Cooking of South-West France. the: A Collection of Traditional and New Recipes from France's Magnificent Rustic Cuisine

I ordered this after by chance coming upon a tossed out copy of another of Wolfert's cookbooks. I can only assume the person did not like to cook. Wolfert deserves as much acclaim as Julia. This is authentic, delicious French cooking, and with a mind to --somewhat--reduced cholesteral. No collection should be without it. I intend to hunt down all of her other books.

A few additional remarks besides the excellent review by Mr. Marold: Even if you are not up to cooking these great dishes, this book is one of the most useful books if you plan on going there. Wolfert covers many specific places you may want to visit. She locates some important restaurants and chefs (even in San Francisco). She tells you what to eat in many cities. She tells you about things you may want to bring home, including some of the specialized pots which are very hard to obtain here; one exception is the U.S. maker of the pot on the cover. You can order the "Diable Charentais" by Googling and selecting the translation of the potter's page. Wolfert shows you how much diversity there is within short distances across this region. For the cook as well as the traveler, no book in English is so perceptive, comprehensive and accurate. With attention, you can reproduce "the truth". She is also helpful to those of us who cannot assemble the authentic equipment and ingredients. The importance of this new edition is the current information on people and places, and especially on the sources now accessible from home.

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.

This completely updated revision of `The Cooking of Southwest France' by premier cookbook author, Paula Wolfert is like a long drink of cold water to someone who looks forward to superior cookbooks. This volume may be just a tad less definitive than the author's landmark `Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco', but not from a deficiency on the part of the author, who has made things just a bit more challenging for herself by expanding the range of `Southwestern France'. The range of her book covers, according to her map of the `Greater French Southwest', about two fifths of the country, from La Rochelle in the northwest to the Spanish border, then north along the Mediterranean coast to Montpellier on the Gulf of Lion, then north to include the provinces of Auvergne, Limousin, and Perigord in addition to the southwest heartland of Guyenne, Gascogne, and Languedoc. While Provence and the rest of the French southeast is devoted to the use of olive oil and the French north loves its Normandy butter fat, the defining fat of the French southwest is animal fats, primarily lard from pork, duck fat, and chicken fat. These lipids are so central to the cooking of this region that many of the recipes look more foreign to our modern culinary sensibilities than recipes from Southeast Asia with its reliance on peanut oil. Ms. Wolfert is quick to assure us early in the book that pork and duck fat is actually less saturated and less cholesterol laden than is butter fat. For the sake of enjoying this book, I will accept this and warn you that to fully appreciate the recipes in this book, I suggest you search out a good source of lard and duck fat. To aid you in this quest, Ms. Wolfert includes one of the best listings of Internet sources I have seen in a long time. The other rare ingredient you will need or be able to produce is verjus (sour grape sauce) which is a remarkable throwback to the cooking of ancient Rome. I recently queried my local megamart and could find no trace of this product. The other hallmark products of the region are foie gras from both geese and ducks, black mushrooms, walnuts, chestnuts, cepes (porcini mushrooms in Italian), Bayonne ham (not available in the United States at all. Procuitto or Serrano hams are very acceptable substitutes), chicken, baby eels (available from Spanish speciality stores), snails, salt cod, verjus (sour grape juice) and red wines (Bordelais). Aside from devoted Paula Wolfert fans, those who will find this book most useful are people who are especially fond of dishes with duck, geese, and chicken. Close to half of the main course dishes involves one of these three birds. The only catch is that the best duck for most of these recipes is the Moutard, which is both more expensive and harder to find in the United states than the common Pekin and Muscovy ducks easily obtained from D'Artagnan in your local megamart. The book is also an important authority on those most important dishes of the area, Garbure (a m

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.