Quality bistro cookbook that is principals heavy?

[designdog]

The Balthazar Cookbook Balthazar, while technically a "brasserie" should provide a good reference. Also Linda Dannenburg has a good travel style book with recipes.

In French, try the encyclopedic Ducasse Ducasse, which is quite good save the avant garde photographs...

[fooey]

The Balthazar CookbookBalthazar, while technically a "brasserie" should provide a good reference.

There must be something to The Balthazar Cookbook. It's one of the only cookbooks I want, but haven't bought because the price refuses to drop. Edited August 31, 2009 by fooey (log)

[MaxH]

...Patricia Wells ...Simple French Food by Richard Olney ...]

-- and as others mentioned, Elizabeth David. Yes! YES! Such authors kept the flame alive when more mainstream US writers pushed mediocrity and false shortcuts. They are among a sort of underground short hits list that I've found to be a de-facto consensus among very experienced cooking enthusiasts and accomplished professional chefs I've asked about cookbooks.

Another unusual book and an example of the serious writing on French food available in the US before Julia Child (and in this case, from the same publisher) is Alexander Watt's Paris Bistro Cookery (Knopf, 1957; readily available used, amazon.com alone currently lists many copies, starting about $23). The author, a food writer living in Paris, went to 50 favorite bistros and wrote up two representative recipes from each, complete with atmospheric background, cultural quirks, etc. of the often family-run businesses.

Among many, many cookbooks at hand, one of those I use the most is from here in the Bay Area at the region's quintessential modern bistro: The original, 1984 cookbook from the Café at Chez Panisse (upstairs and independent from the well-known restaurant, though often confused with it nowadays by out-of-towners). It's the "Chez Panisse Pasta-Pizza-Calzone" cookbook, ISBN 0394530942, representing recipes from various chefs who worked there. It's full of ideas that are fresh and alive and unpretentious. When I first got it in the 1980s (long before the backlash that has developed against Alice Waters's recent image in interviews, by the way) I cooked through some recipes that looked interesting. Some were even better than they looked, and brought out insightful principles about flavors that I hadn't seen in better-known cookbooks. It's organized around fresh produce by season, but the favorite resipes that I cherish the book for, and cook repeatedly, have nothing remotely to do with fancy or precious ingredients, just insight. Representative is the first recipe: "White Asparagus, Brown Butter, Parmesan, & Fetticine." That commences the first of four seasonal pasta-recipe chapters; a long chapter on pizzas and calzones follows, beginning "Caramelized Onions, Gorgonzola, & Rosemary." Try it, you'll like it!