Customer Reviews

Paul Bocuse's French Cooking

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We own dozens of French cook books, including all the classics and many books featuring the recipes of great French restaurants. This is our go-to cook book for classic French cuisine. The recipes are superbly written: succinct, correct, intuitive. Bocuse never gives you a direction you do not need, and he never leaves out a hint that you do need. You can find every important French sauce; all the classic preparations of poultry, game, meat, and vegetables; and wonderful soups and desserts. Just the best!

Paul Bocuse is one of the best chefs in the World, one that has inspired many of the current superstars we see on TV. I bought this book for the first time many years ago and learned a lot from it. The recipes are dead on and explained the way a novice cook can follow, yet are also valuable to the most demanding and experienced gourmet. Since I lost it a while back, I am very glad to add it again to my cookbook collection.

This book has the most stupid thing to ever appear in a cookbook: `In my opinion one should leave the table feeling a little bit hungry.' (Insert your own clever retort here). It has been sometimes said that one can judge the talent of a chef by the respect that he/she cooks vegetables. By this measure, Bocuse is a bad chef; he is representative of an entire generation of restaurant chefs who are in the regular habit of torturing the vegetables, showing no respect for the flavor or freshness of the vegetables he/she is cooking. It expounds `nouvelle cuisine'; like the current fashion of `slow food', it is (was) an elitist movement primarily of interest to 3 star Guide Michelin restaurants and their well to do customers, and certainly doomed to the dustbin of culinary history. It is not relevant to the typical home cook. The back cover has a quote from a review that states `a new emphasis on freshness and simplicity'. This is way wide of the mark. This book was written in 1976. Perhaps it had more currency then, but today, one fails to see the point of this book.

Despite the rhetoric and the legendary name of the chef/author, the recipes themselves are pretty standard. It is an ordinary, average, and unexceptional collection of French recipes. It is a random mélange of haute cuisine and bistro cooking, with an emphasis on the former. As a sort of encyclopedia of standard French haute cuisine for restaurants or the accomplished home chef, it is acceptable; for the typical home cook, forget it. It is not a learning or educational tool; you better know your French haute cuisine cooking techniques. There are a number of recipe in this book I am rather doubtful of, and it takes a cook already experienced in French Cuisine to be able to detect these recipes.

The author commits the usual assortment of cookbook sins. Some recipes can be done as described, others require sophisticated kitchen skills. Sauces, like demi-glace, that restaurants much less homes are unlikely to have just hanging around, are repeatedly called for. Some recipes call for ingredients that the home cook will never get even if very rich, e.g. various song/game birds and truffles. The procedures can be downright terse and unhelpful. Protein cooked in the oven are only given cooking times with no internal temperature, and protein cooked on the stove have no indication as to when the protein is properly cooked; it assumes you already know these things. Sophisticated, multi-component recipes that require skill and planning to pull off correctly. Only using expensive meat (the beef section for the most part assumes that you have access to the whole tenderloin, more recipes for veal than anything else). The poultry section assumes you have access to a butcher who will freshly kill and dress poultry according to your request. It often calls for meat to be larded, but it does not describe how to do this. If you have a good battery of home kitchen skills or are a foodservice pro and need a reference for French cooking, this book is OK. Otherwise, forget this book and move on.

I also note the frequent, incorrect use of the verb `moisten'; this is probably an attempt to translate tremper or mouille. Either way, it is not a legitimate culinary translation and is a mark of laziness on the part of the translator. The temperatures listed in the `Making Sugar Syrup' section seemed to be totally wrong, whether in Fahrenheit or Centigrade. The English names of some of the recipes and ingredients do not match current usage, but here perhaps we can blame a sloppy translator rather than the author. It is the only cookbook I can recall that specifically recommends cooking meat `a la cuiller' (e.g. soft enough to eat with a spoon). Plate presentations that require the talents of both architect and painter are eschewed; sound familiar?