City Travel Guides
Home Page > Go back a page
Books : Plats du jour
Search Books - select a category
See Larger Image |
Plats du jour by: Patience Gray |
|
Binding: Unknown Binding Label: Penguin Books Manufacturer: Penguin Books Number Of Pages: 299 Publication Date: 1958 Publisher: Penguin Books Studio: Penguin Books Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating: - a seminal bookI bought the original paperback which has now all but disintegrated. After a year in France as a student it took me back to the culinary wonders of the Massif Central while we were still suffering the rigours of post-war shortages. I thought the names of the authors were a joke. Years late I found they were genuine - so English but so right. Several hundred cook-books later this is still one of my favourites - an incomparable introduction to food that tastes as it should. She is now out there with "the sculptor" writing as magically as ever. Without peer. Rating: - Period charm and classic cuisine"or, foreign food", is the subtitle of this book. It was published in Britain in 1957, when foreign food was, well, foreign to the insular British, who still had vivid memories of post-war rationing. Elizabeth David had burst onto the scene seven years earlier with Mediterranean Food, a book which unforgettably celebrates the vivid flavours and colours of southern Europe and has become part of our culinary heritage. Despite this, Plats du Jour is a voice from another age -- an age where the words pasta, risotto, and paella were still considered sufficiently foreign to be italicised, where the authors felt the need to explain, "Pizza is a dish made with leavened bread." To me, this sense of the exotic is part of the period ... Read More: |
|