The nouvelle cuisine of Jean & Pierre Troisgros

This is the first book-length, personal collection of nouvelle cuisine recipes to be published in the United States. Jean and Pierre Troisgros are prestigious chefs and members of the three-star elite that made nouvelle cuisine famous. Their own fame has long since spread to the United States.This collection of their original recipes demonstrates concretely and deliciously the principles of the new French cooking - that true cuisine should be each individual chef's own creative work, based on training and experience, but not nailed down by traditional rules, and that in modern times it should more than ever before respect the true flavors of the best ingredients.The original talent of individual chefs is the most important element of true nouvelle cuisine, and the Troisgros have talent to spare, but the special respect for ingredients is what has led to the most familiar statements about the new French cooking: that its style is lighter and simpler, without heavy sauces; that vegetables are served crisp-tender, fish cooked quickly with perfect timing; that salads and first courses are unusual but never overwhelm a meal, desserts are fragile and light.All this is true, but only at the Troisgros restaurant at Roanne in the Rhone Valley or from the pages of their book in your own kitchen can you really understand what these great chefs have been able to do with the new freedom of nouvelle cuisine. The book is a landmark - and a remarkably approachable cookbook as well. These are, of course, the recipes of chefs, but many of them have come much closer than chefs usually do to the flavorful simplicity of the cooking of French home cooks. Their translator, Roberta Wolfe Smoler, is a very fine cook, but not a chef. She tested all the Troisgros recipes, converted them to American measures, and annotated them wherever needed for substitutions or the behavior of American ingredients different from that of the French.