The Cooking of Southwest France : Recipes from France's Magnificent Rustic Cuisine
"An indispensable cookbook."
- Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue When Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France was first published in 1983, it became an instant classic. This award-winning book was praised by critics, chefs, and home cooks alike as the ultimate source of recipes and information about a legendary style of cooking. Wolfert's recipes for cassoulet and confit literally changed the American culinary scene. Confit, now ubiquitous on restaurant menus, was rarely served in the United States before Wolfert presented it. Now, twenty-plus years later, Wolfert has completely revised her groundbreaking book. In this new edition, you'll find sixty additional recipes - thirty totally new recipes, along with thirty updated recipes from Wolfert's other books. Recipes from the original edition have been revised to account for current tastes and newly available ingredients; some have been dropped. You will find superb classic recipes for cassoulet, sauce perigueux, salmon rillettes, and beef daube; new and revised recipes for ragouts, soups, desserts, and more; and, of course, numerous recipes for the most exemplary of all southwest French ingredients - duck - including the traditional method for duck confit plus two new, easier variations. Other recipes include such gems as Chestnut and Cepe Soup With Walnuts, magnificent lusty Oxtail Daube, mouthwatering Steamed Mussels With Ham, Shallots, and Garlic, as well as Poached Chicken Breast, Auvergne-Style, and the simple yet sublime Potatoes Baked in Sea Salt. You'll also find delicious desserts such as Batter Cake With Fresh Pears From the Correze, and Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream. Each recipe incorporates what the French call a truc, a unique touch that makes the finished dish truly extraordinary. Evocative new food photographs, including sixteen pages in full color, now accompany the text. Connecting the 200 great recipes is Wolfert's unique vision of Southwest France. In sharply etched scenes peopled by local characters ranging from canny peasant women to world-famous master chefs, she captures the region's living traditions and passion for good food. Gascony, the Perigord, Bordeaux, and the Basque country all come alive in these pages. This revised edition of The Cooking of Southwest France is truly another Wolfert classic in its own right.
The Cooking of Southwest France : Recipes from France's Magnificent Rustic Cuisine Accessories
 The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook
Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking
The Country Cooking of France
Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
Simple French Food
Bistro Cooking
All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
The River Cottage Meat Book
The Cooking of Southwest France : Recipes from France's Magnificent Rustic Cuisine Reviews
After visiting the southwest of France 3 months ago, I fell in love with their rustic cuisine. This book, the recipes & writtings, is just like reliving our fabulous 10 day vacation. This is a true gem, I can't wait to use my first recipe from it.
The Cooking of Southwest France did just that. Since we just returned fro southwest France I wanted to find some receipes to make our favorite foods. Great receipes and simple to make.
She tells you what to eat in many cities. Marold:. For the cook as well as the traveler, no book in English is so perceptive, comprehensive and accurate. She tells you about things you may want to bring home, including some of the specialized pots which are very hard to obtain here; one exception is the U.S.
The importance of this new edition is the current information on people and places, and especially on the sources now accessible from home. With attention, you can reproduce "the truth". A few additional remarks besides the excellent review by Mr. Wolfert covers many specific places you may want to visit.
You can order the "Diable Charentais" by Googling and selecting the translation of the potter's page. She locates some important restaurants and chefs (even in San Francisco). maker of the pot on the cover. Wolfert shows you how much diversity there is within short distances across this region.
Even if you are not up to cooking these great dishes, this book is one of the most useful books if you plan on going there. She is also helpful to those of us who cannot assemble the authentic equipment and ingredients.
Note that in the earlier version of this recipe, the skin was left intact. It is also true that many of the recipes still call for ingredients that are hardly on the shelves of the average (or even above average) pantry (e.g., ventreche, piment d'Espelette, rendered duck or goose fat, etc). I have owned the earlier edition for a number of years and have used it to produce successful, one-of-a-kind results. I would also echo the comments of others in warning prospective purchasers not to expect any simple, quick, or uninvolved recipes in this book.
Many main courses require several steps of preparation spread over more than one day. Having said all that, there are some wonderful recipes here. I've found a few more such amendments to recipes that didn't seem to make things any clearer (not to mention easier), and while I cannot say that there aren't any recipes that have been improved by revision, they haven't jumped out at me yet. The substantive difference between the old and new versions of this recipe call for the cook to "shave off the duck skin [from the duck breast that is used to make the ham] leaving the fat underneath intact." This really calls for an illustration or at least some additional explanation, in my opinion, because the skin and subcutaneous fat on the duck breast I examined after reading this instrucion are, as I expected would be the case, as one.
Still, for those willing to invest a great deal of time and attention in the preparation of authentic Southwestern French cuisine, this is THE text in English. A few of the new recipes look interesting, but they rise to the same level of challenge as all of the other recipes in this collection always have. To take one example, both the old and new editions include a recipe for duck "ham," an air-cured preparation that, when it works, produces a prosciutto-like result. I would join with the other reviewers here in recognizing this work as a tour de force in the field of authentic, regional French cooking.
However, the changes worked into this new edition sometimes leave me baffled.
A revised edition of the 1983 book, this is a very authentic tome of sw french cuisine. Paula is one of our greatest cookbook authors, and you cannot go wrong with a single one of her books. The only draw back to this book is that not every recipe is 'doable' to the average home cook, as some ingredients (mainly animal fats) are very hard to find.
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