La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: The Original Companion for French Home Cooking Reviews
May 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under french food cookbooks
La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange: Thе Original Companion fοr French Home Cooking
First published іn 1927 tο educate French housewives іn thе art οf classical cooking, LA BONNE CUISINE DE MADAME E. SAINT-ANGE hаѕ ѕіnсе become thе bible οf French cooking technique, found οn еνеrу kitchen shelf іn France. A housewife аnd a professional chef, Madame Evelyn Saint-Ange wrote іn a rigorous уеt highly instructive аnd engaging style, explaining іn extraordinary detail thе proper way tο skim a sauce, stuff a chicken, аnd construct a pâté en croûte.
Though hеr text hаѕ never
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The classic French home cooking book,
This cannot be an objective review. I learned to cook from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as did many. When I discovered that Julia Child relied on another book, by a French woman and published in 1927, I had to have a copy. La Bonne Cuisine de Madame E. St-Ange has remained on my countertop for over twenty years.
Not that I have cooked much from it. My French is poor enough that translating was a chore, and I have dozens (hundreds?) of perfectly fine French cookbooks in English at hand. But this one book remained.
Mr. Aratow’s translation was long in the making: my Amazon order was open almost two years. It is worth the wait. He has lovingly, and I believe, faithfully rendered the words of Madame, finally offering them up to me and fulfilling the allure that this book has held all these years.
The French have four basic types of cookery:
La haute cuisine: as you would find in a starred restaurant (mostly by men.)
La cuisine regionale: featuring the local ingredients of a province.
La cuisine impromptue: what we Americans digest most nights.
La cuisine bourgeoise: the cooking – real cooking – of the household (mostly by women.) La Bonne Cuisine is the touchstone of the latter.
This is not to say that you will learn to cook la cuisine bourgeoise from this book. It is not for a beginner. It presumes that one has the basic cooking skills of a Frenchwoman in the late 1920′s. One knows how to roast a chicken, for example. (This is only done on a spit, according to Madame. Note that our ovens do not have a control labeled “roast”, but “bake.”) Also, in the pervasive “Wall-Marting” of American grocery shopping, many ingredients will not be available.
No. This is a book that will make a good cook a much better cook. I have always thought that cooking, French cooking in particular, is not so much about the results but about the process – and its links with the past. We can cook and, like Proust’s Madeleine, experience something of a bygone time, a past that we could not have experienced firsthand, thanks to Madame’s La Bonne Cuisine, and Paul Aratow’s translation.
And the results will be quite tasty, believe me. Just keep a copy of an “Americanized” French cook book handy, say the much-underappreciated Glorious French Food by James Peterson. The marriage of his technical expertise and Madame’s wisdom will make you a great home cook. Just look for the ingredients!
Some curiosities: my copy of the book is 786 pages, exactly. Not the 1392 pages claimed here. Also, there is no recipe for coq a vin, a ubiquitous staple of the French home menu. This I do not understand.
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|The Gospel of Farmhouse Food,
Most serious cookbooks these days approach their subject with one fundamental flaw: they attempt to convert restaurant cooking to home cooking, and usually steer the unwary toward oversimplified and ultimately unrewarding food. Recently a few outstanding cookbooks have bucked this trend, either by sticking to simple dishes and carefully vetting the recipes for home kitchens [as in Anthony Bordain's excellent Les Halles Cookbook] or by going straight to the farmhouse source of great home-made food [as in Paula Wolfert's contemporary classic The Cooking of Southwest France]. For years, maybe since the early days of Chez Panisse, what we have lacked is the kind of fundamental instructional book, part recipe book, part primer, part Larousse Gastronomique Bourgeois, that could fill out our knowledge and broaden our technique. La Bonne Cuisine is that book. In the month since it arrived it has become a key part of my menu-planning process, and probably the most practical primer on my long shelf of food books. With La Bonne Cuisine, the Oxford Companion to Wine, the Larousse, and Richard Olney I feel connected to a galaxy of masters whose knowledge can filter down to my humble American kitchen in useful and inspiring ways. So, if you have good kitchen fundmentals, love to perfect good rustic dishes, and wish to escape the trap of trying to replicate restaurant preparations, I recommend Mme. St. Ange’s book. Next time you’re making a Daube Provencal, for example, read the section on braising meats first. It will improve your food.
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|The great classic of cuisine bourgeoise,
Madame Saint-Ange is the bible of bourgeois cooking. Written in 1924, I think it’s been in print continuously in France. It is now out in an excellent English translation by Aratow, the co-founder of Chez Panisse. I wouldn’t have believed that the cadences of the original French could be so well rendered into English, but here they are!
Bourgeois cooking is the cooking of the urban upper middle class, people who in 1924 probably had a servant, but not a full kitchen staff. It is emphatically not “farmhouse cooking” (as another reviewer suggests), but definitely urban and urbane.
Madame Saint-Ange’s recipes lay very heavy emphasis on technique, and often build on each other. One of my favorites is the recipe for Boeuf a la Mode (Braised Beef). The recipe itself is only about two pages, but it refers back to the section on “How to braise red meats”, which is several pages, and in turn refers back to the section on “How to make a stock”, another several pages. And it all pays off with a moist, rich piece of meat in an unctuous sauce.
Although she’s a perfectionist, she realizes that you don’t always have the time or money for doing things the best way. She often gives variations which are faster or cheaper.
All in all, a marvelous cookbook.
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