Product Description

Author Daniel Young brings home to American cooks the charm, culture, and food of the fifty best Paris cafe's. Unlike the bistro, the cafe' is a place where you can sit for as long as you like with only a drink -- but the food is so tempting, you'll want to order more than just a cafe' au lait. Here are more than 150 recipes for classics like Coq au Vin and Boeuf Bourguignon, which satisfy cravings for hearty comfort food. Many French favorites such as Pommes Dauphine (Croquettes of Pureed Potatoes) are surprisingly simple and can be prepared in under thirty minutes. Desserts like tarte tatin and chocolate-hazelnut-filled crepes are quintessential French treats and wonderfully easy to make.

Sure to transport even armchair travelers, The Paris Cafe' Cookbook presents stories of rendezvous and routines from the author's travels to cafe's from Ma Bourgogne, situated in the oldest square in Paris, to the Web Bar, a new cyber cafe'. Evocative black-and-white photographs and colorful illustrations accompany the essays and recipes, making this cookbook a delightful gift for food lovers and Francophiles.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #246419 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-04
• Released on: 1998-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Paris Café Cookbook brings home a food experience peculiar to a single city and singular kind of establishment. In Paris, the birthplace of the café, these establishments provide a sense of family cooking where little of it exists at home any longer. Daniel Young, restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, has produced a delightful and informative book.

Young begins his book with a long elaboration that defines the Parisian café, setting it apart from brasserie and bistro, though some can be either. Though his book is set up to follow a standard pattern (appetizers, sides, main dishes, and desserts), the divisions are broken up by short essays describing each of the 50 cafés Young has selected. This is as much tour guide as cookbook at this point.

But it also anchors to a specific place and sensibility the food described in the recipes. Sure, Pot-au-Feu recipes are a dime a dozen, but Young gives the reader the Pot-au-Feu to be found at Brasserie Stella--as well as the Brasserie itself. Steamed Chicken with Tarragon Sauce is sure to elicit no big surprises, yet this is the recipe served at Pétrissan's. The Stuffed Artichokes with Ratatouille Niçoise can be found at Les Fontaines or at your very own dinner table. Café food is not elaborate or technique intensive. You can, in fact, do this home cooking at home.

That's what is so delightful about The Paris Café Cookbook: anyone who can't make it to Paris 16 times in three years to work on a book about Paris cafés can simply cook the food at home, establish the right ambience, sit down, dine, and pretend. Let taste be your guide. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly
Young, a New York City restaurant critic and food commentator, collects recipes from the City of Lights' best-known haunts in this serviceable cookbook. In a slightly smug introduction, Young explains why he?a New Yorker?is qualified to select the best of Paris (he's more open to the city's charm) and suggests that although the dishes he's selected are high in fat, the small portions (along with cigarettes and alcohol) aid Parisians in staying slim. Appetizers include an Onion Tart from Brasserie de l'ile St.-Louis and Mussels and Zucchini Salad with Spicy Mayonnaise from the Clown Bar. The Decadent Mashed Potatoes from Le Cafe Marly live up to their name with 1 1/4 cups butter plus one cup cream. Desserts are the strongest category here: Lemon Tart with Prune Compote from L'Ete en Pente Douce is pleasantly tangy, while Le Vaudeville's Gratin of Fresh Figs with a Red Wine Sabayon is simple yet original. Descriptions and histories of the cafes themselves are light and fun: despite its name, Cafe Cannibale was created as a place where women could gather without falling prey to cruising men, and the famous clientele at the Cafe de Flore has included Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The owner called the latter his worst customer ever because he could make one drink last so long.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Not bad?Young, the restaurant critic for the New York Daily News and an NPR commentator, got to spend months in Paris discovering his favorite cafes and sampling their fare. His book includes a page or more description of each, numerous atmospheric black-and-white photographs, and more than 150 recipes, ranging from the traditional?Poule au Pot, or Chicken in the Pot?to the contemporary?Sauteed Tuna with Orange and Star Anise Butter Sauce. Fun for both armchair travelers and anyone interested in French cooking, this is recommended for most libraries.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

GET READY TO PACK UP TO PARIS
Wonderful book that not only inspires you to cook up some authentic french food but has you wanting to get there anyway you can. Daniel Young does a great job in giving you personal descriptions of 'authentic' bistros and enamors you with his food travels. Add to the fact he's put in a few nice black and white photos of the bistros and your well on your way to 'gettin down'n'french' in your own kitchen Check out the lemon tarte with prune preserve..i can't wait to try it. Thanks Daniel you gave us a handsome book by which to dream and cook by.

Could have been much more evocative
Daniel Young has two different purposes at work in this book, and they don't always seem to go together so well. On the one hand, he wants to give us a representative sampling of café cuisine, so we can recreate at home the tastes and smells of the Paris café experience. And here, I think, he succeeds admirably.

At the same time, however, he is also attempting to present us with something of a portrait of café culture -- a celebration, in the words of the introduction, "of what makes this institution so worth preserving." No less, the author hopes that after reading his book, we "should be prepared to choose a regular Parisian café to call your own." Frankly, I don't think he achieves this second goal nearly so well.

This book is divided, in standard cookbook fashion, by categories of food -- appetizers, entrees, and so on. Cafés are presented within each section based on the representative recipe Young has chosen from its menu. If more than one selection comes from a given café, however, they appear on different pages, sometimes widely separated. While the virtue of this approach is unmistakable for a cookbook, it does make it a bit more difficult to consider any given café.

While the writing about each café is generally pretty good, I didn't find the text-heavy layout and two-color photography particularly inviting. And for a book that's supposed to help us choose a café or two of our own, I was very disappointed that there were so few photos ... and that the ones that there were, were so often less than evocative. If Daniel Young's descriptive writing could be combined with the wonderful photography of Marie-France Boyer's The French Cafe, *that* would be a book to treasure.

In all, your opinion of this book will be colored by what you hope to get out of it. If, like some of the other reviewers on this page, you want to cook authentic and memorable café offerings in your own home, then this is probably just what you're looking for. But if you're searching for something that captures the mystique and romance of the café culture, then "The Paris Café Cookbook," while unquestionably a good start in that direction, will still leave a bit more to be desired.

Excellent Recipes
The recipes from the book are truly delightful. I've made several of them over the past two years. This book is well-written and does justice to a cook outside France, by providing reasonable substitutions. Once while in Paris, I decided to compare the recipe results against the actual dishes at the cafes in the book. Surprisingly, the food tasted and looked very similar. The desserts are especially delicious - Mousse au Chocolat, Profiteroles au Chocolat, Peach Cake with Strawberry Sauce, Creme Brulee, Pear Clafoutis ... ummm!