Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Wolfert's book has taken the short shelf in my kitchen alongside Richard Olney, Alice Waters, and Marcella Hazan. The Cooking of Southwest France, especially in this new and improved edition, is a rare feat: not only are the recipes detailed, clear, and deeply informative, but the accompanying text is the best I've found for a hard-to-penetrate region of highly chauvanistic local opinion and practice. The introduction and the section on the flavors of the Southwest is an enlightening essay on its own, the bare bones of a great travel book which is fleshed out in the recipes.
Now about those recipes: Richard Olney has long been my standard for great cooking instruction. His recipes manage to be clear and opinionated, true to the region [in his case mostly Provence] but manageable in a big-city American kitchen, relentless in their pursuit of pleasure, dismissive of the narrow and purse-lipped health obsessions of the food-as-medicine Anglo-Saxon crowd, and deeply informed about the ingredients per se. Paula Wolfert, to my knowledge, is the first writer of cookbooks to equal Olney's contribution. Her style is more broadly journalistic and less opinionated, but her recipes are equally true to their sources.
That being said, her sources are French. French farmhouse kitchens and French starred restaurants. So these recipes can be arduous, a real stretch for the average American home kitchen. Many recipes require not only equipment most Americans don't own, but techniques that are dificult to master and even harder to research. But we welcomed Julia Child by spending more time in the kitchen and more money buying kitchen tools, and Wolfert's recipes deserves that same dedication. As Richard Olney said, paraphrased: "The best food requires effort and skill and a sensitivity to the raw materials". So, after stretching my well-equipped kitchen to the limits this last weekend making a beef daube with cepes-prune sauce, stuffed onion a la Michel Bras, and God knows what other multi-page recipes only He can forgive, I can say that if your stove can't sloooow simmer, if you don't have a fine seive, if you don't have access to real cepes, if the idea of reducing two bottles of Cahors to two cups of sauce makes you shudder, and if you don't want to stand at the stove skimming and re-skimming, then this book isn't for you. Don't just open this book on the evening before the boss is due for dinner. Start a week ahead and plan well, and know that your efforts will be rewarded if you are true and steadfast.
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