French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [250]
Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. Jane Grigson. Michael Joseph, 1967. Penguin edition 1970. Also published as The Art of Charcuterie, Knopf, New York, 1967. A valuable work on the salting, curing and cooking of pork and other meats, as practised in French households as well as by professional charcutiers. Authentic recipes, a practical approach and good writing.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 2. Julia Child and Simone Beck. Michael Joseph, 1977 (original American edition, Knopf, 1970). The authors have carried their method of giving recipes in meticulous detail even further than in the first volume (see p. 474) of this remarkable work. For those who want to attempt the baking of various types of French bread, brioches, and croissants there are some fifty pages, with detailed explanatory drawings, devoted to this subject.
Good Things. Jane Grigson. Michael Joseph, 1971. Penguin edition 1973. While not exclusively dealing with French cookery or French ingredients, the book offers many interesting and lesser known French country recipes.
Mediterranean Seafood. Alan Davidson. Penguin, 1972. One of the most remarkable works on fish and fish cookery ever to appear in the English language. A reference book of great fascination, with recipes, some very rare, from all countries bordering the Mediterranean. There are clear line drawings of every fish, mollusc, and crustacean mentioned, with a description, and names given in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Tunisian.
La Cuisine du Compté de Nice. Jacques Médecin. Julliard 1972.
Les Recettes de la Table Niçoise. Raymond Aimisen, André Martin. Librairie Istra, Societe Alsacienne d’édition et de diffusion, 19 rue de l’ail, Strasbourg 1972.
ADDITIONAL BOOK LIST 1983
A CHARMING young woman in eighteenth-century dress stands over a stove, sauté pan in hand. Behind her in the open fireplace something is cooking in a tall covered marmite set on a low trivet, on the table is a skinned fowl, on the alert at the cook’s feet sits the inevitable kitchen cat. Under the engraving the caption announces Tous les ans nouvelle cuisine, car tous les ans changent les goûts. The artist is Hubert François Gravelot, the date 1759. At the period nouvelle cuisine was in the news. The previous year, a third edition of François Marin’s Les Dons de Comus, one of the most influential cookery books of eighteenth-century France, had appeared. Nouvelle cuisine then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more. ‘The old cooking, l’ancienne cuisine’, wrote Marin in his reworked preface, ‘is that which the French made fashionable throughout Europe and which, not thirty years ago, was in almost general usage. Modern cooking, established on the foundations of the old, with less show and fewer encumbrances, although with just as much variety, is simpler, cleaner, more delicate, and perhaps even more accomplished.’ The old cooking was highly complex and infinitely intricate; modern cuisine is a kind of Chemistry. ‘The science of the Cook consists in the breaking down, rendering digestible & quintessentialising35 of foods; in the extraction of the nutritious but light juices; in blending and so combining them that no single element dominates yet each one makes its presence felt. In short to impart to them that Unity which Artists give to their colours. . . .’ It could almost be the voice of Prosper Montagné, of Fernand Point, of Michel Guérard.
Like today’s author-chefs, Marin was a professional cook. So was his contemporary, Menon, author of several fashionable works including La Nouvelle Cuisine avec de nouveaux menus etc. published in 1742, and the phenomenally successful La Cuisinière Bourgeoise of 1746, continuously in print for over a century, and again reprinted in 1981. These two men, and others whose works appeared anonymously—an unimaginable publishing