass paperback printed in acidic paper. It is a great cookbook. My only gripe is that the old one had a foreword on measurements and tables of equivalents. Gone in this edition. Otherwise, it is fine.A good book for the chef who wants to build on his abilities. Delivered promptly without problems.You need this book if you are a fan of the French Chef TV show

The book is a collection of all recipes from the French Chef, it is a great help if you want to cook any dish from that show. The recipes are very precise and follow the the TV recipes exactly. No inconsistencies.

If you purchase this book and want to cook something French but you do not have the French Show dvds, I recommend to purchase them, since many details (how to eval the quality of materials, how to mix, cook etc) are omitted from the book or are hardly understood from the book without video guidance

best seller what can I say, excellent info for everyone who’s in a kitchenI like to cook when I have the time or entertaining gives me the venue for it, but I had never tried many French or French-inspired dishes. A self-professed “foodie”, I knew Julia Child was worth having a look at and for $6, it couldn’t hurt! So far I have been impressed with the dishes I’ve made not only in the quality in flavor and taste, but at how EASY they are to make. Americans don’t make sauces as much as the Europeans do and I was eager to learn a few - Julia’s sauces were delicious, easy and I will certainly be making them more often. The directions are easy to follow and will certainly help the “beginner cook”. The reason for my 4-star rating was because it would have been nice to have the glossy pictures common in cookbooks today, but this cookbook is certainly a classic and a good one to have in your collection. Highly recommended!
Price: $16.95   Buy This Book