Parisian Home Cooking: Conversations, Recipes, And Tips From The Cooks And Food Merchants Of Paris (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Picture for a moment a package of salmon steaks wrapped in plastic, labeled with a price sticker, and put out on display with the rest of the shrink-wrapped seafood in your neighborhood giant supermarket. Or for that matter, picture yourself racing through the supermarket, getting the food shopping over with as quickly and as sanely as possible. This is the opposite of Michael Roberts' Parisian Home Cooking, a cookbook as much about attitude as actual food.

Through artful recipes and engaging street photography, Roberts brings to life a culinary Paris found in private homes, a cuisine with a different sense of rhythm than anything American. Lunches are longer. Dinners are later. Shopping for the best ingredients imaginable is an interpersonal experience to be savored. "The charm of a French meal," Roberts writes, "is their insistence on quality ingredients and balanced flavor, in respecting those ingredients by not overcomplicating the cooking...."

To take this book to heart in an American city, Roberts suggests we "make marketing an adventure." To this end he finds himself making full use of ethnic markets and groceries, buying fish from Japanese markets, fresh poultry in Chinese markets, and so on. "The Indian grocery is where I buy chickpea flour for making socca, a Niçoise crepe.... Don't think that you need access to a French market or gourmet emporium to cook French food."

That said, prepare for the likes of Senegalese Salt Cod Fritters, Cream of Sorrel Soup, Escarole Salad with Mustard Vinaigrette, Green Beans and Morels, Scallops with Noodles and Basil, Turkey Cutlets with Sage and Lemon Butter, Braised Rabbit with Mustard and Calvados, Roasted Turnips with Sage, and Spiced Poached Peaches.

Roberts divides his book into the traditional courses of a French meal, starting with little things to nibble and encourage an appetite, and ending with dessert. Traveling the pages in between takes the casual visitor deep into the heart of Parisian markets, then back home to a small kitchen filled with the heart-healing aromas of a simple, divine meal, Parisian style. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

Chef and hotel restaurant consultant Roberts brings a disarmingly relaxed approach to French cooking and succeeds in taming a cuisine that can intimidate with its sometimes exacting procedures. He shows that Parisian home cooks are as hampered by small kitchens and time shortages as the rest of us, and that, as a result, their daily recipes are far less complicated than traditional French cookbooks suggest. Roberts proves that techniques are within the reach of anyone; his book provides ingredient lists that are not overwhelming and brims with such fresh ideas as the simple Cream of Radish Leaf Soup. Steamed Mussels West Indian Style tingles with coriander, curry and red pepper flakes. Pan-Seared Tuna Served with Its Marinade boasts a virtually effortless sauce of red wine, Dijon mustard and shallots. Casserole Roasted Chicken is one of several recipes that recall earlier Parisian stoves without thermostats, while delivering a very moist bird. Veal Shanks with Bread Sauce has a braising liquid ingeniously thickened with bread crumbs. Beef Tenderloin Steaks with Roquefort Sauce lavishly weds savory flavors popular with Parisians, as does Pork in the Style of the Butcher's Wife, heady with a mustard cream sauce, herbs, capers and cornichons. Many dishes are not for the fat conscious, but those who want to prepare French food with an informality that's almost Italian will relish Roberts's delectably casual recipes. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Cookbooks (May 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688138683
• ISBN-13: 978-0688138684
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #120,778 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cooking Fiend and Francophile is Right..., March 8, 2000

By A Customer

...everything I make from this book is truly delicious and , may I add, nutritious. Parisian Home Cooking teaches us that the value of fresh and diverse ingredients, simply prepared is the core of true health; dishes that yearn to be enjoyed amoung friends and actually leave you energy to enjoy their company! I just love the woman who refuses to spend more than fifteen minutes at her stove yet serves up divine dinners; the butcher's timeless admonition that for the body to work it must have some fat - how avant; the tips that coax real flavor from simple foods - to "sweeten" the vinegar for the perfect vinaigrette by adding a splash of wine (just one tip of many). As the diet gurus duke it out for your dollars, look at the slim, healthy Parisians in the photographs, read what they eat at home, and you will toss out the crazed American diet fads with relief. This book will feed you. It's also a good read. Move over Dr. Ornish and Monsieur Pepin - the secret is out!

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The new rush-to-the-stoves book, June 6, 1999

By A Customer

NEW YOUR TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW JUNE 6, 1999

The new rush-to-the-stoves book is Parisian Home Cooking: Conversations, Recipes and Tips From the Cooks and Food Merchants of Paris......a collection of recipes lovingly and cannily collected from Parisians young and old-- a concierge, a hip friend and his mother, a fellow American in Paris, the butcher at the street market and many other garrulous vendors. Roberts, a longtime Los Angeles restaurant chef and (with Barbara Kafka) one of the country's few truly original thinkers about cooking, returned to Paris 20 years after receiving his culinary schooling there, armed with a student's enthusiasm, an anthropologist's curiosity, a born schmoozer's way of eliciting cooking secrets and a sensational sense of taste. He rediscovers techniques born of Parisian practicality in the face of minimal burners and unreliable ovens: duck cooked and defatted in a pressure cooker before being finished in the oven, chicken roasted in a closely covered casserole, steak seared in a cast-iron skillet over high heat. Techniques and recipes like this will make cooks who cut their teeth on Julia Child and then moved on to Italy fall in love with French cooking all over again.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars from NEWSDAY, July 30, 1999

By A Customer

Book and Author: "Parisian Home Cooking: Conversations, Recipes, and Tips from the Cooks and Food Merchants of Paris," by Michael Roberts. Roberts pioneered California cuisine at his Los Angeles restaurant, Trumps, and is the author of "Secret Ingredients," "Make-Ahead Gourmet" and "What's for Dinner." Details: William Morrow, $25; 352 pages, 175 recipes, black-and-white photographs of Parisian markets and habitues throughout.

Description: Roberts starts off with advice on how to shop Parisian style in your hometown (frequent small markets; develop relationships with purveyors), then launches into recipes for every course, which are appended with kitchen tips and trenchant tales of marketing and cooking in Paris. Assessment: During this vogue for all things Italian, Roberts clearly wants to rescue French food from its current reputation as fussy and outdated. He absolutely succeeds with this well-written collection of vigorous, straightforward recipes. The book also paints a vivid picture of Roberts' Parisian crowd, urbane professionals who happen to whip up fabulous meals in their tiny kitchens. -Erica Marcus .