French Bistro

"Yet beyond all this, the attraction for many is a longstanding idea of France, an almost mythical view of the country seen through a prism in which historical and cultural associations merge with the idea of a specific lifestyle."
– from A Brief History of France









Great French cookbooks such as French Regional Food by Joel Robuchon, or Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan have more in common than the fact that they both represent an earnest

passion for French recipes – they both come from cooks who have spent either years or a lifetime in the country itself.  For Robuchon, he declares in his foreword that he "was born in Poitiers, in the Poitou.  It is my 'homeland' – the region of my childhood and the place where I undertook my first

apprenticeship when I was just fifteen years old."  For Greenspan, she describes a long-standing
desire to transplant to Paris from NY, traveling for years "back and forth between New York City and France.  Then, thirteen years ago, I became truly bicontinental: Michael and I moved into an apartment in Paris's 6th arrondissement, and I got the French life I couldn't ever have really imagined but had

always longed for."  To have the blessing of placing one's nose on the very windows of the local buchons, cafes, bistros and markets of French streets and back alleys would no doubt be the best way to learn the historical craft of the greatest culinary heritage on earth, but here, in these pages, is writing about the idea (as referenced above) of France and French cooking.


In many ways it is the imagination itself that is at the very cause of great cooking. Results, of course, must be had – the steak must be pink and tender, the bread soft, warm, and earthy, the salad fresh.  Yet

fine cooking isn't mechanical.  To set one's imagination around the art of cooking is what sets the cook, I believe, inside the mind of the food, if there is such a thing.  To project the idea of a favorite food into the process is what allows for a variety of good results.  If the recipe calls for cut ham, then, as I've always felt, cut the ham the way the imagination would like it eventually done, then execute.  If

the imagination can tell that a soup has become too thick, despite the prescribed intentions of the recipe, then add water to make it the way the imagination would like it.  This doesn't even begin to cover the notion of the senses and how they are evoked in the cooking process. Taste, sight, smell, even the sound of the crackling of the bacon onto a skillet, are non-mechanical ways of enjoying the process of cooking...that enjoyment is then transferred over and onto the product.

If the cook is able to summon the imagination this way for creating recipes, then he or she can also summon the imagination to consider what it might be like to create authentic French cuisine, to visualize various regions of France where so many of the ingredients of the great recipes have grown.  To be able to refer back to the historical genesis of a food as you cook it is as direct a way to appreciate what has come before as any other.  Like the great archeologists who salivate at the idea of placing their hands on a trinket of sunken treasure in order to 'sense' history, so too does the imaginative cook "see through a prism in which historical and cultural associations merge with the idea of a specific lifestyle."