Word: willan
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...sheer usefulness, the best book on the market must be La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan (Crown; $60), the Briton who in 1975 founded the famous Paris cooking school La Varenne. This is a how-to book more than a book of recipes, although Willan has scattered many simple recipes throughout the technical sections of her well-illustrated manual. In one of the most instructive sections, double-page illustrations show the kinds of meat cuts typically available both in the U.S. and France. I have often wondered just how to butterfly a leg of lamb when, at the last moment...
Just about every technique the home chef could need or aspire to need is contained in this pricey volume. It never occurred to me to make chocolate truffles at home, but the process looks easy in Willan's book. You whip up a genache by pouring a boiled combination of butter and cream over chopped chocolate. Chill that and then roll into little balls and chill some more. Melt some more chocolate, dip the genache balls in the warm chocolate and roll them in powdered cocoa...
...intelligence, authority and charm, few cookbooks can match Anne Willan's French Regional Cooking (Morrow; $29.95). The English-born, Americanized cuisinière has won international fame with her writing and her La Varenne cooking school in Paris. With four colleagues the author traveled more than 6,000 miles and spent a year choosing and testing the 400 recipes in the book. Their salivant safari takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the Alps, from the sands of St.-Malo to the beaches of Nice, with hardly a dull plat en route. Willan succeeds admirably in analyzing the tastes...
...thorough, as is her catalogue raisonné of cheeses. Some of the most luscious of all regional dishes are sweet: the fruity pound cake of the Loire, the tangy tartlets of Rouen and the fritters from the Alps known as pets de nonne (the name suggests they are gaseous). Willan also serves up historical tidbits. For example: Proust's madeleines came from Commercy in Lorraine; the word restaurant originated in Paris more than 200 years ago, when an innkeeper started offering bowls of bouillon known as restauratifs, and chowder is derived from chaudière, a cauldron in which...
...tour of pastry, piquant fillings and their origins. Some of her recipes inevitably show up in other books, but usually in different forms. Callen's version of pounti, the prune-and-ham pie from France's Auvergne, for example, differs in important respects from Anne Willan's formulation, and both are worth trying. The pie crust, filled and adorned to suit the native palate, is almost universal. The pissaladière of southern France and Switzerland's zwiebelwähe are sisters under the skin to the Italian pizza-of which, Callen notes, there are many...