Bookshop: More about French food

Any English-speaking cook wanting to know more about real French cuisine (i.e. the food cooked and eaten in French homes, not fancy restaurants) cannot avoid Elizabeth David. The grande dame of English cookery writers brought a spark of Mediterranean colour to ration-hit Britons after the war, with Mediterranean Food, of which Jane Grigson wrote: "How grey it was then, partly because of our kitchen insularity, partly because of the war ... then came Elizabeth David like sunshine, writing with brief elegance about good food ... she made us understand that we could do better with what we had." David followed this up with her classic works on French cooking, French Provincial Cooking and French Country Cooking. Of the two, FPC is more comprehensive and deeply researched, but the earlier FCC contains some delightful little gems, including a superb mushroom soup.

One of my favourite David books is not a recipe book as such, but a collection of articles written for magazines and newspapers over the years: An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. David's concise, no-nonsense style is ideally suited to this medium and there are some wonderful reminiscences of meals in France and elsewhere, along with inimitable rants about bogus food (the article about mayonnaise is particularly memorable). It does contain incidental recipes, including my favourite tomato recipe ever, tomates à la crème, which as David says, "tastes startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes". A great bedside book -- but all of David's books lend themselves to reading at leisure, not just cooking.

It has to be said, though, that if you are a novice cook, Elizabeth David is not the best place to start. Her recipes are very brief, and assume a fair amount of knowledge of cooking processes and the behaviour of various mixtures. If you aren't absolutely certain of what you are doing, the results could be disappointing.

In contrast, the most exhaustive reference for French food I have ever found, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (2 volumes, by Simone Beck, Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle) spells everything out in laborious detail (including a 15-page recipe for French bread!). I wouldn't bother attempting the bread, but the other recipes are more practical. If you follow the instructions in this book, you cannot go wrong, and the results will be all you could hope for. My first copy of Volume 1 (the more useful of the two) was so well-used that it literally disintegrated and I had to buy another copy. Once you have mastered the basics in this book, you can go on to Elizabeth David with confidence.

A word of warning: read each recipe in this book through before you start, as instead of being listed all together at the beginning, ingredients and equipment required are listed at each stage of the recipe (which may be several pages long). I can't be the only person who has got halfway through and found a vital ingredient lacking!

Another valuable book for novices is the wonderful Complete French Cookery Course by Mireille Johnston, mentioned on our main bookshop page. A reassuring book to pick up when you want to impress your guests with authentic French food, without driving yourself to the brink of a nervous breakdown in the process.

Other reliable sources (apart from those mentioned on the main books page):

A favourite on my bookshelf is a little book called Plats du Jour, or, Foreign Food, by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd. It was first published in 1957, and my copy, picked up in a secondhand shop for 50p, is a pink paperback delightfully illustrated by David Gentleman. Written at a time when foreign food was, well, foreign to British cooks, it collects together substantial dishes, mainly French and Italian, which can form the basis of a meal, together with cheese, salad, and fruit. Patience Gray has lived in rural areas of France and Italy on a shoestring budget and these simple recipes reflect true peasant traditions. There's even a section on wild fungi, with illustrations. Most used recipe in this book: Poule au riz au safran, a wonderfully comforting dish which makes the most of a scrawny old farmyard hen.

French Country Cooking by Michel and Albert Roux. Unfortunately this wonderful book now seems to be out of print. Normally I find books by professional chefs aren't worth the shelf space -- they seem to presuppose a vast kitchen, an unlimited supply of pans, an army of commis chefs and unhindered access to ingredients such as demi-glace and sauce espagnole. This book by the Roux brothers is a brilliant exception to the rule. Drawing on their memories of French home cooking during their youth, it devotes a section to each region of France. Some of the recipes are fiddly, it's true, but most are child's play to any competent cook. The recipe for rabbit and mustard rejects the usual mustard/cream combination and produces a wonderfully light and fresh-tasting dish. And the stuffed mussels from Bouzigues are fingerlicking good!

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