Les Marrons:
A tremendous fuss is made about the difficulty of shelling and skinning chestnuts. It is really very easy but people who are not accustomed to cooking, and consequently handling food when it is hot, are better advised to leave the job to more experienced cooks and housewives. It is all a question of how much heat your hands can stand, and it is well known that women are better at this than men.-Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 463.
Most French cookbooks will have the same core of receipts. You might want MTAOFC2 for the bread, or St. Ange for its echt, but functionally, there is a lot of redundancy. It is the throwaway gems like the one above that make Elizabeth David's books indispensable. Unlike, say, Kitchen Confidential's Evel Knievel approach to handling hot pots, this is T.E. Lawrence sangfroid.
*Stolen from Orson.
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