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It's April in Paris with Michael Roberts' Parisian Home Cooking (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1999). We can all at least dream about spending April in Paris, strolling along the Seine or in the Luxembourg Gardens, buying baguettes and olives and hunks of cheese at open-air markets, and enjoying simple but wonderful meals by the light of a candle sputtering in an empty wine bottle.
Michael Roberts did just that, living for years in Paris as he worked in restaurants and studied cooking. What he absorbed was far more than the secrets of haute cuisine. He learned what real Parisians, his friends, cooked and ate every day. As he says, "You start with fine ingredients. You cook things in a way that coaxes out the flavors. No need to complicate a recipe with many ingredients, because they only end up fighting each other. . . . Parisian cooks, the women especially, cook in an offhanded manner, relying on intuition and experience, not worrying about a dish coming out perfectly."
The recipes in his book are based on fresh seasonal ingredients, impeccable basic technique, and the opportunity for invention. Roberts often suggests variations to a recipe and leaves it to the reader to improvise.
Black-and-white photographs of produce markets, bakeries, butcher shops, and private kitchens are tucked among the recipes. The kitchen photographs are especially fascinating to anyone who has been a tourist in Paris without ever entering a private home. How small the kitchens are! And what great food comes out of them.
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