Product Description

'It is difficult to think of any home that can do without Elizabeth David's FRENCH PROVINCIAL COOKING...One could cook for a lifetime on the book alone' - Observer Elizabeth David succeeds in inducing a desire to use each recipe as soon as it is read. Whether she is describing the preparation of a plain green salad, or the marinading of a haunch of wild boar, she writes with the same imaginative directness. Recipes like 'pot au feu' are described in all their delicious simplicity, which, it is made clear, means cooking without elaboration and has nothing to do with the higgledy piggledy 'let's hope it's all right' technique. Some excellent advice is included on the choice of the tools that would always be needed in any kitchen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25649 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Review
It is difficult to think of any home that can do without Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking. --The Observer

If I had to go on a desert island I'd take this with me. Elizabeth is brilliant at telling stories about the food she cooks. The text is threaded with memories of the places and people she loved. Being such an emotional writer, you can almost taste the food as you're reading.
--Oz Clarke, the Daily Express

Voted one of the top 45 cookbooks of all time by New York's Village Voice --Village Voice

Daily Express, 30 November 2007
I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this book taught a generation how to cook and how to eat.
Terence Conran

Review
If I had to go on a desert island I'd take this with me. Elizabeth is brilliant at telling stories about the food she cooks. The text is threaded with memories of the places and people she loved. Being such an emotional writer, you can almost taste the food as you're reading.

Customer Reviews

Penguin degrades the experience
I bought this edition to replace our Penguin book from 1964 which had gradually worn into a pile of disconnected pages over decades of loving use. All the inspiring writing is still there, of course, all the no-nonsense, no compromise common sense of Elizabeth David that makes this book an essential for anyone who loves to eat well, cook well, or both. But oh, Penguin, you have chosen the cheapest of thick paper, and the print is woefully smaller than the old edition, on pages that are larger! This looks like a scan of a hardback edition. Juliet Renny's delicate line drawings now appear coarsened. Once upon a time, French Provincial Cooking was mostly for browsing -- you simply could not find all the ingredients. Today you can get everything, so you have the pleasure of cooking authentic French dishes with Elizabeth David's unparalleled expert guidance. Nevertheless, you will still want to settle down and read your way through recipes you plan to make some day and learn what makes them so good, and you might just want to do it with a rather nicer edition than this one. So 4 stars out of 4 for the content and 0 stars out of 1 for the production.

A copy is essential for anyone interested in cooking
This is the book that more than any other introduced the English to wonderful French food. Many of the foods that are now taken utterly for granted in every supermarket were unknown and alien before this book. It may well have encouraged exploration to France and of its food that began with the hoards of English tourists to France of the 1970s. It is also the perfect book to read outside the kitchen- she conjures up all those times when in France that you feel that you are the first person to have eaten that onion tart or coq au vin...

"Cut a cockrerel into joints"....
I bought this book on eBay and found myself in proud possession of a hardcover `second edition' reprint from 1965. (I have no idea if the current version is updated or even converted to metric, sorry).
Elizabeth is a darling ! and definitely the first English Domestic Goddess, long before Nigella et al came onto the scene. Her delivery of these many, many regional recipes is neither as school madam-ish as early Delia, nor as infuriatingly chummy as Jamie-the-mockeny-Oliver. She engages us in such a way as to make one really believe that nobody cooks like the French, but at the same time that anyone can recreate this culinary wonderland here in grey old England.
This book is so much more than a list of recipes, it is an adventure in France. Given that, when it was written, France was somewhere most of us had only heard of, this book takes us on a fascinating tour into the psyche of a foreign people.
Buy this book today. Even if you have absolutely no interest in cooking. It really is that rip-roaring a read !