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Bistro Cooking Paperback – January 11, 1989
| Patricia Wells (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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BISTRO COOKING contains over 200 scrumptious bistro recipes made lighter and quicker for the way we cook today. Warm Poached Sausage with Potato Salad. Benoit's Mussel Soup. Guy Savoy's Fall Leg of Lamb. Beef Stew with Wild Mushrooms and Orange, Chicken Basquaise, Pasta with Lemon, Ham, and Black Olives, L'Ami Louis' Potato Cake, Provencal Roast Tomatoes, Pears in Red Wine, and Golden Cream and Apple Tart.
Throughout, lively notes and sidebars capture the world of bistro owners in the kitchen, les grands chefs, and more. Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Winner of the 1989 IACP Seagram Food and Beverage Award. Over 166,000 copies in print.
- Print length291 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWorkman Publishing Company
- Publication dateJanuary 11, 1989
- Dimensions7.44 x 0.81 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100894806238
- ISBN-13978-0894806230
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—Melissa Clark―Melissa Clark, WNYC
From the Inside Flap
With 200 recipes, plus menus and quotes, BISTRO COOKING features not only bistro owners in the kitchen, but French housewives, farmers, winemakers, breadbakers, and many others who contribute to bistro as a way of life.
Patricia Wells' wonderful naturalness, openness, and honesty are in perfect harmony with the simple, delicious fare she celebrates in BISTRO COOKING . . . her enthusiasm and joy are reflected on every page of this fine book, and happily we are all the beneficiaries. -JACQUES PEPIN
MENU
LEFT BANK BISTRO; TABLE FOR TWO
Familiar bistro fare, a menu designed to celebrate romance, love, or simply the fact that you're alive and well. With this, try a Saint-Veran or a Macon-Villages.
Saucisson Chaud Pommes a L'Huile
Warm Poached Sausage with Potato Salad
Canard aux Olives Chez Allard
Chez Allard's Roast Duck with Olives
Tarte aux Pommes a la CrSme
Golden Cream and Apple Tart
From the Back Cover
With 200 recipes, plus menus and quotes, BISTRO COOKING features not only bistro owners in the kitchen, but French housewives, farmers, winemakers, breadbakers, and many others who contribute to bistro as a way of life.
"Patricia Wells' wonderful naturalness, openness, and honesty are in perfect harmony with the simple, delicious fare she celebrates in BISTRO COOKING . . . her enthusiasm and joy are reflected on every page of this fine book, and happily we are all the beneficiaries." -JACQUES PEPIN
MENU
LEFT BANK BISTRO; TABLE FOR TWO
Familiar bistro fare, a menu designed to celebrate romance, love, or simply the fact that you're alive and well. With this, try a Saint-Veran or a Macon-Villages.
Saucisson Chaud Pommes a L'Huile
Warm Poached Sausage with Potato Salad
Canard aux Olives Chez Allard
Chez Allard's Roast Duck with Olives
Tarte aux Pommes a la CrSme
Golden Cream and Apple Tart
About the Author
Patricia Wells, for more than two decades the restaurant critic for The International Herald Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Bistro Cooking, as well as more than a dozen other books. She also runs a successful cooking school in both Paris and Provence, where she and her husband have lived for more than 30 years.
Product details
- Publisher : Workman Publishing Company; Later Printing edition (January 11, 1989)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 291 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0894806238
- ISBN-13 : 978-0894806230
- Item Weight : 1.39 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.44 x 0.81 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #236,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #196 in French Cooking, Food & Wine
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Patricia Wells is a journalist, author, and teacher who runs a popular cooking school—At Home with Patricia Wells—in Paris and Provence. Salad As A Meal is her twelfth book. She won the James Beard Award for The Provence Cookbook, Patricia Wells at Home in Provence, and Simply French. Also nominated for Beard Awards were Vegetable Harvest and The Paris Cookbook. With her husband, Walter, she is also the author of We've Always Had Paris . . . and Provence. The French government has honored her as a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, recognizing her contribution to French culture. A former New York Times reporter, she is the only foreigner and only woman to serve as restaurant critic for a major French publication, L'Express. For more than twenty-five years she was the global restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune.
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Like all of her other books, the table of contents and selection of recipes therein follows a conventional pattern with chapters on Appetizers, First Courses, and Palate Teasers; Soups of the Day; Market Basket Salads; Pastas; Seasonal Vegetables; Potatoes; Eggs, Cheese, Terrines, and Tarts; Fish and Shellfish; Poultry, Chicken, Duck, Guinea Hen, and Rabbit; Meats, Roasts, and Daily Specials; Homemade Desserts; and Pastries, Bread Dough, Sauces, and Stocks.
The first thing that stands out is the wide variety of dishes. The next is the relative simplicity of the recipe techniques without sacrificing anything to quality and respect for ingredients. I compared Wells' pot-au-feu recipe in this book with the recipe in Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' and found the attention to detail was as good or greater in Wells' book. At the same time, Wells is not entangling us in a lot of complex preparations. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Wells and Child agree on a method for making Crème Fraiche that does not require day or more to wait for the result.
Wells succeeds in evoking the feeling of the bistro experience in the selection of her recipes, the chatter in the headnotes explaining the source of the recipes, the consistent presentation of a French title for each recipe, even if the dish is a local favorite at a small establishment (such as `Maggie's Roasted Red Peppers') and not an established standard dish. The photographs and layout of the book also enhance the subject, making the book a lot of fun to read without going too far, destroying the utility of a book you have to read and follow it's directions.
The emphasis on simplicity and utility extends to the pantry recipes in the last chapter. I especially like the distinction between the three different types of pastry crust. If you are new to pastry, however, I recommend you consult a book such as Alford and Duguid's `Home Baking' specializing in a discussion of pastry to become aware of the subtleties of pastry dough. I also suggest that for stocks, the reader consult a fuller discussion of the subject such as Cooks Illustrated's volume `The Best Recipe'.
One thing I did not find in this book which I expected was an explanation of the distinction between a bistro and a brassiere. Wells cites several recipes that originate from brassieres and includes bistros, brassieres, and restaurants in her list of establishments in the back of the book.
Three other small aspects of the book did annoy me. One was the numerous references on unfamiliar terms to an index which, in some cases, did not include the term on which the reference was made. Another was the inaccuracy of some English to metric unit conversions. I found a few which were consistently off by about 10%. A third was the use of the metric unit centiliters in place of milliliters. Almost all American metric measuring devices for the kitchen are graduated in milliliters. I can anticipate a lot of blank stares at the abbreviation `cl' for metrically challenged cooks.
All of these caveats are small matters when weighted against the great good fun to be found in preparing recipes from this book. This book will go to the top of my list when I am looking for ideas to fill out a menu and I have no clue to what I want to eat. At the list price of less than $14, the cachet of genuine bistro food makes this book a real gem.
Highly recommended to all.
I bought this book on a whim about 20 years ago when I was starting out on my own, and today I credit it with teaching me to cook. This book caused me not just to like, but to love, French cooking, which I had previously regarded as either too tyrannical or just not that interesting. Thanks to this magnificent little volume, French cooking is now a very easy and natural part of my life.
This book absolutely oozes charm, and Mrs. Wells' enthusiasm and joy on the pages of it are infectious. One of the best things she does is to just plain motivate you to get in the kitchen and start cooking. The spirit of this book is light-hearted and fun, but make no mistake, Mrs. Wells' knowledge of French food, and of cooking in general, is anything but light. Bistro Cooking is the reference I turn to again and again when I want an honest-to-goodness recipe for a dish such as a roast chicken, a potato gratin, a chocolate cake or a fruit tart. (The chocolate mousse on page 244 is the most divine thing I have ever tasted.) The recipes are authentic, tried and true, and cannot be beat.
What is it that makes this book so special? Maybe it is the vintage-looking black and white photos, the charming illustrations or the quaint French menus. Maybe it is the total do-ability of the recipes, for surely there is not a reason in the world why you couldn't make any of them? It's not really a question of whether you CAN make the recipes in this book, it is a question of whether you can RESIST making them. Maybe it is all the helpful advice that is so comfortably offered throughout that gives one the sense that they would acquire more practical culinary know-how by using Bistro Cooking than they would if they were to enroll in cooking school for a year. Maybe it is the feeling you get when you sit down in your favorite chair and open the book that you are stepping right through its pages into another time and place. Yes, I admit that armchair travelers such as myself will love it, but they will also love knowing that Mrs. Wells is an absolute authority on French food and that the recipes in this book are so good they should be considered the standard by which other recipes for the same dishes ought to be judged. Or maybe it's the feeling you get from reading her description of a dish that the recipe that follows for it is not just a formula for making very good food but surely for happiness itself. Maybe it's everything.
I can promise you this: This is a cookbook unlike any you have ever owned and if you acquire it, it will occupy a very special place, not only on your bookshelf, but in your life and in your heart.
The book is divided into a number of sections: hors d'oeuvres and first dishes, Soups, Salads, Pastas, Seasonal vegetables, Potatoes, Eggs (cheese, tarts), Fish and shellfish, Poultry, Meat, Desserts, and Pastries.
The recipes provide hearty food. Soups? An onion soup; Monkfish soup with garlic cream; Leek, potato, and bacon soup. Fish? Codfish with herbed tomato sauce is intriguing (tomato and fish don't seem to go well together to me--based on some unfortunate dining experiences--but this works! Other examples: Smoked haddock with Savoy cabbage; Oven-roasted scallops. Poultry? Chicken with tarragon vinegar; Chicken sautéed with scallops; Roast duck with olives. And on it goers.
The recipes are easy to understand. Not all are quite so simple, but the array of recipes provides a good resource for the kitchen.
All in all, a nice work.
Top reviews from other countries
Not only do I use it for the recipes, but as a frequent visitor to provence, I adore reading the introductions to each recipe. I imagine myself visiting the many markets and purchasing the ingredients required, then strolling back to the kitchen to prepare the meals for my family. Heavenly...
The book is more than a collection of recipes. Patricia Wells has a way that takes you along with her on her journey through France visiting the many bistros and markets.
The recipes are fantastic and the helpful hints and tips `truc' makes it a joyous read.
Buy it now...
Bravo!










