Buying The French Menu Cookbook

Richard Olney is one of the main voices for French cuisine in the English-speaking world, and yet this book also goes beyond the basics of French cooking and reintroduces to the American public concepts of eating by season and constructing menus based on each dish's impact on the palette, contrasting and matching flavors and textures. In fact, the chapters at the beginning in which Olney simply introduces these ideas, giving helpful tips that can be applied to cooking of any kind, not just French, are worth the price of the book alone. Read the small chapter on menu composition and you can just picture it hammered to the kitchen wall of every fine dining establishment today.

However, the main point of this book is clearly to teach French cuisine, and this book is full of information on that topic as well. The book feels much more like a culinary journal or memoir at times than a cookbook, and you could, as I sometimes do, just read the book as it is without trying to pick out something to make for dinner. Although Olney stylistically toes the line in his prose and dictation in coming across as lofty and reprimanding, there somehow remains just enough dry humor and flexibility that the reader never feels berated.

The recipes themselves aren't always straightforward or simple, although practically every curious ingredient is explained for the reader in great detail. Olney is one of the surprisingly few French cookbook authors who considers the price and availability of several ingredients such as Perigord truffles and even foie gras, and would probably have done so with veal had this book been written after veal was made somewhat of a taboo in this country. I've practically cooked through this book by now (although, I've never actually prepared a suggested menu all in one sitting) and Olney walks very thoroughly through the more complicated recipes, while simultaneously taking simple recipes up a notch, giving the reader something new to try.

Don't be put off by the dated look and feel of the book, the content has aged quite well and the information, ahead of its time then, is still completely relevant to today's home cook. And better, this is a cookbook you can actually read, and become incredibly well-versed in French cuisine by the time you've finished. This is the printed product of a lifelong devotion to the food and wine of France, and I hope it is not forgotten.Get more detail about The French Menu Cookbook.