Saveur Cooks Authentic French: Rediscovering the Recipes, Traditions, and Flavors of the World’s Greatest Cuisine
by the editors of Saveur MagazineChronicle Books, 320 pp., $40
As much as I adore French food, it’s hard for me to get excited about new French cookbooks. Often, they aren’t “new” at all, and if they are truly new, well then, somehow it seems like they’re not so French. The recently released Saveur Cooks Authentic French: Rediscovering the Recipes, Traditions, and Flavors of the World’s Greatest Cuisine, by the editors of Saveur Magazine, is definitely an exception. This is a cookbook at once classic and new — a tome that takes you to France not only through its recipes (both traditional and nouvelle cuisine), but also through a multitude of inviting photographs (both vintage and contemporary) of the French enjoying their one true love — food.
Because of its cultural anthropological approach to cooking, Saveur Magazine long ago became my favorite food publication. It’s the kind of place where I find history and trivia, intrigue and romance, all of it centered on food. For some reason, though, I never cut out the magazine’s recipes despite the fact that each issue features at least two things I’d love to cook. This is probably because cutting up a Saveur somehow seems inappropriate — sort of like cutting up a National Geographic. So, I couldn’t be happier to see all of the magazine’s colorful articles on France compiled in such a magnificent, user-friendly book.
Saveur Cooks Authentic French includes hundreds of recipes, each with a sidebar gleaned from the magazine giving the recipes a contextual story. From a technical standpoint, the cookbook covers all the bases, from the simplest salad assemblies to the more demanding production of terrines and pastries. In all the recipes, directions are straightforward and concise, and one quick read-through lets you know if you’re up for the work involved or not. If you’re a dedicated Francophile, you’ll love the book’s chapter introductions — poetic musings about the different regions of France that speak to different parts of the appetite. In the “Cheese & Eggs” chapter, the Alps are hailed as “an emblematic range, romantic, imposing, operatic — mountains as metaphor — [that] inspire, in those who traverse them — enormous hunger.” As a result, they explain, old-fashioned French mountain cooking is “robust and satisfying.” The chapter illustrates this in its recipes for Fondue Savoyarde, Shallot custard, and Gougeres, addictive little cheese puffs from Burgundy.
The Seafood section begins with, “In the Fall of 1991, I moved to the pretty port town of Sanary-sur-Mer — to live for a time with a close-knit group of professional fishermen. For the better part of a year, I’d meet them at the dock in the predawn darkness, beneath a silvery moon, boarding one of their tiny fishing boats and heading out to sea.” The “Hemingwayesque” story continues, and in the pages that follow it, Bouillabaisse, Mussels in White Wine, and Roasted Whole Sea Bass are deconstructed.
Saveur Cooks Authentic French is a cookbook you can cuddle up with and read. Every chapter offers a new gastronomic journey, exposing the reader to a wide array of regional recipes and their corresponding rituals and traditions. There are Mediterranean entries from Provence, farmhouse foods from Brittany, hearty preparations from Alsace and Burgundy, and earthy specialties from the Lot and Perigord. You can read about the only French artisan still making handmade walnut oil in the Medieval tradition, learn fun frog (as in frog leg) facts and trivia, and vicariously experience meals both in the country’s most celebrated restaurants and its off-the-beaten-path cafes and brasseries.
The editors of Saveur know their French food and their French culture. In fact, they champion it. French cuisine, they explain with assurance, “is far more than just a collection of recipes. It’s a philosophy, an aesthetic, an attitude towards life. It is a way of preparing food — which is to say, a way of approaching (and assimilating) the natural world — based on an immensely complex and sophisticated system of complementary, interlocking bases, part chemical, part mathematical, part artistic.” They insist that after a decade of focusing on fusion foods, American tastes have come back to the pure and classic. And “these,” they unequivocally proclaim, “are, in the Western world at least, indisputably, and authentically French.” Amen.
This article appears in November 19 • 1999.