Traditional and new recipes travel from arroz to zuppa
A great cookbook can compete with any adventure novel. It will have glamorous, expensive leading characters like Mam'selle Canard and Signor Vitello, and a savory supporting cast. There will be cuttings and slicings, pairings and peelings, as in any other thriller, and the unpredictable can always be expected. Like a good novel, a well-done cookbook is also a sociological document, recording the infinite ways in which people all over the world nourish, titillate and please, borrowing from one culture, lending to another. Even before the Romans planted vines in Southern France, before Marco Polo returned from China bearing the secrets of pasta and ice cream, mankind was engaged in this most civilized exchange. It continues.
Haute cuisine, as we relish it, was formulated and perfected in France between the 14th and 19th centuries. The recipes developed by La Varenne and La Chapelle, Brillat-Savarin and Beauvilliers (who founded the first recorded restaurant in France) are as practical and savory as ever. In The Grand Masters of French Cuisine (Putnam; 288 pages; $25), Celine Vence and Robert Courtine, two of France's most distinguished culinary authorities, have assembled some of the greatest formulas ever invented. It would be hard to resist the original instructions for boeuf mode as constructed by Pierre de Lune in 1656, or for preserved quinces as prescribed by Nostradamus in 1552. From the stick-roasted eggs of Taillevenť (1373) to the spit-roasted eel of Alexandre Dumas père (1873), the dishes outlined are all cookable with available ingredients.
Good meals, ça va sans dire, should not be corseted by classic formulas or restricted to scarce foodstuff. This is what nouvelle cuisine is all about: less emphasis on heavy, masking sauces, greater reliance on the fresh flesh, fish, fowl and vegetables that can be encouraged to speak for themselves. Jean and Pierre Troisgros most elegantly practice the new cookery at their three-star restaurant in the Rhone Valley. In The Nouvelle Cuisine (Morrow; 254 pages; $12.95), the chers frères range easily from red mullet with beef marrow to that little-known marvel, coupe-jarret, which consists of five different meats (pork, veal, beef, lamb and chicken) cooked in one kettle.