When French Women Cook: A Gastronomic Memoir

Madeleine Kamman, born 1931 in Paris, is a chef and restaurateur, cookery teacher and author of seven cookbooks, who has spent most of her working life in America bringing the rigors of French technique to American ingredients and audiences. Kamman has been recognized by food luminaries such as James Beard for her discerning palette and knowledge of the history, culture and science of food, as well as her passion for celebrating the food cooked by women in the home as much as the masters of haute cuisine. She has been celebrated as a leader of what she called "cuisine personelle" - part of the nouvelle cuisine movement that reinvented the classics of French classical cuisine - and as one of the world's most authoritative and exacting teachers of cooking - a "teacher's teacher" - who has Influenced the development of American chefs and the American cookery scene. In WHEN FRENCH WOMEN COOK, each chapter is devoted to a different woman important in Ms. Kamman's life - her grandmother, a cousin, a friend, the countrywoman who took her in when as a child she was evacuated from wartime Paris, and others. Each of these remarkable women represents a different are of France and the food and cooking of that province or locality as Madeleine Kamman came to know it. And each of the eight women is memorialized in a graceful, affectionate essay that introduces the recipes of the region she symbolizes. The recipes, about 250 of them, are marvelously readable, eminently cookable, and comprise every sort of dish from potages to preserves. They are authentically French but perfect accessible to the American cook. Each one is time, tested, graded as to degree of difficulty; and the ingredients are measured in metrics as well as the traditional way. And Marie-Charlotte, Henriette and the other ladies of France to whom Ms. Kamman has paid eloquent tribute in these pages will capture your imagination and your heart.