La Bonne Cuisine De Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Essential Companion for Authentic French Cooking

This is the cookbook that pre-dated and influenced them all: from ginette mathiot's je sais cuisiner (1932) through prosper montaigne's first edition of the larousse gastronomique (1938) via elizabeth david's seminal french cookbooks of the 1950s (french country cooking, mediterranean food) to julia child and simone beck's treatise on french cooking for the american audience (mastering the art of french cookery, volumes 1 & 2), all relied heavily for their source material on Evelyn St. Ange. La Bonne Cuisine itself borrowed heavily from the bible itself, Escoffier's Guide Culinaire (written in 1907) but I would suggest that whilst Escoffier's tome assumes a fair amount of cookery know-how and is more an academic rather than a practical guide, La bonne cuisine can quite easily be used for day-to-day cookery. She lists all there is to know about french cooking in 700-odd pages, from the innumerable ways to thicken a watery broth to what to do with pastry from scratch to how to rescue a dish to how to prepare/debone all sorts of meats to.....the list goes on and on. Her style is pedantic, slightly schoolmarmish and very, very amusing - but overall it emanates competence in what she's attempting to teach as well as being eminently readable. If you're after a comprehensive guide on french cookery with short, snappy recipes a la Silver Spoon, Ginette Mathiot's je sais cusiner would be a better choice; if however you would like to lose yourself in the pages of a literary, historic cookbook that nevertheless teaches you the a-z of french cookery from scratch, this is a must-have.

This is a book about cooking before it became an academic subject. Written by somebody who did it really well, rooted in an old tradition, but with the ways and means that were available to anybody with a serious interest in food. None of the cooking in the modern haute cuisine style, many very small items in surprising combinations; Mme st Ange still cooks meals. But she cooks them really well. This is back to the basics, back to the roots of Fench cuisine and I'll take one of these recipes over a night out in a three-star restaurant any day.