Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics [Hardcover]

James Peterson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 30, 2002

From the James Beard award--winning author of Sauces-a new classic on French cuisine for today's cook

His award-winning books have won the praise of The New York Times and Gourmet magazine as well as such culinary luminaries as chefs Daniel Boulud, Jeremiah Tower, and Alice Waters. Now James Peterson brings his tremendous stores of culinary knowledge, energy, and imagination to this fresh and inspiring look at the classic dishes of French cuisine. With a refreshing, broadminded approach that embraces different French cooking styles-from fine dining to bistro-style cooking, from hearty regional fare to nouvelle cuisine-Peterson uses fifty "foundation" French dishes as the springboard to preparing a variety of related dishes. In his inventive hands, the classic Moules à la marinière inspires the delightful Miniature Servings of Mussels with Sea Urchin Sauce and Mussel Soup with Garlic Puree and Saffron, while the timeless Duck à l'orange gives rise to the subtle Salad of Sautéed or Grilled Duck Breasts and Sautéed Duck Breasts with Classic Orange Sauce. Through these recipes, Peterson reveals the underlying principles and connections in French cooking that liberate readers to devise and prepare new dishes on their own. With hundreds recipes and dazzling color photography throughout, Glorious French Food gives everyone who enjoys cooking access to essential French cooking traditions and techniques and helps them give free reign to the intuition and spontaneity that lie in the heart-and stomach-of every good cook. It will take its place on the shelf right next to Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Glorious French Food, James Peterson argues that once you understand a recipe's "logic and context," and the techniques required to follow it, you actually have something much more valuable than the recipe itself--you have the knowledge to create variations, make simplifications, and cook with spontaneity. Although French cuisine is often accused of being fussy and time-consuming, Peterson's clear instructions demystify many traditionally finicky recipes, and in the process, teach us how to cook anything.

The hundreds of recipes presented here are a pleasure to peruse; kitchen novices can work their way through this hefty volume and come out the other end accomplished cooks. Peterson details necessary equipment, techniques, and ingredients for each recipe so that by the time you start making it, you're fearless. Some of his dishes are remarkably simple, like the beautifully fresh, ready-in-minutes Shaved Fennel Salad, or the richly aromatic French Onion Soup. Others are more complicated, but all teach a lesson: In the Roast Chicken chapter, learn to roast without a thermometer, truss without a needle, make gravy, and then succeed at Roast Chicken Stuffed Under the Skin with Spinach and Ricotta. Learn to make pasta dough, and then re-present leftover Provençal Lamb Stew (if there's any of this heavenly, melt-in-your-mouth tender, orange-scented stew left) as Meat-Filled Ravioli. Perfect for fans of French cuisine, this is also a remarkably handy reference guide for any kitchen. --Leora Y. Bloom

From Library Journal

Cooking teacher Peterson is the author of several other big cookbook/reference works, including Fish & Shellfish and Splendid Soups. The recipes in those books reflected influences from cuisines all over the world, but here Peterson, who worked in France and had his own French restaurant in New York's Greenwich Village, turns to his first culinary love. He has chosen 50 classic recipes as the starting point for his wide-ranging exploration of French food and techniques; each recipe serves both to demonstrate a variety of techniques and as the inspiration for a diverse collection of other recipes related to it in one way or another. Thus, the bouillabaisse chapter, for example, shows how to thicken a sauce with a beurre manie, intensify flavor with herbs, and work with eel and octopus; the spin-off recipes include French-style fish and shellfish chowder and pureed fish soup from Marseille, among others. One of Peterson's aims is to inspire his readers to use his recipes as a starting point for their own creations, so each chapter includes boxes and charts on improvising with different ingredients and flavors. The suggested variations for individual recipes, often mini-essays in themselves, open up dozens of other possibilities. Peterson is both passionate and knowledgeable about his subject, and his new book is an essential purchase. [Good Cook Book Club main selection.]
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 742 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; 1 edition (August 30, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471442763
• ISBN-13: 978-0471442769
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.7 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #334,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Peterson is an award-winning food writer, cookbook author, photographer, and cooking teacher who started his career as a restaurant cook in Paris in the 1970s. He is the author of fifteen titles, including "Sauces," his first book and a 1991 James Beard Cookbook of the Year winner, and "Cooking," a 2008 James Beard Award winner. He has been one of the country's preeminent cooking instructors for more than 20 years and currently teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education (formerly Peter Kump's) in New York. He is revered within the industry and highly regarded as a professional resource. James Peterson cooks, writes, and photographs from Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Glorious Resuscitation of Classic French Recipes, October 29, 2002

By 

rodboomboom (Dearborn, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics (Hardcover)

Peterson is thorough and talented and creative, and cut his culinary teeth (so to speak) in France. Thus, he has a wealth of info at hand to write this book.

Wealth of material to pass on well describes this monumental effort of over 700 pages. Techniques and equipment and sources are all nicely organized and explained here, as this is a trademark of Peterson's published efforts.

What I find exceptional to other French efforts is a pronunication guide which is thorough and delightful to use. No more fastly slurring when ordering now. This provides what we need to order Fletan Aux Moules.

Where does one start to comment on this massive undertaking of reviewing this, only to say that the recipe collection is extensive and flavorful and within the reach of serious home chefs. One certainly cannot comment on trying even a small majority of these quickly, however, the few tried on magnificent! E.g. Mediterranean Fish Soup (Bouillabaisse) for which he provides a history of the dish, the contentions over its meaning, etc. Plus he adds tips to achieve as close to the real thing dish in making the rouille, spice tricks and fillet advice. The result is superior Fish Stew!

Second dish tried was Saute of Beef or Lamb En Surprise. This amply demonstrates his concern to provide necessary substitute considerations (e.g. here for morels). This quickly prepared dish is exquisite, and demonstrates the depth of flavor and concentration on the red wine beef broth which serves as defining layer here.

I cannot wait to dive into other delights here. This is truly one to invest in and turn to often. Most of us home chefs will thrive on this most welcome and well-done offering.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very Novel Cookbook. Buy it to read!!!, September 7, 2005

By 

B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics (Hardcover)

`Glorious French Food' by leading culinary educator, James Peterson may be a true lost classic, in the cookbook world similar to `The Thirteenth Warrior' in the movies or the novels of Thomas Berger, including `Little Big Man'. I noticed a copy on the bargain stacks a few days ago and immediately felt regret for not having done a review of it to help, in some very small way to raise the reputation of this excellent culinary pedagogical text.

I have a very `love / hate' relationship with James Peterson's books. Peterson has a very well deserved reputation as the author of the classic reference, `Sauces', now in a second edition (rare for cookbooks) and his Jacques Pepin homage, `Essentials of Cooking' (for those of you who need your culinary show and tell in full color). He has also done several excellent texts on special subjects such as Vegetables, Salmon, Duck, and Soups. I have reviewed each and every one of these books favorably, yet my experience when doing specific Peterson recipes (except those in `Sauces') is mixed. I am not entirely surprised at this, as I sometimes find his individual recipe descriptions just a bit mixed up, as if his copy editor was taking a coffee break as they were editing that recipe.

Peterson may in this book offer a great explanation for this paradox. He says that his greatest ambition would be to write a cookbook with no recipes. This is not as easy as it sounds, since I reviewed Pam Anderson's book `How to Cook Without a Book' and I found it wanting in several regards. Peterson also says that his greatest compliment is when a reader says they made one of his recipes, but changed it a bit, and it came out very well. All this means is that Peterson is a relatively unconventional cookbook author who is best approached differently than you may approach `The Joy of Cooking' or `Mastering the Art of French Cooking'.

This book, even for its great size (almost 750 pages) is, like Madeleine Kamman's `The New Making of a Cook', a book meant to be read from front to back in an easy chair with no electronic distractions nearby. The first and most important reason for reading this book like a novel is its novel organization. Instead of chapters on Salads, Soups and Stocks, Meat, Poultry, Starches, Vegetables, and Desserts, there are a very neat 50 chapters on fifty of the most famous dishes from the French culinary canon. As you may guess from the size of the book, there is a lot more here than 50 recipes which, with a typical treatment, may take not much more than 100 pages to dispatch. Rather, most of the chapters are really about a family of dishes.

The very first chapter takes twelve (12) pages to cover `Assorted Vegetable Salads', all falling under the rubric of the French word, `Crudites' which, roughly translated, means raw vegetables. In this chapter are nine (9) dish recipes for Celeriac Remoulade, Grated Carrots, Red Cabbage Salad, Cold Cucumbers, Marinated Mushrooms, Baby Artichokes with Walnuts, Shaved Fennel Salad, Tomato Salad, and Parisian-Style Potato Salad. There are also two `pantry' recipes for Basic Mayonnaise and Crème Fraiche. Like the very liberal Chris Schlesinger (`The Thrill of the Grill', `How to Cook Meat', etc) and unlike the very traditional Madeleine Kamman, Peterson is extremely liberating with his advice. He tells us how to improvise crème fraiche and he tells us all the reasons why some substitutes, such as American sour cream, will just not work as well in some recipes. He does not tell us not to improvise. He also follows the party line on the right potato for the right dish, but he also says that you can probably get away with using any kind of potato for any kind of dish, which fits my experience in using a russet for both mashed potatoes (with a good potato ricer) and potato salad, two recipes for which russets are supposed to be inferior to waxy or `all purpose' varieties.

Part of what makes many great cookbooks such a pleasure to read is the extent to which the author introduces their own informed opinion into the writing. Both `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' and `The New Making of a Cook' would be great cookbooks without the lively opinions of Julia Child and Madeleine Kamman, but they are much better at getting their subject across than a dry presentation of quantities and procedures. If you think this is unimportant, take a quick look at a few recipes in `The Joy of Cooking' and you will see an ample amount of humor in even this encyclopedic collection of recipes.

One thing I especially enjoyed in this book was the affirmation of the doctrine in Ms. Kamman's book that in spite of all the butter, pork fat, goose fat, or olive oil in popular recipes, French cooking is NOT about high fat content. Peterson is especially good on fats in general and butter in particular, as he hits all the right notes about cooking with butter. For one thing, he discounts the common practice so popular with TV culinary personalities of mixing butter and oil to raise the burn point of butter solids. He says it simply does not keep the butter solids from going black. He also clearly differentiates plain clarified butter from the Indian staple, ghee, where the butterfat is taken to a darker brown than is done by simple clarification.

I even found something new on my favorite cookbook subject, omelets. Peterson gives two different techniques and clearly differentiates both the method and the cultural differences in French cooking between the omelet and scrambled eggs.

The bad news is that if this book may be in danger of loosing its market, and it may go out of print. The good news is that you should be able to get a copy from our beloved Amazon.com for cheap.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A French launching pad, May 23, 2004

By 

socrates - See all my reviews

This review is from: Glorious French Food: A Fresh Approach to the Classics (Hardcover)

Glorious French Food is well written but has a somewhat different approach. Instead of huge lists of formulas to be followed, this book is more like base lessons in French cooking. All the basics and classics are included and at the end of the lesson are variations. If one is looking for the "ground rules" in order to evenutally use your own creativity then this is the book for you. If however, you want to just be told "do this, then do that", other volumes may be a better match.