Cuisine du terroir - original recipes collected by the master chefs of France. - Celine Vence

flavour it imparts to its producta, so ‘cuisine du ter. voir’ haa come to mean the great French home cooking of the past, when the menu depended on locality and season, and inventiveness went hand in hand with traditions passed down from mother to daughter. Aware of how modern methods in both field and kitchen have watered down the delights and flavours of household food, the Master Chefs of France have compiled this volume to record and perpetuate classic domestic practices before they are lost ìn a world of convenience foods, nouvelle cuisine, and bland international influences. S ince ‘terroir’ refers to not merely the land but also the The recipes range from the unexpected, like mussels cooked under pine needles, cuttlefish cassoulet, and poppyseed tart, to original versions of well-known dishes such as gratin dauphinois (which requires a touch of turnip), coq au vin (which must be made with a cockerel), and black cherry clafoutis (where the fruit should not be stoned). But CUISINE DU TERROIR is more than a compendium of provincial recipes: in providing details of the regions, their elimate, countryside, produce, eating habits, even their way of life, as well as the background to individual recipes, the book evokes the close relationship between cookery and place, demonstrating in the dishes how the one grew out of the other, CUISINE DU TERROIR is for the practical, the adventurous, or the armchair cook, while, for the gourmet traveller, there is a list of the Master Chefs’ restaurants. ‘Precise, detailed, scholarly, immense. . . ’ Quotidien de Paris