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A Taste of My Life

Author: Raymond Blanc
Hardcover, 400 pages
Publisher: Bantam Press (2008)
ISBN-13: 978-0593060360

This is Raymond Blanc’s culinary autobiography. Entirely self-taught and now 59 years old, in his latest book he looks back fondly at a career that has seen 19 Michelin-starred chefs (among them Marco Pieree White and Heston Blumenthal) pass through the kitchen at his iconic hotel-restaurant in Oxfordshire. His collection of food-related anecdotes tells of his mother’s simple, delicious cooking and his days as a young boy collecting frogs’ legs in rural France. His early desire to be a chef led to him crossing the Channel in 1972 to become a waiter at a pub in Oxfordshire, then chef-patron of “Le Quat Saisons” in a shopping mall in Oxford where he became a runaway success before finally moving to “Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons” in 1984. A Taste of My Life is a wonderfully engaging memoir by a culinary genius and essential reading for anyone with an interest in food and cooking. Raymond Blanc takes the reader to every corner of the culinary universe, from simple, rustic cuisine to the rarefied realms of molecular gastronomy. He offers his thoughts on food and shares the secrets he has learned along the way. Incidentally, he took Maman Blanc’s simple tomato salad and turned his memory of that into his famous “Essence of Tomato” at “Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons”. “My mother is the greatest cook I know,” he says. “ All chefs are mummy’s boys and I am no exception.”

The Complete Robuchon

Author: Joel Robuchon
Hardcover, 610 pages
Publisher: Grub Street (2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1906502225

Joel Robuchon, born in Poitiers in 1945, runs more than a dozen restaurants in cities worldwide (his empire stretches from Paris to New York, Las Vegas to Tokyo, London to Hong Kong), has been awarded  a total of 18 Michelin Guide stars and is widely regarded as the most influential French chef of the post-nouvelle cuisine era. Renowned for relentless perfectionism, his food is seen as instrumental in leading French cuisine away from the excesses – and excessive reductionism – of nouvelle cuisine, bringing it back to a more authentic French style where each ingredient is allowed to develop its own distinctive flavour. Along the way, he has mentored such distinguished chefs as Gordon Ramsay and created signature dishes such as his famous cauliflower cream with caviar and potato puree. This book offers over 800 recipes: Whether scrambled eggs, pot-au-feu or Sole Meuniere – each dish is described in impeccable detail, from preparing ingredients in the proper manner to their precise cooking times. It records the basics of French cuisine and offers a broad sampling of dishes that made Joel Robuchon famous. A definitive guide to French cooking for the way we live now.

The Spaghetti Tree: Mario and Franco and the Trattoria Revolution

Author: Alasdair Scott Sutherland
Paperback, 220 pages
Publisher: Primavera Books (2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0955789205

“In post-war Britain, we knew so little about foreign cooking that most of us believed the BBC’s 1957 Panorama April Fool story that spaghetti grew on trees” says Alasdair Scott Sutherland. His fascinationg book offers a colourful  contribution to the social and food history of Britain in the sixties. The Spaghetti Tree is the untold story of Britain’s growing love affair with Italian food, originally sparked in 1959 by Mario and Franco at La Trattoria Terrazza in Soho. With its authentic dishes, informal style and its cool, modern interior, La Terrazza became the most famous and influential restaurant in London. The “Trat Scene” became a part of sixties folklore and throughout the decade, many of Mario and Franco’s employees left to open their own places, taking with them La Terrazza’s menu, recipes, style, staff, designer – and even its customers. Fifty years later, in the kitchens of Giorgio Locatelli’s Michelin-starred “Locanda” in London’s West End, Mario and Franco’s legend lives on. Alasdair Scott Sutherland was there at the time, and so was novelist Len Deighton. “The Italian revolution that Mario and Franco brought to London in the Sixties is a tale of passion and possession, vendetta and repentance, a story of triumph, disaster and betrayal,” he writes in his foreword. “It is an opera – and more like Rigoletto than Die Fledermaus.”