Les Recettes Originales de Alain Chapel: Looking for Alain

Over the last few months writing this blog one name has been a recurring theme in the books I have read: Alain Chapel. A chef acclaimed by his contemporaries, but whose greatness I have always struggled to understand. So I spend two months doing some serious digging about what made him tick. And this is what I discovered...

What if The Fat Duck closed and nobody cared?

Restaurant closes. No one cares.

Well that's exactly what happened last year, when Restaurant Alain Chapel in Mionnay quietly announced that it would not re-open after the winter break.

The news was barely reported. It made the diary columns of the French press - just. A few old lags in the foodie world commented. A couple of chefs mourned.

After over forty years in the highest echelons of French Gastronomy, the name of Alain Chapel was no more.

It wasn't always like this.

In the 1970s Alain Chapel was at the forefront of French gastronomy. If Bocuse was the Ferran Adria of the day (i.e. Chef Most Likely To Be Profiled In The In-Flight Magazine), then Alain Chapel was the Heston of the era. Operating out of his dolled-up auberge on the outskirts of Lyon, he was the mad scientist creating weird dishes with strange ingredients (stuffed pigs ears! braised chicken tripe!). It's no wonder that even today, Heston has a dish the menu named after him

At the height of his powers, with three Michelin stars and restaurants in France and Japan, Chapel was a man in demand. He flew Concorde to New York to cook for millionnaire customers. The Morocco royal family hired him to run a week-long pop-up in Fez (and you thought pop-ups were something new...). For people in the know, the greatest chef in the world wasn't Paul, it was Alain.

Then Alain dropped dead in 1990 - heart attack at the age of 53.

The culinary world mourned, but swiftly moved on. The restaurant endured under his trusted number two Phillip Jousse, losing a one macaroon but keeping a respectable two stars until the end. The master's two sons Romain And David (seven and ten when he died) went away, apprenticed and returned to take up the mantle. But unlike at Troisgros or Bise or Azak, a glorious second act was not to be. In February 2012, as L'Express noted, "Restaurant Alain Chapel closed in indifference".

Looking for Alain

But even though Alain is gone, you cannot escape his shadow. Leafing through my collection of cookbooks, I find him in all sorts of places

Alain Ducasse is one. After all, he trained at Mionnay and acknowledges that "Alain Chapel taught me to taste". Flick (okay, crowbar) your way through his Grand Livre de Cuisine and "facon Alain Chapel" is a recurring subtitle - here applied to a roast veal chop, there on a lobster and pigeon salad. And finally on a ragout of cockscombs, crayfish and mushrooms.

Then of course there's Heston. In the Big Fat Duck Cookbook he talks about how he was awed by Chapel - first by reading his books (problem - they were only in French and Heston only spoke English), and later by a sublime meal at Mionnay. And it was Chapel's signature pigeon jelly which inspired his Jelly of Quail which sprawls across eight pages in the centre of the book.

For a more personal angle try Michel Roux Jr. His autobio-with-recipes Life in the Kitchen recounts the two years he spent as a youthful apprentice chez Chapel. Amidst the stories of teenage japes and foie gras terrines, his respect for the Master is clear: "He was an extraordinary chef, an inspiration and very formidable."

The menu at Alain Chapel (click here for a more legible version)

And of course there's a whole chapter devoted to him in Blake And Crewe's Great Chefs of France. Set amidst a galaxy of star chefs (including Bocuse), it is Chapel's "supreme inventiveness" which makes him stand out:

There is no other menu like it... there is not a dish on Alain Chapel's menu which does not reveal an inventiveness and imagination which lift him into the rare class of supreme chefs. There is no dish which does not surprise.

And this isn't just rose-tinted-regret. Even before he died he was hailed by chefs and critics alike - just look at the galaxy of stars below who gathered in 1977 for his fortieth birthday:

"Everyone with more than two michelin stars say CHEESE"

Yet the real Alain Chapel remains elusive.

People still remember him, however dimly. But ask someone exactly what it was that was so great about him and a quizzical look descends. Set against today’s standards his food looks rather dated. Reading the carte today it sounds like a pretty traditional French restaurant. Foie gras with that. Truffles with this. What’s all the fuss?

You can find out though. You just need to look hard enough.

How to make a silk purse out of a calf’s ear

Let’s start with some of the recipes.

Stuffed calf's ears with fried parsley

Dinner time! :-p

The recipe is found on page 172 of Les Recettes Originales de Alain Chapel (of which more later). Ears from veal calves are blanched an braised for three hours in a casserole with a white wine bouillon. Meanwhile veal sweetbreads, chicken wings and truffle are sauteed with butter and mushrooms and bound into a forcemeat with egg yolks. The ears are stuffed with this mixture, rolled in more egg and breadcrumb and then fried  until golden. This dish is then served piping hot, garnished with crispy fried parsley.

This dish is Chapel's refinement of traditional bourgeois cuisine - in essence taking a humble ingredient and making it stretch further with a bit of stuffing (albeit a truffle and veal sweetbread stuffing). It's not a dish you normally see in a three star restaurant; there are echoes here of Pierre Koffmann giving the humble pigs trotter a similar treatment. If you do want to try it though I recommend you high-tail it to Troisgros in Roanne, which has recently started serving this dish as a tribute to Chapel. Be warned however, they are charging a stonking €110 for the starter of "Oreille et ris de veau a la truffe, inspires de Mionnay".

Pigeon jelly with chicken oysters and young vegetables

Quail jelly with langoustine cream -

Heston's Blumenthal's homage

In his book (p294), Chapel calls this his favourite dish and one of his true "grands plats" of his maison. I'll leave it to As Heston Blumenthal to  describes this one:

His pigeon dish had a few spoonfuls of delicate jelly surrounded by an artful arrangement of chicken oysters, mullet fillets, crayfish and their eggs - shades of pink and red offset by the glistening green of peas, spinach and lamb's lettuce, chives and chervil - bordered by a pale yellow crescent of creamy fish stock with orange zest and lemon juice. He had taken the elements of classical cooking and put them together in a very modern and innovative way that I found really exciting.

And this is of course the inspiration for Heston's Jelly of quail, langoustine cream, parfait of foie gras, truffle and oak toast, scented moss - Homage to Alain Chapel. It's a very different recipe of course but the clear jelly (quail, as he was already using pigeon in another dish) flavoured with star anise is straight out of Chapel's playbook.

What's striking to me is how modern this recipe feels (the Chapel version I mean). Its actually a dish which wouldn't feel out of place if it was served up at Noma - a melange of contrasting arranged ingredients on a plate, bound together with a textural contrast (the jelly) and sauced with a very light dressing. This is precisely the sort food being served up by modernist chefs at places like Noma, Viajante or Dabbous (albeit with a little more sous vide and parmesan snow thrown in).

Chicken tripe a notre mode

This dish (p390) is Chapel's reinvention of the classic tripes a la mode de Caen, except he started with chicken tripes, an ingredient I've never seen used elsewhere. The tripes are blanched for twenty seconds and then gently cooked, along with some veal tripe, with chicken stock, white wine and half of a calf's foot. They're then finished with mustard and Calvados (a tribute to their Normandy origins) and served in a cocotte.

Now if modern food is about getting down and dirty with your ingredients, this dish showed Chapel could mix it with the best of them. As Michel Roux Jr recounts in A Life in the Kitchen the tripes had to delivered warm, minutes after the hens were killed, and blanched within the hour. It was an incredibly difficult and fiddly dish to prepare.

The greatness of Alain

Having looked at a few of Chapel's signature dishes, there is something mildly disconcerting about then. Read about him on the surface and everything looks very as-is. Pigeon. Veal. Chicken. That’s all very traditional French. Very bourgeois.

But Pigeon jelly? Calf ear? Chicken tripe?

Something strange is going on.

Then there are other hints. He had own vegetable garden (I thought that was something that started with Passard). He put Japanese dishes on the menu (long before Robuchon’s zen master act). Asian spices like star anise and ginger were turning up on the carte (at a time when Jean-George Vongerichten was still making foie gras terrines in Alsace). And this was all in the 1970s.

The simple fact is that Chapel was doing things that were fundamentally different from all of his contemporaries. I believe he was operating at least ten years ahead of everyone else. And probably more.

So what made Alain so great? I would say three things:

First, he built on tradition

That chicken liver parfait (from Michel Roux Jr's

Life in the Kitchen)

One reason he doesn’t seem as revolutionary to us as a Heston or an Adria is his food wasn’t as dramatic a break with the past. That was partly the point – he always claimed his cooking was evolutionary, not revolutionary.

For example, one of his great signatures was a warm chicken liver parfait (which Craig Claibourne called one of the absolute cooking glories of this generation) – in many ways traditional Lyonnais bistro fare, taken to the nth degree.

Also, as we have already seen the calf's ear and the chicken tripes also had their roots in bourgeois country cuisine. Of course this was gussied up, truffled up and generally moved on. But Chapel was very much cooking with tradition, not against it.

Second he embraced innovation.

But make no mistake, no matter what he claimed, Alain wasn’t just an evolutionary chef. He was also doing things that were profoundly revolutionary:

• Ingredients: He took humble and unusual ingredients like chicken tripe and calves ears, and refashioned strange (but strangely familiar) combinations.
• Asian techniques and flavours: Chapel's work in Japan opened him up to Japanese cuisine long before it was fashionable, something evidenced in his famed Crepe Japonaise. His made unheard-of use of Asian spicing, spiking his pigeon jelly with anise and deploying ginger in his savoury courses (don’t laugh. In those days that was really wild).
• Pioneering ingredient-led cuisine: Decades before Alain Passard got religion about his vegetable patch, Chapel has his own garden (le jardin de cure) where he grew baby salad leaves and vegetables for cooking. Rather than touring the market each day so see who had what we good, he would seek out the single finest producer for each item and place all his confidence in them. Nowadays chefs make a great song and dance about being close to their producers (check out the Phaidon Noma book or the Rockpool book for examples). Chapel was ahead of the game
• Innovating with technology: Chapel was keen to incorporate space-age gadgets like ice-cream machines, ovens with different temperatures at the top and bottom (for breads and pastries) or robot-coupes for chopping fine herbes. Again with the passing of time this sounds incredibly hum-drum but in post-war France this was twenty-first century gear.
• Inventing new techniques: The frothed-up soups that were all the rage in the 1990s started with his mushroom cappuccino. And this wasn't just a fad. Remember that this underlying principle - that foaming up a sauce increases its surface area and flavour, also lies behind El Bulli's espumas and sponges in the 1990s. A more unremarked innovation was his jus perle – instead of a smooth cream- or butter-based sauce he would leave his jus unemulsified with droplets of flavoursome fat floating in the mix. This is something Heston makes a great song and dance about as “flavour encapsulation” – to Chapel it was just another everyday innovation.

Third he was the perfectionist

I don't think its a coincidence that Ducasse - who has built an empire on laser-like culinary precision, learned his trade with Alain Chapel. Contemporary accounts all point to an incredible quiet and concentration in his kitchen. As one stagiere writes:

I have been in libraries that were noisier than that kitchen, where everyone seemed so concentrated in work that an earthquake might have passed unnoticed. I do not think one single plate escaped M. Chapel's final inspection, and, believe me, he would have detected the slightest flaw.

In Great Chefs of France Crewe and Blake also remark on the incredible calm in the kitchen - different from any of the other three star kitchens they have seen:

So everybody moves, calmly and without haste; yet all is done at amazing speed. Gradually you become aware of the power of this kitchen, It is like one of those beautiful nineteenth-century pumping-engines, moving majestically and silently, seemingly without effort, yet delivering immense power, smooth and everlasting.

There is a picture in the book of Chapel putting the finishing touches to a dish, the tip of his tongue sticking out in concentration. It is this intensity which made Chapel a man apart - and perhaps contributed to his early demise.

Chapel - a study in concentration

A cuisine that changes your life

The result was a kitchen that blew - your - mind.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask David Kinch of the great West Coast restaurant Manresa. For him it was Chapel’s pigeon with fresh peas and braised lettuces that changed his life:

I was 23, and of course I knew everything. But after that dinner I realised that all my training was wrong, that  I had completely missed the point of what makes great food. I went back to my room and cried! What this guy could do with a handful of peas and some lettuce, and how the purity of the flavours could be maintained and yet come together, was something I had never learned.

Or ask Michel Roux Jr - I emailed Le Gavroche while I was researching this post and they were kind enough to send me the following:

Alain Chapel was a great man, had respect for local ingredients and dishes such as Chicken Tripe, Crepes Japanaise, which were very avant-garde. He was using fresh ginger which was unheard of in France in the 70’s. The man was a genius, his dishes tasted heavenly and were shockingly straightforward.

Michel Roux 

Maître Cuisinier de France & Managing Director 

Alain Chapel in Print

Parlez-vous Francais?

Alain Chapel's only cookbook,

now happily back in print

Which makes it even more of a tragedy that Alain Chapel put very little in print before he died, and virtually nothing in English.

The only major book was Les recettes originales de Alain Chapel, originally published in 1980 as part of Robert Laffont's long-running Les Recettes Originales... collection.

(The Editions Laffont series is a fascinating endeavour in its own right - 23 volumes detailing the recipes of the major chefs of the day (Senderens, Robuchon Girardet and Guialtiero Marchesi all feature), starkly printed in black and white with the barest of illustration. It's the sort of project which would be unthinkable today in a era of celebrity chefs, publishing agents and multi-million dollar book deals.)

Toady these volumes are hard to find. Books for Cooks in Notting Hill used to stock them but haven't had then for years. Thankfully though a few of the volumes (by Chapel, Troigros and Michel Guerard) were recently reprinted in paperback, which means that for the first time in many years Alain Chapel is now only an Amazon.fr click (and a French dictionary) away.

The Recipes of Tradition...

The book starts with a lengthy introduction, where Chapel expounds on a variety of topics - tasting menus, the evolution of cuisine, flavour and place... (I have to admit my French falls down a bit here - if anyone fancies chipping in with an English translation I'm all ears). A lot of it is summed up though in the subtitle of the book: La cuisine, c'est beaucoup plus que des recettes. "Cuisine is more than recipes".

After a brief section on basic recipes (stocks, sauces, pastries etc) we then pile into the heart of the piece. One of the great things about this book is that its actually two pretty much self-contained cookbooks in one. The first part Les Recettes de la Tradition is his book on traditional French cusine. He kicks off with an eight-page account La saint-cochon, which details what to do when you slaughter a whole pig. Starting with what do with with the blood, he then ploughs into recipes for faggots made with the pork rind, liver & kidney, a head-cheese incorporating the ears and feet, rillettes, saucissons, boudin blanc, pork scratchings and the belly, salted with thyme. It all feels very St John.

Chicken kidney, cockscomb and
crayfish ragout - the Ducasse version

He than details numerous traditional recipes, split into the usual categories - starters, soups, fish, poultry, desserts etc. Many of his signature dishes feature here, including the famous chicken liver mousse (p136) served with a crayfish sauce, and the stuffed calf's ears I've already mentioned.

Bear in mind traditional does not mean boring! He also features the exuberant ragout of chicken kidneys, cockscombs, crayfish, morels and chervil - a dish repeated (and name-checked) in Alain Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine. There's also a rather extravagant beef bouillon (p144) which incorporates a pound of caviar (and another quarter-pound of pressed caviar) and recipe for a roast Bresse capon flanked by ten larks and ten snipes (not recommended if your guests are members of the RSPB!). And finally I have to mention the Oeufs poeles a l'assassin on page 150 - actually quite a pedestrian dish of friend eggs deglazed with wine vinegar - but you gotta love that name.

... and the Recipes of the Imagination

More example's of Chapel's food - click to zoom

(from Great Chefs of France)

However that's only half the book. Because then you get to the second section, entitles Les Recettes de l'Imagination. Again its pretty much a standalone work, with sections on starters, meat, dessert etc. Except this time these are Chapel's dishes, rather than rehashed French classics.

So you have the iconic pigeon jelly and the chicken tripe. Or a featherlight dish of Langouste steamed with verbana, girolles and chicory leaves (p340). Or his famous Crepe Japonaises (p454). Actually this is basically an okonomiyaki pancake (street food! how on-trend! :-p), scented with ginger and served with beef, pork, gambas and squid.

The section on desserts contains the recipe for a praline tart, much praised by Heston Blumenthal and (just to show that no-one's perfect!) a slight dubious concoction of yogurt, cucumber and tarragon supposedly inspired by Balkan cuisine.

Touched by genius

I'm left in two minds on this book. Set against the modern arsenal of chefbooks, its always going to feel dated. There are no pictures. The dishes clearly come from another era. And being in French doesn't help. If you pluck this off the shelf and read it cold you're going to be left wondering what the fuss is all about.

But having put in the time to try and understand Chapel and his cuisine, you start to see that there's so much more. The book is stuffed with iconic recipes like the pigeon jelly, the chicken tripes and that chicken liver parfait. These are historic recipes which no chef should be without.

And when you put Chapel into the context of what everyone else was doing at the time the achievement is even more staggering. He was as far ahead of the chasing pack as El Bulli was in the nineties. His only point of reference was himself.

My only regret is we don't have a good version of this book in English. The best we can do is the chapter in Great Chefs of France, but that hardly tells the whole story. Remember, this is a guy who David Rosengarten rates as the second greatest chef of his lifetime - the fact there is virtually nothing by him in English is the whole food world's loss.

Afterword - Another Chapel in London

One little postscript - as I mentioned Chapel's two kids had it worst of all. Not only a famous father, but the pressure of tryng to take on the mantle of one of the greatest chefs of his era (I call this trick "doing an Arzak"). In that context the decision to close the restaurant must have been absolutely traumatic.

But on this side of the Channel there is some sort of silver lining, as the youngest son Romain has recently resurfaced in London - cooking as chef de cuisine as Pierre Gagnaire's two-star outpost Sketch.

So if you want a hint of the old Chapel magic do rock along and try it out (the weekday set lunch in particular is an absolute steal). The good thing is that the boy's still young, so I hope it isn't the last we've heard of the Chapel name in the kitchen.

Noma, Celler Can Roca, Bocuse & Co: Culinary Unicorns

Let's go unicorn-hunting

There are rare cookbooks and there are influential cookbooks. But there are very few rare and influential cookbooks.

The reasons are quite straightforward. Normally the more influential   cookbook has, the more widely it is read. This follows a straightforward commercial logic. 1) Chef becomes famous/important. 2) Said chef writes book. 3) Said book becomes famous/important. 4) Said book is subject to numerous reprints cos at the end of the day said chef wants to make a living.

For rare cookbooks the opposite logic applies. 1) Cookbook is published. 2) No one wants to read it. 3) Cookbook falls out of print. End of story. If it ain't good enough to attract a reprint, its unlikely to be particularly significant.

Of course (and there is an "of course" otherwise there wouldn't be much point to this blog post!) there is also a delicious category of exceptions. a small cadre of books do exist which are both mind-bogglingly influential  and incredibly rare.

They have mostly been written in the last thirty years, many by chefs who are household names. For various reasons - cost, obsolescence or simply ignorance - their authors or publishers have let them fall by the wayside, such that they are almost unobtainable today.

These are the culinary unicorns.

Let me show you what I mean:

Joan Roca's revolutionary manifesto

Sous-Vide Cuisine (Joan Roca & Salvador Brugues)

Today the Catalonian restaurant El Celler de Can Roca is part of the culinary establishment. Situated in sprawling new premises in Girona it wears its three stars with pride: A leading light of Spanish gastronomy, a pioneer of sous vide cuisine and a purveyor of an exceptionally good value wine list.

It wasn't always like this. When I first went it was in a slight ramshackle out of town site by a service station (the restaurant originally started off in the basement of the Roca family's Catalan diner, hence the name). The food was good, the wine was a snip and as I was leaving I spotted Sous-Vide Cuisine on sale in reception.

Even back then it wasn't cheap. The book itself cost a hundred Euros (about the same price as the tasting menu!), and at under 200 pages you weren't getting much content for your money. But the information it contained was priceless.

First published in 2003, this was the first cookbook to properly document the techniques of sous-vide cuisine in the high-end kitchen. Although today it is thoroughly ubiquitous, at the time it was the wild west of culinary technique. At the time there were so many unanswered questions about using sous vide in a gastronomic (as opposed to industrial catering) setting - how long to cook different cuts for? What temperatures were safe? How quickly do you need to cool merchandise to avoid giving your customers a nasty case of gastroenteritis? This was the first book to systematically explore and answer these questions.

Part cookbook, part physics manual.

Starting from first principles, the book explains the sous vide method in tremendous detail, from what gas to use to package the food to what equipment to use in the sealing process. This section, while essential, if quite dry. However it kicks into gear from chapter 3 onwards as Roca talks about the application of sous-vide in his own kitchen. His revolutionary insight was using sous-vide not only as a way to prepare food for storing (e.g. tough cuts products above 65c for an extended period to make them tender and fridge-sterilised), but also what he calls "Indirect Cooking" - using sous-vide to cook more delicate foods at a lower temperature, to create entirely new forms of taste and texture. This allowed him to create iconic dishes, such as his Warm Cod with Spinich, Idiazabal Cream, Pine Nuts and PX Reduction, where the cod is cooked sous-vide to a 38-40c internal temp to a melting, gelatinous texture. Or foie gras taken to a 60c internal temperature which not only yields a silky, consistent result but also minimises the dreaded foie-gras fat leakage:

The benefits of sous-vide are lavishly illustrated with before/after images and scary-looking temperature charts. The book also deals with some natural extensions to the sous-vide technique such as using it vacuum sealing to compress ingredients to give a firmer texture, and also its applications for desserts (e.g. using it to infuse green tea into chocolate). The book finishes with twenty-five resturant-class dishes - not many for a standalone cookbook, but more than enough to illustrate the principles at work:

Looking back at this book nearly than a decade after publication (and when mainstream food science has moved on immeasurably) I'm struck but how fresh and comprehensive it still seems. Every single book about sous vide since them - from Thomas Keller's Under Pressure to Modernist Cuisine owes a debt to this volume. (Side-note: One disappointment about Under Pressure is that it complete airbrushes the Roca brothers out of its history of sous-vide, while copiously name-dropping Keller's French equipment manufacturer instead).

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However the book itself remains frustratingly hard to find. Partly also its because of the obscenely high sticker price and limited distribution. Partly also I think is the nature of the work. The way the text is arranged and presented reminds me of some of the horribly obtuse chocolate-making books (e.g. anything by Jean-Pierre Wybauw). There are a bunch of fantabulous cheffy recipes a the back but you have to wade through an awful lot of flow charts and exposition before you get to them. I suspect this tends to banish it to the top-shelf marked "professional cookery" rather than the section marked "really interesting cheffy books" in any bookstore.

Anyhow I don't think I've ever seen it in a bookshop, ever. In the US second-hand copies are fetching $180 on Amazon (although strangely the UK site seems to have new copies - a snip at £85). Given the growing interest in sous-vide techniques I think this book deserves - and demands - a wider audience. But until the Roca brothers pull their finger out and arrange a more accessible edition, it will remain the quintessential culinary unicorn.

Bocuse and his friends

Great Chefs of France (Anthony Blake &

Quentin Crewe)

In the age of the 24/7 Food Blog you forget how hard it used to be to find out about three star cuisine. For English speaking foodies, the cuisine and culture of France's three star temples used to be an undiscovered country. Set against that backdrop, Quentin Crewe and Anthony Blake's Great Chefs of France is a monumental work. Published back in 1978, he minutely profiles every French three star outside Paris, describing each chef, their cuisine, their their day-to-day life routines. At the back of the book is also a copy of the carte for each men, which makes fascinating reading thirty years on.

This was the first book to people's eyes in the Anglophone world to what food could really be. Unsurprisingly many of the today's leading chefs cite this as a definite influence. Heston Blumenthal writes:

More than any other volume, I read Quentin Crewe and Anthony Blake's Great Chefs of France, which presented, in words and pictures, portraits of a dozen of France's most influential chefs... I read these words over and over until I knew them virtually by heart.

The genius of this book is its timing. Crewe and Blake were lucky to be writing as a the revolution was taking place. You see time you see Emeril or Gordon or Wolfgang on TV its all down to Paul. In the 1970s Paul Bocuse singlehanded defined the role of the celebrity chef, with sheer force of will accompanied by tureens of black truffle soup. This book captures him and his nouvelle cuisine cohorts - the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guerard, Georges Blanc in the pomp (it is notable that Crewe decided to focus on the non-Parisian three stars - as this was the age when France's regional restaurants really came to the fore).

As well a profiling the nouvelle cuisine muskateers, It also provides a nod to the generation of postwar chefs (many forgotten today) who laid the groundwork of the revolution Pic, Point, Thuiller, Bise. There is no other book in the English language which captures what was taking place. Just as Bob Carlos Clarke's White Heat captured Marco as he defined the rock star chef, Crewe was simply at the right place at the right time.

And there is one last reason why this book should not be missed. It contains one of the few accounts of the great Lyonnais chef Alain Chapel available in English. For those who know of Chapel's stellar reputation (and he counts Ducasse, Keller and Heston among his fans), that's worth the price of admission alone.

Michel Guerard: Culinary revolutionary and fashion terrorist.

But the book itself is frighteningly elusive. I found my copy in a Charing Cross Road basement after a hot online tip (I'd previously made do with a copy I'd spent an evening painstakingly copying on the work photocopier). I guess given the look and the content of the book so clearly rooted in the seventies (check out Michel Guerards flares to the right!), there's little money in a reprint. But if you do ever come across a used copy, seize it with both hands.

Northern Lights

Noma Nordic Cuisine (Rene Redzepi &
Claus Meyer); Source: TasteFood

But of course there is one culinary unicorn which outstrips all of these. A book so mythical that Japanese gourmets have been known to fly thousands of miles just to catch a glimpse of it. A book who's very pages are said to contain the secrets of the unlimited foie gras and pickled herring.

I refer, of course, to the legendary Noma Cookbook.

Note that I am not referring too the Phaidon-published travesty that is Noma: Time and Space in Nordic Cuisine. The less said about that (or anything else by Phaidon), the better. Long before that was even a footnote on a marketing manager's schedule, Redzepi had published his original book Noma: Nordic Cuisine, wayback in 2006.

It's this English edition, of which only a thousand were printed, which is the ultimate culinary unicorn. I don't have a copy, and have never had a sniff of one. I know it only by reputation. If you search hard you can find traces on the web. The introduction (and manifesto for Noma's cuisine) is on the website of collaborator Claus Meyer, here. This blog post (part 2 here) has some pictures and a few recipes (even these authors admit they were only using a borrowed copy). It could be of course that the book is a complete let-down and consists largely of recipes for pickled herring, but somehow I doubt it (the egg yolk cream recipe looks both unusual and promising).

Source: TasteFood

Just like the Crewe book, this book precisely captures the moment - Noma just as it (and Nordic cuisine) was emerging from El Bulli's shadow. Looking back this is a work which should feature front and centre in every bookshop in the land. But it does not.

In fact the opposite is true. A mere seven years after publication the book is virtually unobtainable. One copy is listed on Amazon for a mere £1800 (although be careful - judging by the cover it might be the Danish version). Otherwise I think it's pretty much impossible to find a copy.

The problem is that in 2010 Phaidon published Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. Rather than a sequel to the earlier book, it covers much the same ground in a more overblown fashion, outlining Redzepi's culinary philosophy with the help of a few recipes and lot of soft-focus photography. Alas this seems to have been the death-knell for the earlier volume, as there seems little reason for a reprint while the newer book covers the same ground (and is selling so well). To me that is a shame - I rarely have anything good to say about Phaidon cookbooks and this one is no exception. The separation of the photos of the dishes from the recipes they describe smacks of an editor who fetishes how the book looks but doesn't want to understand the food itself. I hope that at some point they see sense and reprint the earlier volume. Until then I think the food world remains much the poorer.

Postscript: Other unicorns

While writing this piece a bunch of former and nearly -unicorns crossed my mind. I thought they were worth mentioning:

La Tante Claire by Pierre Koffmann

Until its recent reprint, Pierre Koffmann's Memories of Gascony would have been first on my list of culinary unicorns, not only as the heartwork of one of London's defining culinary figures (and for that pigs trotter recipe), but also because it is an excellent exemplar of the memoir-with-recipes. I do note however that its sister-volume La Tante Claire (co-authored with Anthony Blake, who worked on Great Chefs of France) remains out of print. This is a shame as it continues the story of Koffmann's journey to Le Gavroche in London, out to Bray to create the Waterside Inn and back to Chelsea to La Tante Claire, where he later won his three michelin stars. The pigs trotter recipe also features, if you missed it the first time round.

White Heat by Marco Pierre White

Like some of the other unicorns, another exercise in Zeitgeist-capture, this time from Marco Pierre White in his sizzling eighties heyday. I've already written about this one before, but just to note that before its 2009 softcover reprint there was a period of 4-5 years where this book out of print and heart-breakingly hard to find. A good example of the publishers seeing sense and doing everyone a service.

Le Grande Livre de Cuisine de Joel Robuchon

As I noted before, the definitive record of Robuchon, at least in his Paris haute cuisine days. Unlike Ducasse's similar books however this one hasn't been translated into English which means it remains much more of a niche item. It can be had on Amazon for around $400, but I suspect as time wears on it will be rarer and rarer.

Pei Mei's Chinese Cookbook

The subject of one of my earlier blog posts, this book used to be readily available second-hand on Amazon, but I note it has become harder to find over the last few years. Partly a historical relic partly a culinary landmark,the user unfriendliness and 1970s styling of the book probably precludes a reprint (unless someone is willing to embark on a fresh translation). It can be had on Kindle but the full fat print version is becoming rapidly hard to find.

Future culinary unicorns

What books readily available now will become future culinary unicorns? Speaking facetiously all of them, if e-books cannibalise print as I think they will. More seriously I think Modernist Cuisine will probably get there - if only because its size and expense limits the scope for reprints; when all copies are gone there'll be gone.

In the UK I suspect if David Everitt-Matthias ever got annointed with a third michelin star, his existing cookbooks (Essence and Dessert) will instantly become collector's items (viz the Noma book when Rene get made Best Chef in the World Ever). Ditto Sat Bains, helped by the fact that his cookbook is pretty much unobtainable already - as far as I can tell its available only direct from the restaurant or the publisher with little or no retail availability (I think its a Face Publishing thing). Also NB DEM has his third cookbook out imminently. Worth looking out for, three stars or no.

And to finish with, entirely different kind of Culinary Unicorn.

Signatures: Pommes Puree (Robuchon)

The Two Lives of Joel

Robuchon the chef

Robuchon in his 1990's pomp

Joel Robuchon is the chef with two lives. The first as a trad haute Parisian chef (you know the sort... Lalique China, Riedel glasses and more truffles than sense). The second as the zen master of the global McRobuchon brand - Davos Man's caterer of choice.

Let's deal with his first incarnation; Robuchon the chef. From 1981 through to the mid-1990s Robuchon was acclaimed as the finest chef in Paris, ergo in France and ergo the world (remember this was an era when El Bulli was still serving duck magret and fish pot-au-feu). Robuchon was the first culinary superstar of the post-nouvelle cuisine era. His cuisine married the technical innovation and lightness of Bocuse et al, with a return to more traditional bourgeois combinations - a reaction to the excesses of nouvelle cuisine (you know... raspberry vinegar... kiwi fruit with everything).

So rather than pairing his lobster with vanilla it went with spring vegetables and a lobster-coral sauce (pic at left). Truffles were layered on a bosky galette of smoked bacon and onion. Foie gras came with a smooth cream sauce made with humble lentils. These were combinations you might find in a provincial auberge, but taken to the nth degree by Robuchon's notorious perfectionism. and obsession with detail.

This approach was exemplified in his most famous dish - not some elaborate concoction of caviar (although there was the famous Gelée de caviar a la crème de Chou-fleur too), but simple pommes puree. Or mashed potatoes to you and me. You can hardly call it a signature dish, perhaps a signature side? But it was Robuchon's philosophy on a plate - taking the humblest dishes and applying the finest craft, ingredients and several dozen sticks of butter, resulting in something completely extraordinary.

Of course the food was followed by the plaudits. Robuchon won three stars at Jamin, his first solo venture which later transferred to an elegant mansion at 55 Av Raymond Poincare. For nearly fifteen years he ran the toughest kitchen in town - who's starred alumni included Eric Ripert, Benoit Guichard and a youthful Gordon Ramsay (who famously had a plate of langoustine ravioli thrown at him when he messed up the dish). But then at the height of his powers he gave it all up.

Having seen so many of his peers kill themselves slaving away at the stoves (the great Alain Chapel, who dropped dead at 53, springs to mind), Robuchon always vowed that he wouldn't end that way. So in 1995 he sold up Av Raymond Poincare to Alain Ducasse, and retired to oversee the refit of Larousse Gastronomique, prepare cook-chill meals with Fleury-Michon (sic) and generally enjoy the good life.

Robuchon the brand

Of course it was never going to end that way. After six years away Robuchon was back. Not behind the stoves mind you - but in that elusive role of chef/consultant/general big cheese. A sort of Brand Fromage, if you excuse the pun.

The comeback kicked off in 2001 with Robuchon A La Galera, a haute cuisine joint in a casino in Macau. But it really began to gather pace with opening of Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris two years later. Atelier was a mashup of haute cuisine and a sushi bar, heavily influenced by Robuchon's itinerant wanderings in Japan (he had franchised Toyko's ludicrously OTT Taillevant-Robuchon wayback in 1989). Kitted out in a slightly absurd black-dojo-pyjama outfit, Robuchon presented himself as a sort of zen master of haute cuisine.

Robuchon, Atelier, Spiffy Website, Silly Pyjamas.

A cynic would say that he (along with Alain Ducasse) had finally figured out how to apply the franchising model to foie gras. Certainly Ducasse and Robuchon were the first people to realise that if your people and processes are good enough you don't have to be in the kitchen to win Michelin stars (Bocuse had led the the way when he pointed "who cooks at the restaurant when I'm in the kitchen? The same people who cook when I'm there!"). Although arguably they were only following in the footsteps of Dumas and Rembrandt in getting educated wage slaves to craft the gear and then slapping their name on it to sell it.

Robuchon was also helped massive growth in appetite for haute cuisine - both in terms of the blogosphere creating a wider audience and Michelin's international expansion slapping a macaron-shaped seal of approval on his ventures. Galera received three michelin stars in the first HK guide; the various Ateliers (by now Paris, London, Vegas, HK, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo) a star or two each. The shamelessly gaudy Robuchon At The Mansion in Vegas another three.

Beef & foie gras sliders at Atelier McRobuchon

The food had evolved some too. For sure it was still assuredly French deluxe, but the plates were smaller and the dishes even more finely wrought. A langoustine (just the one) came tempura-ed with a dab of pistou. Lightly cooked egg was delicately layered in a martini glass with a morel cream. But classics like the truffled bacon tart and the caviar with cauliflower cream had fallen by the wayside (though I think they still do a version in Vegas). The one constant, however, was the pommes puree.

I had it a couple of times in London. Its delicious, though ever so slightly rich (note: that's English irony at work). In fact I'd describe it as being more a butter puree, enriched with potato than vice versa. Its strange - start munching a stick of butter neat and you'll soon start to feel slight ill. But dish up a bowl of JRs super-mash and you could frankly eat it all day. It's that good.

The Recipe

The Pomme Puree recipe from Cuisine Actuelle (click on image for more detail)

Not as easy as it sounds!

There are several versions of the recipe scattered around my library. The most obvious place to start it Patricia Well's Cuisine Actuelle (later reprinted as Simply French), which was the first book to bring Robuchon to an English speaking audience. The set up is very simple. Boil spuds, mash with butter, add hot milk. Hmmm maybe the "chef of the century thing" isnt that hard after all...

The devil is in the detail

Of course as with everything Robuchon the devil is in the detail. Remember Robuchon was the ultimate perfectionist - every tiny detail counts.

La Ratte- Joel's secret weapon

To start with the variety of potato. Ratte was Robuchon's weapon of choice - its a small thin-skinned tuber which is remarkably high in starch, which makes for a fluffier mash. The science behind this is slightly tiresome, but I found a good explanation in Cook's Illustrated compilation of culinary awesomeness, The Best Recipe:

Although you can mash any type of potato, the variety you choose does make a significant difference in the ultimate quality of the dish. Potatoes are composed mostly of starch and water. The starch is in the form of granules, which in turn are contained in starch cells. The higher the starch content of the potato, the fuller the cells. In high-starch potatoes, the cells are completely full-they look like plump little beach balls. In medium- or low-start potatoes, the cells are more like underinflated beach balls. The space between these less-full cells is mostly taken up by water.

The full starch cells of high-starch potatoes are most likely to maintain their integrity and stay separate when mashed, giving the potatoes a delightfully fluffy, full texture. In addition, the low water content of these potatoes allows them to absorb milk, cream, and/or butter without becoming wet or gummy. Starch cells in lower-starch potatoes, on the other hand, tend to clump when cooked and break more easily, allowing the starch to dissolve into whatever liquid is present. The broken cells and dissolved starch tend to make sticky, gummy mashed potatoes.

Then the boiling. Boil then in their skins - apparently to keep the moisture in (hmmm is that really the case?). Then peel warm. Then (gently) stir the drained spuds on the heat for 4-5 minutes to drive off excess moisture.

Then the mashing - by hand mind you (potatos do not take kindly to mechanical agitation). It bursts the starch cells and makes them gluey. A hand cranked vegetable mill (mouli-legumes) is the preferred method. And then rub through a tamis, a flat-bottomed drum sieve.

And in comes the butter - lots of it. The finest unsalted of course. Cut into small chunks. Stirred in, not beaten.

And finally the milk - This comes last for all, just before service. The milk should be piping hot and this time whipped in. Vigorously. To get some air into the mix.

For a full overview of this technique check out this video of JR getting his minion to do all the hard work for him. It's in French but you should get the general idea.

What you're left with is not so much a puree, but a potato butter emulsion. More mousseline than mash. Its paler in colour than your used to. And ever so slightly buttery:

The full-fat Robuchon

One word of warning. If you want the full-fat Robuchon, then Patricia Wells may be an unreliable witness. For all her good points (of which more below), her book dates from an era when full resto recipes were deemed unsuitable for the eyes of domestic readers. She readily admits her recipes were "adapted" for the home kitchen, to capture the essence of Robuchon (hmmm Essence of Robuchon? How about a truffled-scented perfume line for foodies? :-p).

An example would be the proportion of cow fat. Well's puree is 20% butter, but that sounds too low. Anecdotal sources claim the puree was 50% or even 70% butter (Wells herself cheerfully adds that you can double the portion of butter "for exceptionally rich potatoes"). If you want to be cautious, more is more.

There are other versions of the recipe. In his food column in the Le Journal Du Dimanche (compiled and republished as La Cuisine de Joel Robuchon) he outlines much the same method, although does not give quantities. Ditto the 2009 Complete Robuchon. I suspect a more complete version is the one in his Grand Livre de Cuisine, a 2001 magnum opus roughly the size of a truffled turkey and costing much the same. Its been on my Amazon wish list for a while but alas I do not own a copy.

Actually the best version of the recipe I have isn't written by Robuchon or Wells at all, but by British chef Tom Aikens, who worked with Robuchon just before his first retirement. His cunningly titled Tom Aikens Cooking has the following account.

Robuchon in Paris was famous for its puree de pommes de terre or mashed potato. When I was working there, I was fortunate enough not to have to prepare it, as it was one of the hardest jobs in that kitchen, taking about 2 hours from start to finish. We used Ratte potatoes - a good waxy potato. They would first be scrubbed and slowly cooked, still in the skins to protect them from the water. After about 30-35 minutes they would be drained and kept over simmering water, so they remained warm while being peeled. They were then put into a mouli with a lot of butter, then place in another pan with even more butter, and then it was all brought together with hot milk. It was then passed through a very fine sieve (so fine you couldn't actually see through the mesh). This would take another 30 minutes, and it was so hard the chefs would be exhausted by the end. When the time came to use the potato, it was placed in a copper pan and warmed, then more butter was whisked in to make it light and fluffy. This would take another 45-60 minutes! There was more butter than potato, and it was so rich you could only eat a small amount.

It's mash cap'n, but not as we know it.

The Books

Cusine Actuelle (also publised as Simply French): For all her simplifications, Patricia Well's work is still the best book on Robuchon available. It captures his cuisine at its pomp, in the glory years of Jamin. The great classics are all there, including more truffles than you can shake a stick at (check out the Radicchio and Black Truffle salad on p36 - its basically a pile of truffles with a few lettuce leaves shoved in the bottom). Her introductory comments and interview with JR are well worth a close reading. They contain some of the wisest word on translating three star cooking for the home kitchen that I know of.

La Cuisine de Joel Robuchon - A Seasonal Cookbook (also publised as Cuisine Des Quatre Saisons): This is a compilation of the weekly column Robuchon used to write in France's Journal Dimanches. It was first published (in French) in 1993, so again covers only his Parisian incarnation. The book contains fifty two columns, each a musing on a particular ingredient followed by a recipe. There's some overlap between the Wells book, but unlike UK cookery columns he at least treats the reader like an adults. I guess standards are higher on their side of Le Manche.

Grande Livre de Cuisine: Taking after Alain Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine, this is a meaty volume with a price tag to match. Again covering Robuchon's Paris years its probably the closest you'll get to the actual restaurant recipes, packed with step by step photos which show how he (or his food stylist) did it. Note I don't think this was ever translated so you're have to slum it with the original French (fine by me - I speak fluent a la carte French and dim sum Cantonese!).

The Complete Robuchon: This is an English translation of the French kitchen manual Tout Robuchon. A word of warning - despite the  title this isn't the complete Robuchon at all. Few of his signature dishes feature (although the mash is there, described pretty much as above). Instead there's a pretty exhaustive list of classic French dishes, from Lievre a la Royale to Chou Farci All very useful but not what it promised me on the Amazon pre-order page! On the positive side the layout (by UK cookbook specialists Grub Street) is simple and accessible and the recipes thorough. Think of it as a useful appendix to Larousse, or as a version of Phaidon's I Know How to Cook without the pretentious marketing bullsh*t. Just don't buy it expecting the complete Robuchon - it isn't.

Tom Aikens Cooking: Tom Aikens is a divisive chap. In his mid-2000s pomp he was one of the few chefs in London cooking genuinely distinctive food, but there has also been no shortage of controversy (branding staff, phantom kleptomatics and pre-pack administration for a start). Most recently he's reinvented himself as a purveyor of ersatz new-Nordic cuisine - a shame because I these he's more original than that.

Unfortunately this book is another disappointment. The recipes tend towards the identikit, showing little of Aiken's distinctive style. There also a weird, slightly Dorling Kindersley tone to the text as well - sort of like what you'd expect from a five year old's Comprehension Test. e.g."Cod used to be widely available, but now, because of overfishing, it is one of the most expensive fish to buy. I just hope that we never run out of it for fish and chips", "Tuna is a fabulous fish, which should always be eaten rare. If cooked to well done, it can get rather dry" or "I get my crabs from Dorset, my lobsters from Scotland, and my prawns from Magagascar" (hey Tom, I get mine from the local supermarket!). It feels like it was thoughtlessly dictated to a ghostwriter between shifts (although I note none is listed in the credits). A frustrating debut from a frustrating chef.

The Best Recipe: America's Cooks Illustrated magazine was doing food geekery decades food geekery was cool. The set-up, for those who aren't familiar, is they select a recipe (e.g. "grilled pork chops"), test of multiple variations on it in their kitchen and come up the ultimate version (a formula copied in a more kitchen-sink manner by Felicity Cloake's How to Cook the Perfect series and book). This volume is a deluxe-sized compilation of magazine articles, covering pretty much every US home-cooking standard, from Pumpkin Pie to Popovers. It's a great-resource for two reasons: Firstly because you know you have a bunch of fail-proof recipes for any conceivable domestic culinary situation. Secondly because each recipe is accompanied by a great deal of explanation (often backed up with a lot of solid food science) not only about how each recipe works, but why it works. And for a cookbook, I can think of no higher praise.

Larousse Gastronomique by Prosper Montagne et al: Grand Tour Larousse

Okay to round up before Christmas, a few words on Larousse Gastronomique. This isn't quite a book review, more an appreciation-cum-users guide. My main point is that Larousse tends to be ignored or dismissed nowadays, which is a shame. Sure its no longer the Bible of cuisine nowadays (that is, I believe, now called T'Internet). But it's still a wonderful trove of deliciousness to be enjoyed in its own right. I do.

Knock, knock..

Nowadays it is very fashionable to knock Larousse Gastronomique, the famously frumpy French culinary encyclopaedia.

It's outdated people say (true). The recipes don't work they say (also true). Its ridiculously French they say (Good point. The entry on Great Britain rather pointedly claims "British cookery is basically medieval...").

Even after recent attempts to drag it into the 21st century, its publisher's claim to be "authoritative and comprehensive" looks risible. This is a book which has no entry for "sous vide" (even though it's a French term!), but it does provide a potted biography of Marie, Vicomte de Botherel who's only claim to fame is an unsuccessful attempt to install kitchens on buses (it goes without saying that he gets included because he's French).

To be fair, it does have an entry for Nigella, although it actually refers to a Asian spice rather than a buxon English TV personality.

Nonetheless if I had to be locked in a cell for a month with only one of my cookbooks for company, I think I'd take Larousse.

Introducing Larousse Gastronomique

The story of Larousse

Prosper Montagne: This is what sleb chefs looked like

before they started using stylists...

Larousse Gastronomique begins with Prosper Montagne, best described as the Thomas Keller of his day. Along with his (slightly older) contemporary Auguste Escoffier, he was one of the superstars of fin de siecle gastronomy. While not quite as revolutionary as the Big E (think of Escoffier as the Ferran Adria of the age), Montagne was no slouch, cooking his way around some of the biggest kitchens in France, notably the venerable Pavillon Ledoyen (currently Christian Le Squer's three star lair).

Anyhow to cut a long story short, after many decades behind the range Montagne decided to kick back a little and starting writing books. This culminated in the 1938 publication of Larousse Gastronomique, co-authored with a Dr Gottschalk and published by Larousse, leading purveyors of encyclopedias and other doorstops.

What Escoffier did for French cookery in practice, Montagne did for French cookery in print. Larousse was a staggering confection of history, dishes and recipes. The heart of the book is its coverage of French cuisine - from humble to haute. Montagne systematically went through every French region, dish, and garnish in the classic repertoire. He also provides pen-pictures of famous chefs and personalities, and added articles on history and on many notable ingredients (guess what, foie gras and truffles have some of the longest entries).

Lost in Larousse

On paper it sounds quite prosaic but in person the effect is quite staggering. If you are remotely interested in food this is a book you can get lost in.

Consider the duck...

Take your favourite ingredient - let's say Duck. Flip to the entry and you will learn about the breeds of duck (Aylesbury, Barbary, Gressingham, Long Island, Nante, Norfolk, Peking and Rouen). Then you'll hear about notable preparations of duck, which may take you on to an article on Aiguilettes (long-thin fillets of meat - also used for strips of beef). Or to an article on the Tour d'Argent restaurant, a Parisian old-timer famous for serving pressed, numbered ducks (#253,652 went to Charlie Chaplain). There's an anecdote here (and a painting) about the chef Frederic carving his famous canard au sang:

Frederic carving his famous canard au sang

You ought to have seen Frederic with his monocle, his greying whiskers, his calm demeanour, carving his plump quack-quack, trussed and already flamed, throwing it into the pan, preparing the sauce, salting and peppering like Claude Monet's paintings, with the seriousness of a judge and the precision of a mathematician, and opening up, with a sure hand, in advance, every perspective of taste.

For there you might follow an entry to the famous chef Paillard who cooked at the Tour D'Argent in the 1800s, or Claude Terrail who ran the restaurant with an iron fist until his death in 2006. Meanwhile back to the original article on duck it concludes with twenty two different recipes, including a honeyed duck Apicius-style popularised by Alain Senderens, and Rene Lasserre's duck a l'orange.

You don't get that with Nigella.

The many lives of Larousse

Lost in translation...

Family portrait: 2009 edition (rear), 1988 hardback (right),
much-thumbed 1990 paperback (left)

There have been a number of editions of Larousse over the years (for a more detailed treatment see this article). After the original in 1938 the most important revision was the 1984 edition. This gave the text a thorough overhaul, masterminded by Robert Courtine of Le Monde, adding colour pictures and updating it with the latest trends in nouvelle cuisine. The last major update was in 1996 when a culinary committee of the great and the good (headed by Joel Robuchon) overhauled some of the entries, although the changes were nowhere near as significant as those twelve years earlier. There was a further update in 2007.

These changes are reflected in the English editions. The first English edition was in 1961, adapted from Montagne's original. Similarly in 1988 the Courtine version was translated into English (also released as a natty paperback two years later). The Robuchon version made it into anglais in 2001, with an update in 2009. These two are the versions you're most likely to come across today.

Larousse - key editions you are likely to find

Party like its 1988...

La Belle Patissiere

I actually own three copies - a reprint of the 1988 hardback, a dog-eared copy of the paperback version (quite excellent for taking on long backpacking trips), and the 2009 edition which I found going cheap online.

I actually prefer the 1988 version over the more recent versions. For one thing the entries they added to bring it "up to date" are pretty superficial (as I said - articles on Adria, Heston but nothing on sous-vide or spherification; they do seem quite proud to have an article on tonka beans though). For another the pictures in the newer version tend to be pointless Dorling-Kindersley fluff.

In contrast the 1988 is stuffed with fascinating paintings and drawings which where chopped wholesale in the later version. For example the painting of Frederic and his quack-quack above is gone, as is Joseph Bail's ravishing La Belle Patissiere accompanying the Patisserie article (yes I look like that when I make pasta too :-p ).


Non-French food (according to French people)
Also the 1988 still has outbreaks of hilarious French sniffiness which have been shamefully bowdlerised in more modern versions. So you have the article on Great Britain where they point out that out food is basically medieval and the best thing to happen to British cuisine was actually when Careme and Escoffier turned up in London to teach us how to cook.

In the piece of Australia and New Zealand the author goes to great lengths to talk about Aboriginal traditions which include the cooking of such animals as cockchafer grubs, bats and lizards. Kangaroo-tail soup is considered to be a delicacy whilst adding that Fish and shellfish, often giant-sized, are very popular but are not cooked with any gastronomic refinement.

Rather pointedly the page on North American food (actually more like 3/4 of a page - roughly the same space the book devotes to the town of Lyon) begins It would be wrong to dismiss American cuisine as being confined to the fast food and the snack-bar, and to believe that its contributions to gastronomy are limited to cocktails, ice cream, corned beef, and hot dogs. Yeah right...

Now a lot of this has been amended in later versions (the USA gets its own article for a start) but actually I find these sections some of the funniest bits of the book. Its a shame they've been cut in favour of banalities like Far too vast and varied to be comprehensively described in a few paragraphs, the food of the United States is as rich as diverse as its people.

Changing attitudes to American food!

Real men eat salad

Larousse is basically a book about French people saying how great their food is and being rude about everyone else's cooking. Let's enjoy it for what it is! I love Larousse precisely because its a quirky, opinionated snapshot of classic Frenchness. In particular I was very  annoyed to see Lucien Tendret's glorious recipe for a mixed salad left out of the latest edition. In the name of culinary artistry I've reproduced it in full:

Put into a salad bowl some olive oil of the best quality, some white wine vinegar, 4 tablespoons roast turkey juice, 1/2 teaspoon tarragon mustard, the inside of a lobster, salt, and pepper. Stir until the mixture is perfectly smooth. Then add slices of lobster flesh, slices from the breast of a braised chicken and the breast of a roast turkey without the skin, the breast of three young partridges (keep the best slices for decoration), some thinly sliced truffles cooked in an excellent dry white wine, some mushrooms prepared in the same way, and a number of shelled crayfish. Cover with a layer of blanched endive (chicory) leaves. Add a second layer of the mixture, then a further layer of endive. Then on top tastefully arrange the reserved slices of meat, a few strips of ham from which the fat has been removed, a few large slices of truffle and mushroom, a border of shelled crayfish, a tablespoon of capers washed in white wine, and a cupful of stoned (pitted) green olives. Put a mound of thick mayonnaise in the centre with the largest truffle on top. Serve with the finest dry champagne, very cold but not iced.

That's my kind of salad (apparently Jeremiah Tower once served it at Chez Panisse). Mr Ritz and Mr Waldorf eat your heart out...

Living with Larousse

So to close a few more things I've learnt after twenty years of living with Larousse:

Larousse can be really really random

Quite good for picnics, apparently...

Part of the fun of Larousse is that its like rummaging through an elderly uncles very very random attic. The text is sprinkled with little gems, from a culinary appreciation of the Elephant (The feet and trunk are of the greatest culinary interest: their flesh, which is muscular and gelatinous, resembles ox (beef) tongue) to the Street Cries of Paris (Crapois y'a for salted whale meat, apparently) to Queen of Sheba, a chocolate gateau made especially light by the use of potato flour and ground almonds. For all its failings Larousse has a magpie-like mind that should please anyone who confuses significance with obscurity.

Never cook any recipe from Larousse

To be fair the recipes in Larousse are notoriously unreliable. I remember trying to cook French food from Larousse during my gap year in China (I took two books: Larousse and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Shakey never stood a chance). Complete nightmare. Scrambled egg custard for the ile flottante (OK that maybe I shouldn't have tried to thicken the liaison in a makeshift wok). Disintegrating liver dumplings. Never again. Everything they've told you about how unreliable Larousse's recipes are is true.

There are multiple reasons for this. Montagne wasn't writing for home cooks for a start - the recipes are rudimentary at best (very similar to the brief one-para ones in Escoffier actually). I don't think the translations have helped either - sometimes recipes are newly translated for the 2009 edition, sometimes they are recycled wholesale from the 1988 translation (or earlier). With so many authors across so many editions I doubt there's any consistency as to what kind of recipes got in (and whether they were ever tested). If you want a cookbook, read Nigella.

You can read it online. Now

Hit Amazon.com and look up the 2001 English edition. They hit "Click to Look Inside". Normally Amazon offers you a page or two and the author puff. But lo and behold pretty much the whole damn thing is available to browse. Okay there's a page or two they've held back but I figure 90% of the book is there to browse through. Go have a look if you don't believe me.

Get lost in Larousse

Look you can keep Larousse on your shelf and haul it down as an occasional reference when you need to figure out what a Pate de Pezenas is, but that's a waste. Larousse deserves more than that (incidentally, a Pate de Pezenas is a sweetened pie of mined mutton, shaped like a cotton bobbin which is sometimes served as a dessert).

What you should is brew yourself a nice cup of tea and sit down on the sofa with your Larousse and a plate of cooked pork products (preferably crispy ones). You may want to prop up Larousse on a separate table to avoid knackering your knees.

Then pick your favourite ingredient or region and start reading. Every time you find a funny French term or cross-reference to another article flip look it up and continue reading. When the trail of articles runs dry, back up and carry on reading the original article (you may want to deploy Post-Its to keep your place). Continue for an hour. Or two. I guarantee you will come away hungrier than when you started.

As I said at the start, this is the book I'd most like to have if I were locked away for a month. You can use it to embark on numerous culinary voyages, and never have the same trip twice.

And to finish some nice Pate de Pezenas and a glass of wine...