by Francoise Bernard Translated by Jane Sigal
Rizzoli, $45.00, 806 pages
La Cuisine: Everyday French Home Cooking 1000 Simply Recipes by Francoise Bernard is a luscious and enticingly thick cookbook with surprisingly few and simple ingredient requirements. One, to sometimes three recipes per page with a few seeping over to the next page. This doesn’t always allow the chef to prepare the meal without having to try and turn the page with sticky, wet fingers or a dry elbow. However, with so few ingredients needed and so little of the usual French-infused complication to recipes, page-turning is hardly a big concern.
Chapters are broken down by course from soups to desserts with added chapters covering eggs, various meats and vegetables and cocktails and drinks . ||How about a watercress soup and mushrooms with lemon and herbs for starters? The main course, roast turkey stuffed with chestnuts, gratineed zucchini with onions and for dessert, a simple summer berry pudding. For this Reviewer, you can hold the traditional veal brains and steak tar-tar but there are enough recipes in this cookbook to satisfy even the most discerning taste buds or delicate of palettes. This 806-page cookbook is a must-have in anyone’s kitchen!