Product Description

"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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118516 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When it comes to French food, many Americans know little beyond the bistros of Paris or the herbs of Provence. But many of France's most delightful culinary traditions are to be found near (or nearish) the Pyrénées. For example, there is nothing more enticing than a jar of foie gras, a baguette and a glass of Vin de Cahors; even a simple bowl of Périgord walnuts and a snifter of armagnac can make an immensely satisfying dessert. These combinations can easily be reproduced in an American kitchen-all you need is a good supermarket and plenty of cash-but for more complex dishes, like a Béarnais bean stew, you need a guide. Enter Wolfert and this expanded revision of her 1983 classic, replete with a handy index listing dozens of internet shops that sell everything from truffles to snails. Not only is this is a useful book, it's also interesting to read. Wolfert includes a chapter on the "Tastes of the French Southwest," with informative sections on cèpes, regional cheeses and truffles, just to name a few. And the recipes do not disappoint. Some standouts include Morue Pil-Pil, a spicy, slow-cooked salt cod dish recipe from the Basque region, and Cèpes of the Poor, chunks of eggplant sautéed to replicate the texture of costly mushrooms. Be advised: although Wolfert does allow for less fattening substitutions, like olive oil for duck fat, this is not a cookbook for dieters. And many of these recipes will take hours, if not a full day, of preparation, but the food is worth the wait, and the weight.
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Review
"...Bold and indefatigable...Wolfert writes recipes with such vivid and explicit instructions you might think you were really cooking in Toulousse...." (New York Times Book Review, December 4, 2005)

Ingram
A marvelous portrait of a people and their food, this book includes over 150 splendid recipes from the kitchens of France's most outstanding food region--offering a collection of unforgettable cassoulets, fois gras, truffles and more. Line drawings. Advertising in major food magazines.

Customer Reviews

A superb introduction to regional cooking
There are few books in English on regional French cooking that aren't about Provence, so a work like this is a real find. More important, Wolfert has written with her usual anthropological detail and authenticity. I think this is one of the best books on regional French cooking of any kind. The book is well organized by course and by type of meat. There is a special chapter on cassoulet as well, and very detailed instructions on making a confit that is as good as Madeleine Kamman's. Because most of this is peasant or bourgeois cooking, there are few things in the recipes that will be hard to find, and there is a lot on fascinating new techniques. There's an interesting recipe for mussels in which they're packed upright into an iron pan and covered with dried pine needles which are then set on fire. Also, Wolfert offers some very useful tips on reducing certain kinds of fat content while preserving taste, and what's best is that this is done for the sake of taste and quality, not with all the usual eating-disordered hand-wringing. Anyone interested in some of the real classics of French cooking--cassoulet and confit--will love this book. Most recipes demand a certain amount of experience and comfort in the kitchen, but the payoffs are superb. Great armchair reading too.