Ron Peters's Reviews > Penguin Cookery Library French Provincial Cooking

This is a classic cookbook for making French bourgeois dishes (as opposed to haute cuisine), written for a British audience in 1960. The fundamental philosophy – local, fresh, and seasonal – is the one California believes it discovered in the 1970s with New American Cuisine. I have the 1999 Penguin edition with a foreword by Julia Child. Otherwise, the book is just a reprint of the original.

David includes tables for converting among French, UK, and American measures but, for myself, I wrote inside the cover that a dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons (she even says a half dessertspoon rather than a teaspoon) and that an after-dinner coffee cup is 2-3 ounces, since these come up often. There’s the usual aubergine=eggplant and courgette=zucchini hoopla. (You will be helpfully informed that courgettes are “very small mallows.”)

Probably 80 percent of the dishes are within the abilities of the average home cook. She gives you good alternatives for things like obscurely specific French pans, a few simplified techniques, and ingredient substitutions. In other areas, where she thinks it is important, she is a stickler for traditional preparation, but then she steps you through the process carefully.

Near the beginning, David provides a lightning-quick tour of French regions and their classic dishes, local foodstuffs, and drinks. This section is alright but if you’re really interested, I recommend Waverley Root’s (1958 [1992]) The Food of France in preference.