Customer Reviews

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

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...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!

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.

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 .

`Parisian Home Cooking' by chef / restaurateur / culinary journalist, Michael Roberts is an early entry into what is becoming a very crowded field of cookbooks on French cooking at home, whether in Paris, Provence, or one of the many other culinary rich regions of France. The principle competitors in this market are lead by Patricia Wells, who has at least three (3) titles in this French home cooking sweepstakes. Susan Hermann Loomis also has three, if you include her culinary memoir `On Rue Tatin'. Her latest `Cooking at Home On Rue Tatin' is an especially good entry into this field. There are even several classics in this genre by Madeline Kamman and Richard Olney, but I have not yet read or reviewed them, so I mention them with no opinion on their quality. One of the most recent entries is from TV Food Network Celeb, Ina Garten, `Barefoot in Paris', which has much merit, but as much of that quality is due to her travelogue content as it is to her culinary content. To my mind, the very best entry into this genre is Amanda Hesser's `The Cook and the Gardner', which has so much more to offer it is probably best considered in a class by itself, but it does overlap the subjects of these other titles.

Two prominent virtues of chef Robert's book are its low price and its simple recipes. The books by Wells, Loomis, and Garten also have simple recipes, which points out that all these books are really dealing with what has famously been classified as `cuisine provincial' and not `cuisine bourgeois' which is the subject of the great books by Julia Child, Elizabeth David, and Richard Olney' and certainly not `haute cuisine' which you will find in Wells' collaboration with Joel Robuchon. While most recipes are simple, Roberts has the virtue of having a few more recipes for money. Oddly, I don't see much greater depth in the description of the recipes based on the fact that Roberts is a trained chef and restaurateur.

All these books have some overlap in recipes, but not as much overlap as you may see in similar books on Italian cuisine. In fact, Roberts gives several very interesting recipes for `potted' dishes, which seem to be a species of rustic pate. About half of his soups are based on very common themes of beans, leeks, potatoes, mushrooms, cream, and onions, but some are quite new to me, such as the sauerkraut and Brussels sprout soup from Alsace (bordering on Germany).

The section on egg recipes is something of a surprise, as it completely eschews classic omelet recipes in favor of scrambled eggs. The only recipe with `omelet' in the name might be much more properly be called a frittata as it is done with six or more eggs, cooked on the stove top and finished in the oven, without folding. To make this turn even more interesting, the author says that French home cooks simply do not bother with the true omelet as taught to us by Elizabeth David, Julia Child, and a battalion of other notable culinary writers. Two things keep me from gigging the author on his opinion. One is David's dictum that an omelet is what you want to call it. The second is the fact that the author has lived, studied, and worked in Paris and I have not, at least not for several decades, so I take him at his word when he says the everyday at home egg dish in Paris is the scrambled egg, not the omelet. Even so, his description of the scrambled egg method, while very good, is not the very best I have seen. For that, look in `Simple to Spectacular' by Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten and journalist Mark Bittman. As someone who has struggled with scrambling two eggs, I strongly recommend Roberts' suggestion that scrambling should be done with no fewer than six eggs. On the other hand, I find the techniques here for soft boiled and coddled eggs to be too good to miss.

Most of Roberts' salad recipes are pretty standard stuff except for his unusual suggestion on the use of verjus as a replacement for vinegar. What is so delicious about this notion is not that it is very new, but that it is so very old. Verjus is a common ingredient in most Medieval and Renaissance cookbooks and it probably went out of fashion when commercial vinegar production was well established.

As with any good French cookbook, the vegetable recipes always seem to be the most interesting, especially the gratins and tarts.

The seafood recipes are heavy with mussels, scallops, and salted cod with poaching, fennel, and pan-frying done in many different ways.

The poultry recipes also include the usual collection of excellent chicken recipes, heavy on the methods for treating older birds and roasters. I was especially happy to see three different chicken casseroles. Turkey, duck, and rabbit also get their usual quota of recipes.

In the chapter on red meats, there is the usual collection of veal, beef, lamb, and pork recipes, including a very nice take on preparing `minute steaks'. No treatment of our famous Philly cheese steak does as good a job of detailing the best way to coddle rather than to sautee the thin meat.

The chapter on desserts follows the lead of the egg chapter, in that the average Parisian will simply not bother trying to compete with the local Patissier. So, most of the desserts are quite simple, more assemblies than fully baked cake or pastry. The author does, however, go to the trouble of giving us a lemon tart recipe, including a shortbread-like crust very similar to the Chez Panisse sweet tart crust.

Speaking of Chez Panisse, I suspect Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower would take issue with the author's bio that credits him with pioneering `California cuisine'.

A very nice, inexpensive book of simple and authentic Parisian recipes. Recommended.

Michael Roberts, the author, writes in the introduction to his book as though he were speaking to you at a small, outdoor table at a local café while dunking a biscotti into his espresso. His message is simple and insightful. His advice is worth hearing.

To begin with, you should know that Michael Roberts moved to Paris in 1975 and earned his professional certificate from the Ecole Superieure de Cuisine Jean-Ferrandi. He lived and worked in Paris before returning to the U.S. and opening his own restaurant Trumps in Los Angeles in 1980. He has since that time returned to Paris for several extended visits. He brought his experiences of everyday life in Paris to this book that reveals how the average, working person in Paris shops for food and prepares meals at home. In his introduction to the book, you instantly recognize yourself because he explains how people in the everyday Parisian culture share virtually the same food varieties, cooking equipment, busy schedules and lack of time that people in every other metropolitan area of the world also share.

The discovery that I made is based upon an admission by the author in the opening of his book when he speaks of his youth and says The realization that I had learned to cook but not to nourish, that I hadnt grasped the gastronomic world of the average Parisian, disheartened me. So, he set upon a course to correct that oversight and wrote about his experiences that revolve around one simple philosophy from which we can all profit. You start with fine ingredients. You cook things in a way that coaxes out the flavors. No need to complicate a recipe with many ingredients, because they only end up fighting each other.  Let the ingredients speak to you. He goes on to say The charm of a French meal lies in their insistence on quality ingredients and balanced flavor, in respecting those ingredients by not overcomplicating the cooking. I enjoyed and wholeheartedly agree with his comments that shopping for flavorful ingredients should be a delight, not a chore; that cooking delicious meals doesnt really take very long; that the resulting enjoyment breaks up the tension of the day from which we can all benefit; that the devotion to this splendid ritual of eating well should become part of the rhythm of life; and, finally, that families who share this pattern of living will pass on the gift of memories of yesterday so that familiar flavors or aromas will unlock the memory of childhood,  what most Parisians do nearly every time they sit down at the table.

The books 175 recipes that reflect the authors philosophies are easy to prepare and suit a variety of tastes for various courses of a meal, including soups, salads, entrees, and desserts. My copy of the book has already shown wear on its edges and stains on its most used pages which, if you will pardon the expression, speaks volumes about what I think of this book.

First the positive: I agree with some of the other reviewers that the stories and descriptions of french food philosophy are worth reading. Also the fillet mignon in roquefort sauce IS divine and will stay in my repertoire.

However, I must admit wondering if some of the other glowing reviews have been written by the author's friends. I am a big fan of french food and a longtime cook, but I haven't been pleased with how many of the recipes I've tried turned out. Some of the flavors have been odd or the dishes watery. The author's recommendations on cooking times or temperatures were way off on most of the recipes I've tried and I can only imagine this being confusing for someone who's just starting to cook.

Unfortunately, I don't think Michael Roberts is doing for french cooking what Marcella Hazan did for italian.

I am very interested in french culture - in particular, the culture of food! I have other french cookbooks, but this one is by far the most used. Every single recipe I have cooked from this book has turned out beautifully. My family has especially enjoyed the scallop recipes and the bean soup recipe. I am very pleased with this book. I love the stories of french life and the pictures of the cooks in their kitchens. Hard to believe that so many treats could emerge from such tiny and bare kitchens. Bon appetit!

Little needs to be said about this book! It is the best cookbook I have ever owned. It is used weekly in our home. Recipes are simple, quick and absolutely delightful. You don't need any other French cookbook, although Parisian Home Cooking will only wet your appetite for more and more of this wonderful genre of food! An absolute must! Michael put me on the list for your next book!!!

Michael Roberts' "Parisian Home Cooking" is truly that - good, dependable recipes for the home cook. The ingredients are, for the most part, easily obtained and the directions simple to follow. My personal favorite is the Seven-Hour Leg of Lamb [which takes about 4 hours] - it's the world's tenderest and most flavorful. But take a look at the Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Vinaigrette, the Upside Down Tomato Tart, and his Flourless Chocolate Cake. It's a goldmine of simple, tasty meals.

I checked a copy of this book out of the library last summer and read it like a novel. In my attempt to live a little more simply and a little more French, this book was a timely find. I finally bought my own copy and am slowly but surely cooking my way through. I convinced two friends to buy the book and we're comparing notes as we cook through the book together.

I think besides the terrific recipes, one of the things that I enjoyed the most were the stories of Michael's friends and their cooking tips. We've taken one of the tips to heart...eating eggs for breakfast must mean that one is ill or in training. We have 'egg night' every Wednesday and my children love it!

Some of my favorite recipes include the salt cod with potato gratin, the beef filet with red wine and roquefort sauce, any of the roasted chicken recipes, and the very yummy roasted whole cauliflower. That said, everything that I've made has been delicious.

Happy cooking!