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قراءة كتاب Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them

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Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them

Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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Twenty-four Little
FRENCH DINNERS
AND
How to Cook and Serve Them

BY
CORA MOORE

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright 1919, by
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

 

PREFACE

The Little Dinners of Paris are world-famous. No one can have sojourned in the fascinating capital in its normal days without having come under their spell. To Parisien and visitor alike they are accounted among the uniquely characteristic features of the city's routine life.

Much of the interest that attaches to them is, of course, due to local atmosphere, to the associations that surround the quaint restaurants, half hidden in unexpected nooks and by-ways, to the fact that old Jacques “waits” in his shirtsleeves or that Grosse Marie serves you with a smile as expansive as her own proportions, or that it is Justin or François or “Old Monsoor,” with his eternal grouch, who glides about the zinc counter.

But there is also magic in the arrangement of the menus, in the combinations of food, in the very names of the confections and in the little Gallic touches that, simple though they are, transform commonplace dishes into gastronomic delights.

There is inspiration in the art that enters into the production of a French dinner, in the perfect balance of every item from hors d'œuvre to café noir, in the ways with seasoning that work miracles with left-overs and preserve the daily routine of three meals a day from the deadly monotony of the American régime, in the garnishings that glorify the most insignificant concoctions into objects of appetising beauty and in the sauces that elevate indifferent dishes into the realm of creations and enable a French cook to turn out a dinner fit for capricious young gods from what an American cook wastes in preparing one.

The very economy of the French is an art, and there is art in their economy. It is true that their dishes, as we have known them in this country, are expensive, even extravagant, but that is because they have been for the most part the creations of high-priced chefs. They who have made eating an avocation know that it is not necessary to dine expensively in order to dine well.

C. M.

New York, May, 1919.

 

CONTENTS

PAGE
Preface v
The Bugbear of American Cookery—Monotony 1
Flavor—Handmaid of Variety 9
True Trails toward Economy 15
The Appeal to the Eye 21
Sauces, Simple and Otherwise 25
Twenty-four Little French Dinners
(With Directions for Preparing)
33
Let Us Eat Fish! 109
 

Twenty-four Little
FRENCH DINNERS
AND
How to Cook and Serve Them

 

THE BUGBEAR OF AMERICAN COOKERY—MONOTONY

It is as strange as it is true that with the supplies that have lately proved sufficient to feed a world to draw upon the chief trouble with American cookery is its monotony. The American cook has a wider variety of foods at his command than any other in the world, yet in the average home how rarely is it that the palate is surprised with a flavor that didn't have its turn on the corresponding day last week or tickled with a sauce that is in itself an inspiration and a delight, not a mere “gravy,” liable to harden into lumps of grease when it cools.

Most of this is simply the result of blindly following tradition. Daughter has accepted mother's precepts, regarding them even as the law of the Medes and the Persians, “which altereth not,” and if it were not that increased prices and, lately, at least, “food regulations,” have veritably compelled her toward a more wholesome simplicity, the United States would probably be what it was called half a generation ago, “a nation of dyspeptics.” And we were a nation of dyspeptics because the great American mother of the latter end of the Nineteenth Century, in spite of all her unequaled qualities in every other direction, and in spite of all the encomiums she received in resounding prose or ecstatic verse for her prowess in the kitchen, was from the points of view of health, economy and wisdom the worst cook in the world.

With prices as they are the American housewife cannot afford to use butter and eggs and flour with the prodigality that was a habit with her mother, but so limited is the average woman's knowledge of cookery that these restrictions merely mean more monotony than ever. It is partly to demonstrate that this state of things is unnecessary and that true food economy is not at all synonymous with “going without” that this book has been compiled.

It is upon variety that the French cook confidently relies to make each dish of each meal not just something to eat because her family must have food, not merely a sop to the Cerberus-gnawings of hunger, but a delight to the eye, to the palate, to the stomach—truly a consummation devoutly to be wished for the American home table, and just as possible to attain as it is possible to procure from the grocer or the nearest pharmacist the ingredients by which these wonders are wrought.

But the average American woman doesn't look beyond

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