Renowned for her cooking school in France and her many bestselling cookbooks, Willan combines years of hands-on experience with extensive research to create a brand-new classic. Sprinkled with more than 250 recipes and 270 enchanting photos, this cookbook is an irresistible celebration of French culinary culture.

This gorgeously illustrated volume began as notes on the collection of cookbooks and culinary images gathered by renowned cookbook author Anne Willan and her husband Mark Cherniavsky. From the spiced sauces of medieval times to the massive roasts and ragoûts of Louis XIV’s court to elegant eighteenth-century chilled desserts, The Cookbook Library draws from renowned cookbook author Anne Willan’s and her husband Mark Cherniavsky’s antiquarian cookbook library to guide readers through four centuries of European and early American cuisine. As the authors taste their way through the centuries, describing how each cookbook reflects its time, Willan illuminates culinary crosscurrents among the cuisines of England, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. A deeply personal labor of love, The Cookbook Library traces the history of the recipe and includes some of their favorites.

Abstract: A cookbook for beginners presents the philosophy of cooking as taught at the Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris. The comprehensive course teaches first a mastery of the fundamentals, and then more complicated procedures which can be put together to produce the famous works of French classic and nouvelle cuisine. There are 35 lessons, each dealing with a food ingredient (eggs, cheese), a prepared food (soups, salads) or a technique (sauteing, boning). Each lesson has an introductory statement plus a discussion of utensils and ingredients needed, and preparation techniques, and possible variations. The 250 recipes included give both American and metric measurements and Farenheit and Centigrade temperatures. Color photographs illustrate techniques. (kbc).

"Anne Willan, multi-award-winning culinary historian, cookbook writer, cooking teacher, and founder of La Varenne Cooking School in Paris, explores the lives and work of women cookbook authors whose important books have defined cooking over the past three hundred years. Beginning with the first published cookbook by Hannah Woolley in 1661, up to Alice Waters today, these women, and books, created the canon of the American table. Focusing on the figures behind the recipes, Women in the Kitchen traces the development of American home cooking from the first, early colonial days to transformative cookbooks by Fannie Farmer, Irma Rombauer, Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and Marcella Hazan. Willan offers a short biography of each influential woman, including her background, and a description of the seminal books she authored. These women inspired one another, and in part owe their places in cooking history to those who came before them. Featuring fifty original recipes, as well as updated versions Willan has tested and modernized for the contemporary kitchen, this engaging narrative seamlessly moves through history to help readers understand how female cookbook authors have shaped American cooking today"--Amazon

This fully illustrated volume provides detailed information and advice on choosing, storing, cooking, preserving and freezing food, as well as giving preparation and serving suggestions for both common and exotic ingredients. The book has been divided into six main sections, each concentrating on a different range of foods and exploring the techniques, utensils and ingredients required in step-by-step graphic sequences.