Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The definitive cookbook on French cuisine for American readers: "What a cookbook should be: packed with sumptuous recipes, detailed instructions, and precise line drawings. Some of the instructions look daunting, but as Child herself says in the introduction, 'If you can read, you can cook.'" —Entertainment Weekly “I only wish that I had written it myself.” —James Beard Featuring 524 delicious recipes and over 100 instructive illustrations to guide readers every step of the way, Mastering the Art of French Cooking offers something for everyone, from seasoned experts to beginners who love good food and long to reproduce the savory delights of French cuisine. Julia Child, Simone Beck, and Louisette Bertholle break down the classic foods of France into a logical sequence of themes and variations rather than presenting an endless and diffuse catalogue of dishes—from historic Gallic masterpieces to the seemingly artless perfection of a dish of spring-green peas. Throughout, the focus is on key recipes that form the backbone of French cookery and lend themselves to an infinite number of elaborations—bound to increase anyone’s culinary repertoire. “Julia has slowly but surely altered our way of thinking about food. She has taken the fear out of the term ‘haute cuisine.’ She has increased gastronomic awareness a thousandfold by stressing the importance of good foundation and technique, and she has elevated our consciousness to the refined pleasures of dining." —Thomas Keller, The French Laundry







How to Lower Your Cholesterol with French Gourmet Food


Book Description

The secret to living... truly living and not just existing starts with us. We are what we eat....if we want optimum health, body and mind. It is a choice. Despite the steady growth of healthcare professions, we, as a society continue to become more ill due to over processed and bioengineered foods yet the answer is so simple. So basic. The answers are in this book. Chef Alain Braux will not only guide you how to achieve a healthy mind and body but his delicious and nutritious recipes can also help heal the body with joyous food. His book will lead to lower cholesterol, renewed energy and vitality that you thought you lost! If you buy one book on how nutrition and good food can change your life, this is it! - Kim Stanford. Co-Author of Gluten Freedom Chef Alain Braux is a French certified chef and a nutritherapist - a nutritionist that helps his clients with assorted food allergies live a normal life through healing foods recommendations.




My Place At The Table


Book Description

In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award–winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson’s, tells how he became one of Paris’s most influential food critics Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket éclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means to be truly French. He attends a cocktail party with Yves St. Laurent and has dinner with Giorgio Armani. Over a superb lunch, it’s his landlady who ultimately provides him with a lasting touchstone for how to judge food: “you must understand the intentions of the cook.” At the city’s brasseries and bistros, he discovers real French cooking. Through a series of vivid encounters with culinary figures from Paul Bocuse to Julia Child to Ruth Reichl, Lobrano hones his palate and finds his voice. Soon the timid boy from Connecticut is at the epicenter of the Parisian dining revolution and the restaurant critic of one of the largest newspapers in the France. A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.




Hungry for Paris (second edition)


Book Description

If you’re passionate about eating well, you couldn’t ask for a better travel companion than Alexander Lobrano’s charming, friendly, and authoritative Hungry for Paris, the fully revised and updated guide to this renowned culinary scene. Having written about Paris for almost every major food and travel magazine since moving there in 1986, Lobrano shares his personal selection of the city’s best restaurants, from bistros featuring the hottest young chefs to the secret spots Parisians love. In lively prose that is not only informative but a pleasure to read, Lobrano reveals the ambience, clientele, history, and most delicious dishes of each establishment—alongside helpful maps and beautiful photographs that will surely whet your appetite for Paris. Praise for Hungry for Paris “Hungry for Paris is required reading and features [Alexander Lobrano’s] favorite 109 restaurants reviewed in a fun and witty way. . . . A native of Boston, Lobrano moved to Paris in 1986 and never looked back. He served as the European correspondent for Gourmet from 1999 until it closed in 2009 (also known as the greatest job ever that will never be a job again). . . . He also updates his website frequently with restaurant reviews, all letter graded.”—Food Republic “Written with . . . flair and . . . acerbity is the new, second edition of Alexander Lobrano’s Hungry for Paris, which includes rigorous reviews of what the author considers to be the city’s 109 best restaurants [and] a helpful list of famous Parisian restaurants to be avoided.”—The Wall Street Journal “A wonderful guide to eating in Paris.”—Alice Waters “Nobody else has such an intimate knowledge of what is going on in the Paris food world right this minute. Happily, Alexander Lobrano has written it all down in this wonderful book.”—Ruth Reichl “Delightful . . . the sort of guide you read before you go to Paris—to get in the mood and pick up a few tips, a little style.”—Los Angeles Times “No one is ‘on the ground’ in Paris more than Alec Lobrano. . . . This book will certainly make you hungry for Paris. But even if you aren’t in Paris, his tales of French dining will seduce you into feeling like you are here, sitting in your favorite bistro or sharing a carafe of wine with a witty friend at a neighborhood hotspot.”—David Lebovitz, author of The Sweet Life in Paris “Hungry for Paris is like a cozy bistro on a chilly day: It makes you feel welcome.”—The Washington Post “This book will make readers more than merely hungry for the culinary riches of Paris; it will make them ravenous for a dining companion with Monsieur Lobrano’s particular warmth, wry charm, and refreshingly pure joie de vivre.”—Julia Glass “[Lobrano is] a wonderful man and writer who might know more about Paris restaurants than any other person I’ve ever met.”—Elissa Altman, author of Poor Man’s Feast




Haute Cuisine


Book Description

"Paris is the culinary centre of the world. All the great missionaries of good cookery have gone forth from it, and its cuisine was, is, and ever will be the supreme expression of one of the greatest arts of the world," observed the English author of The Gourmet Guide to Europe in 1903. Even today, a sophisticated meal, expertly prepared and elegantly served, must almost by definition be French. For a century and a half, fine dining the world over has meant French dishes and, above all, French chefs. Despite the growing popularity in the past decade of regional American and international cuisines, French terms like julienne, saute, and chef de cuisine appear on restaurant menus from New Orleans to London to Tokyo, and culinary schools still consider the French methods essential for each new generation of chefs. Amy Trubek, trained as a professional chef at the Cordon Bleu, explores the fascinating story of how the traditions of France came to dominate the culinary world. One of the first reference works for chefs, Ouverture de Cuisine, written by Lancelot de Casteau and published in 1604, set out rules for the preparation and presentation of food for the nobility. Beginning with this guide and the cookbooks that followed, French chefs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries codified the cuisine of the French aristocracy. After the French Revolution, the chefs of France found it necessary to move from the homes of the nobility to the public sphere, where they were able to build on this foundation of an aesthetic of cooking to make cuisine not only a respected profession but also to make it a French profession. French cooks transformed themselves from household servants to masters of the art of fine dining, making the cuisine of the French aristocracy the international haute cuisine. Eager to prove their "good taste," the new elites of the Industrial Age and the bourgeoisie competed to hire French chefs in their homes, and to entertain at restaurants where French chefs presided over the kitchen. Haute Cuisine profiles the great chefs of the nineteenth century, including Antonin Careme and Auguste Escoffier, and their role in creating a professional class of chefs trained in French principles and techniques, as well as their contemporary heirs, notably Pierre Franey and Julia Child. The French influence on the world of cuisine and culture is a story of food as status symbol. "Tell me what you eat," the great gastronome Brillat-Savarin wrote, "and I will tell you who you are." Haute Cuisine shows us how our tastes, desires, and history come together at a common table of appreciation for the French empire of food. Bon appetit!




Paleo French Cuisine


Book Description

Paleo French Cuisine by Chef Alain Braux is a beautiful and surprising book. A panoply of Paleo inspired appetizers, entrees and desserts is preceded by a tough-love rational conversation about food and industrial culture, and our need to make informed and responsible choices. It is brimming with simple sensible scrumptious recipes, with and without meat, drawing from traditions of old world country comfort food while adding to the modernist trend of repurposing known ingredients in amazing ways. Chef Alain Braux is acutely aware of the contrary trends in current dietary philosophy. Paleo is the diet of the alpha, the Yang, the "hunter." The Raw Food movement promotes the diet of the receptive Yin, the vegan, the "gatherer." Chef Braux sees value in each approach to nourishing ourselves. He compares these contrary culinary philosophies from a common sense perspective, and creates a cuisine that draws on the best of both worlds. All recipes are free of grains and many are also dairy-free. There is plenty to love here for vegetarians as well as confirmed meat eaters, plenty of fully raw recipes as well as sautees and stews. Tips on shopping and cooking techniques leave little room for confusion, and all the while the writing style is so friendly and conversational that you may feel this kindly chef is by your side. The recipes are exquisite! French names for each dish give a sense of elegance and romance, but the ingredients are not exotic, the techniques are not complex. The hard work has already been done, recipes perfected, and the artful balance of flavors, colors, textures, tastes and nutrients is effortless as you follow Chef Braux's instructions. The dessert section is simple and splendid, each dish light and refreshing. I highly recommend this book as the best of a generation. This is a keeper! Thank you Chef Braux!




The Escoffier Cookbook


Book Description

An American translation of the definitive Guide Culinaire, the Escoffier Cookbook includes weights, measurements, quantities, and terms according to American usage. Features 2,973 recipes.




Accounting for Taste


Book Description

French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. Accounting for Taste brings these "accidents" to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This momentous culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the "inventor" of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, Accounting for Taste focuses on the people, places, and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect. With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, Ferguson maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself. To Brillat-Savarin's famous dictum—"Animals fill themselves, people eat, intelligent people alone know how to eat"—Priscilla Ferguson adds, and Accounting for Taste shows, how the truly intelligent also know why they eat the way they do. “Parkhurst Ferguson has her nose in the right place, and an infectious lust for her subject that makes this trawl through the history and cultural significance of French food—from French Revolution to Babette’s Feast via Balzac’s suppers and Proust’s madeleines—a satisfying meal of varied courses.”—Ian Kelly, Times (UK)




Mastering the Art of French Eating


Book Description

The memoir of a young diplomat’s wife who must reinvent her dream of living in Paris—one dish at a time When journalist Ann Mah’s diplomat husband is given a three-year assignment in Paris, Ann is overjoyed. A lifelong foodie and Francophile, she immediately begins plotting gastronomic adventures à deux. Then her husband is called away to Iraq on a year-long post—alone. Suddenly, Ann’s vision of a romantic sojourn in the City of Light is turned upside down. So, not unlike another diplomatic wife, Julia Child, Ann must find a life for herself in a new city. Journeying through Paris and the surrounding regions of France, Ann combats her loneliness by seeking out the perfect pain au chocolat and learning the way the andouillette sausage is really made. She explores the history and taste of everything from boeuf Bourguignon to soupe au pistou to the crispiest of buckwheat crepes. And somewhere between Paris and the south of France, she uncovers a few of life’s truths. Like Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French and Julie Powell’s New York Times bestseller Julie and Julia, Mastering the Art of French Eating is interwoven with the lively characters Ann meets and the traditional recipes she samples. Both funny and intelligent, this is a story about love—of food, family, and France.