OP: Paul Bocuse's French Cooking

Paul Bocuse (1926–2018), a protégé of the great Fernand Point, was one of the leading French chefs in post-war France, not only influential for his own work, but also for those chefs who, in turn, studied under him such as Eckart Witzigmann, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

At the height of his career in the 1970s, Bocuse was at the forefront of Cuisine Nouvelle, a movement focusing on fresher ingredients and lighter fare, presented without pretension but with elegance, nonetheless. Bocuse’s appreciation for produce procured daily from the market was evident in this book’s original French title, La Cuisine du Marché—market cuisine—published by Flammarion in 1976.

Paul Bocuse’s French Cooking debuted the following year in English and quickly became a highly prized resource. The book is dense with recipes—nearly 500 pages before the index, color photographs inserted at the end—covering everything from ortolans baked in apples and finished with applejack and veal stock to Escoffier’s recipe for truffles basted with champagne brandy, wrapped in pork fat, and cooked under burning embers. With sections on sauces, eggs, all varieties of fish and meat, vegetables, and impressive dessert coverage, Bocuse does a great service in educating the next generation of chefs.

We offer here a first US printing in Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. The case shows notable shelfwear along the bottom edge. The jacket is shelfworn and price clipped with some wrinkling to the rear. The interior is Near Fine, clean and unmarked, save for a pen scribble on the title page. Highly collectible but we wouldn’t hide it away on a high shelf until we’d thoroughly digested the content.