Review: Food & Laughter
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 30, 2012
I don't know when I've enjoyed a cookbook more. Corinne has a delightful, entertaining, droll way of telling the stories around the food as well as the recipes themselves! I was reading the cookbook part of the time while standing on the street waiting for a bus, literally laughing out loud and baffling the people around me. Then I read more while being driven somewhere, and found myself reading it aloud to the driver, laughing. Then pulling it out to show to our hostess at dinner, who kept chuckling under her breath as she read the Chocolate Mousse recipe. (My favorite line is the first ingredient: "3 eggs of irreproachable freshness and lineage.")I've spent quite a bit of time immersed in French culture as well as being a bit of a foodie. One of my criteria for recipes I will use over and over is that they are simple enough to memorize, and tasty enough to wow the crowd. These qualify on all counts. Most of these had few ingredients, assembled in a straightforward fashion. Those that had a longer string of ingredients were flexible and forgiving about substitutions. Corinne explained carefully the differences between making the recipe in France and making them in America with appropriate substitutions.My own mother is Cajun, and I found several of the recipes astonishingly familiar to those I've grown up making. I must confess I skimmed those -- the ingredients alone told me how to make them. Surprisingly, while it isn't mentioned at all, most of the recipes are gluten-free. Those that aren't can, for the most part, be fairly easily adapted. I can't wait to try the Moulleux au Chocolat, a flourless chocolate cake made with 7 ingredients.After reading the cookbook, and waving it under the noses of everyone who came near me for a day, I came back to Amazon to find out if I could buy a print copy. Sadly, not yet. I would, though. This is one I would use until I memorized all the recipes, and I'd kind of like to have it in print. Perhaps she'll expand it a tad? An appendix of French recipes she enjoys that are not from the novel? I will gladly admit that reading the cookbook has inspired me to purchase the original novel, which I had not read beforehand.