The Liason

It all started when I was perusing the cookbooks in Barnes and Noble a couple years ago and I had my first encounter with the word "motherfucker" in a cookbook. That was of course Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Funnier than your average cookbook, it is an easy introduction to a simplified and Americanized French cooking. Nice pictures too. So from there I started getting interested in French cooking, which some consider an important world cuisine, and which is arguably the basis of all American cooking.

Since then I have been trying with mixed results to get a better understanding of the great cuisine by reading variously opaque important works on the subject. Escoffier's The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery" covers a lot of ground, but it is almost impossible to jump into. Most of those four-thousand sixty-two recipes contain something unattainable to the average home cook, either by amount (24 lbs veal shin bones) geography (chervil, lean bacon, fresh haricot beans, japanese artichokes) economy (truffles) culture (boned salted pig's head, lamb's sweetbreads, cockscombs) or knowledge (panada, bizontine, chow-chow, Perles du Japon).

L'Art Culinaire Francaise, published half a century after Escoffier, is much more friendly to the home cook, although it is perhaps better suited to one who reads French well than to someone at my "trois semestres de Français unversitaire" level.

Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking is my newest addition to the pile, an xmas gift from my sister. It is fantastic! Not only is it the perfect liason to the older books I have been looking at, it is probably the most sensibly organized and thoughtful cookbook I have in my collection. I can't put it down!