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The Cooking Of Southwest France: Recipes from France's Magnificient Rustic Cuisine
"An indispensable cookbook."
- Jeffrey Steingarten, VogueWhen Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France was first published in 1983, it became an instant classic. This award-winning book was praised by critics, chefs, and home cooks alike as the ultimate source of recipes and information about a legendary style of cooking. Wolfert's recipes for cassoulet and confit literally changed the American culinary scene. Confit, now ubiquitous on restaurant menus, was rarely served in the United States before Wolfert presented it.
Now, twenty-plus years later, Wolfert has completely revised her groundbreaking book. In this new edition, you'll find sixty additional recipes - thirty totally new recipes, along with thirty updated recipes from Wolfert's other books. Recipes from the original edition have been revised to account for current tastes and newly available ingredients; some have been dropped.
You will find superb classic recipes for cassoulet, sauce perigueux, salmon rillettes, and beef daube; new and revised recipes for ragouts, soups, desserts, and more; and, of course, numerous recipes for the most exemplary of all southwest French ingredients - duck - including the traditional method for duck confit plus two new, easier variations.
Other recipes include such gems as Chestnut and Cèpe Soup With Walnuts, magnificent lusty Oxtail Daube, mouthwatering Steamed Mussels With Ham, Shallots, and Garlic, as well as Poached Chicken Breast, Auvergne-Style, and the simple yet sublime Potatoes Baked in Sea Salt. You'll also find delicious desserts such as Batter Cake With Fresh Pears From the Correze, and Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream.
Each recipe incorporates what the French call a truc, a unique touch that makes the finished dish truly extraordinary. Evocative new food photographs, including sixteen pages in full color, now accompany the text.
Connecting the 200 great recipes is Wolfert's unique vision of Southwest France. In sharply etched scenes peopled by local characters ranging from canny peasant women to world-famous master chefs, she captures the region's living traditions and passion for good food.
Gascony, the Perigord, Bordeaux, and the Basque country all come alive in these pages. This revised edition of The Cooking of Southwest France is truly another Wolfert classic in its own right.
- Jeffrey Steingarten, VogueWhen Paula Wolfert's The Cooking of Southwest France was first published in 1983, it became an instant classic. This award-winning book was praised by critics, chefs, and home cooks alike as the ultimate source of recipes and information about a legendary style of cooking. Wolfert's recipes for cassoulet and confit literally changed the American culinary scene. Confit, now ubiquitous on restaurant menus, was rarely served in the United States before Wolfert presented it.
Now, twenty-plus years later, Wolfert has completely revised her groundbreaking book. In this new edition, you'll find sixty additional recipes - thirty totally new recipes, along with thirty updated recipes from Wolfert's other books. Recipes from the original edition have been revised to account for current tastes and newly available ingredients; some have been dropped.
You will find superb classic recipes for cassoulet, sauce perigueux, salmon rillettes, and beef daube; new and revised recipes for ragouts, soups, desserts, and more; and, of course, numerous recipes for the most exemplary of all southwest French ingredients - duck - including the traditional method for duck confit plus two new, easier variations.
Other recipes include such gems as Chestnut and Cèpe Soup With Walnuts, magnificent lusty Oxtail Daube, mouthwatering Steamed Mussels With Ham, Shallots, and Garlic, as well as Poached Chicken Breast, Auvergne-Style, and the simple yet sublime Potatoes Baked in Sea Salt. You'll also find delicious desserts such as Batter Cake With Fresh Pears From the Correze, and Prune and Armagnac Ice Cream.
Each recipe incorporates what the French call a truc, a unique touch that makes the finished dish truly extraordinary. Evocative new food photographs, including sixteen pages in full color, now accompany the text.
Connecting the 200 great recipes is Wolfert's unique vision of Southwest France. In sharply etched scenes peopled by local characters ranging from canny peasant women to world-famous master chefs, she captures the region's living traditions and passion for good food.
Gascony, the Perigord, Bordeaux, and the Basque country all come alive in these pages. This revised edition of The Cooking of Southwest France is truly another Wolfert classic in its own right.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1994
56 people are currently reading
483 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 16, 2017
This was a well-done cookbook dealing only with cuisine of the limited geography of South-West France as specified in the title. The author focussed on the area's rustic, hearty dishes and covered them very well. The geography was limited but the food was not. There were many famous dishes to cover. She gave maps, recipes of local cities, individual techniques of various people ranging from top chefs to peasant housewives. She made numerous trips to the area and became friendly with its cooks and chefs and learned their great recipes, concepts, tastes, oral lore, and techniques.
I disagree with her comment in her "Acknowledgments" that she wants to lower fat in the recipes because she thinks fat is unhealthy. I completely disagree with this theory which has been heavily promoted since about 1970 or so and I regret that the author believes this. There is not only nothing wrong with butter, suet, fish fats, marrow and other animal fats which are tasty, satisfying and filling, but they also contain essential fatty acids which are necessary for good health. Essential fatty acids come from animal fats and a few seeds and they ARE essential to human life.
I liked her Attribution page wherein she explained that she was scrupulous about assigning credit for the recipes. If there is no attribution, then the dish was in the common domain. If the recipe stated "Inspired by a recipe from..." then she was taught that recipe by that person and she has changed the recipe to make substitutions, simplifications or improvements for her readers in the United States. Finally, a recipe that bears a name (such as Lucien Vanel) in its title or in its introduction was from that person.
Next came her "Introduction" with at least three pages dwelling on reducing fats in food which I wish she had omitted. She had a good paragraph on making sauces by stratification which I previously had never understood, and here she explained it in a way that I finally got it. You quickly and vigorously heat an acid, harmonize it with a stock, and bind them together with a fat, but she explained the process much more artistically than I just did.
There was a major mistake in the "Contents" because it listed "Crèpes" in Chapter One, but there were no crèpes nor any kind of pancakes there. I finally figured out that the "Contents" should have said "Cèpes" which are mushrooms. Her first chapter was an overview of tastes anchored in this culture: foie gras, truffles, cèpes, Armagnac, confits, and more.
Chapter Two was stocks, demi-glaces, sauces, and bread. Chapter Three was soup, garbures, miques, veloutés and more. Chapter Four was salads, dressings, tapenade, and rillettes. Chapter Five covered appetizers, compotes, terrines, stuffed duck neck in brioche, sauces, snails, and asparagus. I liked the pages she had on peeling asparagus and how to easily make your own asparagus peeler with a knife guide made of wire.
Chapter Six was supper dishes such as cabbage cakes and sausage (El Trinxat Cerda), Pipérade (Sauce Basquaise with Eggs and Ham), and Croustade of Duck Confit with Apples. Chapter Seven handled vegetables such as eggplant, braised leeks, potatoes, mushrooms, artichokes, onions, fried pumpkin slices, corn cakes and more (here I've stripped them of their fancy French names).
Chapter Eight was about seafood and fish. One recipe was Coquilles St. Jacques, Sauce Mandarine (or Scallops in Tangerine Sauce). Here a mystery was solved for me. Previously I had failed to be able to cook edible morue (salt cod). Now I know the methods and techniques to get salt cod ready for successful cooking by either poaching, frying or roasting.
Chapter Nine was a hefty chapter on chicken, and Chapter Ten was on "Ducks, Geese, and Game" dishes. You can learn how to make a salt crust, how to make confits, rillettes, how to grill quail, and how to cook pheasants. There was a recipe for rabbit with pears and ginger: "Poires Confites au Gingembre".
Chapter Eleven gives several of the many versions of cassoulets for the locale. Chapter Twelve is a large chapter with many substantial hearty recipes for pork, beef, veal, and lamb.
Chapter Thirteen was "Desserts" and I recognized one of my favorites, Clafouti which is a fun fruit pie baked in a cast iron skillet without any crust and with pits left in the fruits. You put unpitted cherries (or small plums or berries or any small fruit) into the skillet and pour an egg custard over the fruits and bake. I did not like her version because she said to remove the stones and that's the whole point of a clafouti – to be playful and to make people spit out stones from a silly pie lacking a crust!
I enjoyed all of this book except the pastry preparations which were not explained. She just gave a list of ingredients to dump into a food processor and eliminated most of the kneading and manipulations of the dough. I was disappointed. The food processor dump was jarring after an entire book of deeply massaging various foods to coax and finesse and enhance their flavors and tastes; now I was just dumping parts into an impartial grinding machine. I was removed from the artistry. Even though the pie crusts were called "Pâtè à Croustade du Sud-Ouest" and "Pâtè Sucrée"
this preparation lost its heart and soul when the food processor took my place for the labor. I liked the "Preserves" recipes using brandies and spirits with fruits.
There was a nice appendix with many nice cooking tips and explanations (how to make crème frâiche, verjus, clarified butter) and sources for some ingredients (tartaric acid, orange flower water, sauces) and recommendations for quality brands to buy (Petrossian for truffles).
The index was scant. Throughout the book, the author had several recipes requiring pastry and said to use her home-made croustade recipe. When I searched the index under for "croustade", it said to look under "pie, covered". There were two recipes with croustades there: – a croustade of duck confit and a croustade with quince and prunes. I read through each of the two recipes and each recipe said the home-made croustade dough followed its recipe, but it did not. After I had almost finished all of the book, the last recipe ended on page 340, I finally stumbled onto the disappointing food processor dough recipe on page 334. A food processor did not match my rustic imagery of making a pie crust. Not perfect, but this was definitely an excellent book, except for "New Techniques to Lighten Hearty Dishes" which I would just omit.
I disagree with her comment in her "Acknowledgments" that she wants to lower fat in the recipes because she thinks fat is unhealthy. I completely disagree with this theory which has been heavily promoted since about 1970 or so and I regret that the author believes this. There is not only nothing wrong with butter, suet, fish fats, marrow and other animal fats which are tasty, satisfying and filling, but they also contain essential fatty acids which are necessary for good health. Essential fatty acids come from animal fats and a few seeds and they ARE essential to human life.
I liked her Attribution page wherein she explained that she was scrupulous about assigning credit for the recipes. If there is no attribution, then the dish was in the common domain. If the recipe stated "Inspired by a recipe from..." then she was taught that recipe by that person and she has changed the recipe to make substitutions, simplifications or improvements for her readers in the United States. Finally, a recipe that bears a name (such as Lucien Vanel) in its title or in its introduction was from that person.
Next came her "Introduction" with at least three pages dwelling on reducing fats in food which I wish she had omitted. She had a good paragraph on making sauces by stratification which I previously had never understood, and here she explained it in a way that I finally got it. You quickly and vigorously heat an acid, harmonize it with a stock, and bind them together with a fat, but she explained the process much more artistically than I just did.
There was a major mistake in the "Contents" because it listed "Crèpes" in Chapter One, but there were no crèpes nor any kind of pancakes there. I finally figured out that the "Contents" should have said "Cèpes" which are mushrooms. Her first chapter was an overview of tastes anchored in this culture: foie gras, truffles, cèpes, Armagnac, confits, and more.
Chapter Two was stocks, demi-glaces, sauces, and bread. Chapter Three was soup, garbures, miques, veloutés and more. Chapter Four was salads, dressings, tapenade, and rillettes. Chapter Five covered appetizers, compotes, terrines, stuffed duck neck in brioche, sauces, snails, and asparagus. I liked the pages she had on peeling asparagus and how to easily make your own asparagus peeler with a knife guide made of wire.
Chapter Six was supper dishes such as cabbage cakes and sausage (El Trinxat Cerda), Pipérade (Sauce Basquaise with Eggs and Ham), and Croustade of Duck Confit with Apples. Chapter Seven handled vegetables such as eggplant, braised leeks, potatoes, mushrooms, artichokes, onions, fried pumpkin slices, corn cakes and more (here I've stripped them of their fancy French names).
Chapter Eight was about seafood and fish. One recipe was Coquilles St. Jacques, Sauce Mandarine (or Scallops in Tangerine Sauce). Here a mystery was solved for me. Previously I had failed to be able to cook edible morue (salt cod). Now I know the methods and techniques to get salt cod ready for successful cooking by either poaching, frying or roasting.
Chapter Nine was a hefty chapter on chicken, and Chapter Ten was on "Ducks, Geese, and Game" dishes. You can learn how to make a salt crust, how to make confits, rillettes, how to grill quail, and how to cook pheasants. There was a recipe for rabbit with pears and ginger: "Poires Confites au Gingembre".
Chapter Eleven gives several of the many versions of cassoulets for the locale. Chapter Twelve is a large chapter with many substantial hearty recipes for pork, beef, veal, and lamb.
Chapter Thirteen was "Desserts" and I recognized one of my favorites, Clafouti which is a fun fruit pie baked in a cast iron skillet without any crust and with pits left in the fruits. You put unpitted cherries (or small plums or berries or any small fruit) into the skillet and pour an egg custard over the fruits and bake. I did not like her version because she said to remove the stones and that's the whole point of a clafouti – to be playful and to make people spit out stones from a silly pie lacking a crust!
I enjoyed all of this book except the pastry preparations which were not explained. She just gave a list of ingredients to dump into a food processor and eliminated most of the kneading and manipulations of the dough. I was disappointed. The food processor dump was jarring after an entire book of deeply massaging various foods to coax and finesse and enhance their flavors and tastes; now I was just dumping parts into an impartial grinding machine. I was removed from the artistry. Even though the pie crusts were called "Pâtè à Croustade du Sud-Ouest" and "Pâtè Sucrée"
this preparation lost its heart and soul when the food processor took my place for the labor. I liked the "Preserves" recipes using brandies and spirits with fruits.
There was a nice appendix with many nice cooking tips and explanations (how to make crème frâiche, verjus, clarified butter) and sources for some ingredients (tartaric acid, orange flower water, sauces) and recommendations for quality brands to buy (Petrossian for truffles).
The index was scant. Throughout the book, the author had several recipes requiring pastry and said to use her home-made croustade recipe. When I searched the index under for "croustade", it said to look under "pie, covered". There were two recipes with croustades there: – a croustade of duck confit and a croustade with quince and prunes. I read through each of the two recipes and each recipe said the home-made croustade dough followed its recipe, but it did not. After I had almost finished all of the book, the last recipe ended on page 340, I finally stumbled onto the disappointing food processor dough recipe on page 334. A food processor did not match my rustic imagery of making a pie crust. Not perfect, but this was definitely an excellent book, except for "New Techniques to Lighten Hearty Dishes" which I would just omit.
June 6, 2011
This is a cookbook, but I have read it from cover to cover. Ingredient to ingredient. Butter fat to duck fat. It explains the culture of rustic French cuisine, which relies not on the sauces and mignons of its haute cousin but on time, dedication, and quite a bit of wine and duck. My household approved of me testing the recipes, of course...try an "oxtail daube," which requires an entire bottle of red wine and about three days of heating, stirring, and fat separation, or perhaps an almost savory dark chocolate cake with sea salt. The recipes are not too difficult to follow, even in North America, and the lessons are priceless.
June 18, 2012
To make good food you have to love it. The love you put in making a dish comes out in the taste and experience of eating it. Basically what goes in comes out. Paula Wolfert is a lover of food, this comes out clearly in the way she writes about it. To me she brings out echos of David, Roden, Del Conte.
February 17, 2013
This is my "go to" cookbook when I want a dish that is authentically southwestern France! Every recipe that I have made has been excellent. Many take planning, time and a good butcher (easy here in San Francisco, I must admit), but the results are always excellent!
September 27, 2017
In 1983, Paula Wolfert wrote "The Cooking of Southwest France" and introduced many American cooks to the flavours and techniques of Gascony, the Perigord, Bordeaux, and the Basque country. The book won the 1983 French's Tastemaker Award and was a finalist for the British Andre Simon Award. British chef Fergus Henderson (the nose-to-tail guy who likes offal) says her recipe for cassoulet is his favorite recipe of all time. In 2005, she revised this classic cookbook, adding about fifty recipes and eliminating others, updating many. She expanded the offerings using duck, which is a great blessing. Ms. Wolfert has been diagnosed with senile dementia and can no longer cook or write. She has left a worthy legacy of nine cookbooks, two about Morocco, the greatest of which may be her tome on the cooking of Southwest France.
September 5, 2021
I've read several french cookbooks recently and been unimpressed. Firstly, it really is non-vegetarian, there is not even the concept. However, if you are into duck, rabbit, and veal etc perhaps this is the book for you.
September 12, 2024
I did this book for book club. She was an extraordinary business woman, however, her personal life was quite perplexed by men. This is just a short but sweet synopsis. Highly reccommend.
January 16, 2016
How do you rate a cookbook ? I used this to research some cassoulet variations, but was drawn to read the rest of the book page by page. The book is divided into category sections, i.e. poultry, duck/goose/rabbit, etc., and a small primer starting each section. The recipes are not esoteric, but they offer some interesting variations, and use a lot of vegetables in their preparation, something I'm fond of, and which is a characteristic of SW French cuisine. Each recipe has a 'notes to the cook' section covering substitutions, prep details and ancillary information about the ingredients. Type is easily readable and well-spaced, making for ease of use at a kitchen counter while working. My only complaint would be the few photographs, which are beautiful, are grouped together in two sections in the book, making a lot of page turning necessary if you're referring to one against its corresponding recipe. But all in all, a great book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 9, 2007
Everything has been delicious so far. The book even got me to cook rabbit! However, I've had to subtract one star because of the myriad of specialty, need your French grandmother to make it in her root cellar type of ingredients.
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May 9, 2013Javaczuk gave me this cookbook after our honeymoon in France decades ago. Lovely duck, goose, rabbit, game recipes, for back in the day when we ate duck, goose, rabbit, and game.
Packing away now as we declutter the house, preparing to put it on the market.
Packing away now as we declutter the house, preparing to put it on the market.
September 26, 2008
cooking less and less with Garland on the scene but these recipes are so authentic and so satisfying...so once in a while....
August 30, 2011
The new, updated version is as wonderful as the original. Paula Wolfert is a excellent writer.
April 13, 2017
Totally delicious recipes, and some can be adapted to the slow cooker.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews