`Mastering Simplicity' by Christian Delouvrier is a combination celebrity chef memoir and restaurant cookbook with the intended spin of making simple the apparent complexity in the canon of standard French cuisine. On the one hand, the book succeeds in presenting a well-written and interestingly presented sequence of classic French or French style recipes. On the other, it fails in presenting its primary contention that it can simplify French cooking. As the author and his cowriters admit in more than one recipe, this is long with lots of ingredients, but you can do it if you just break it down into its (many) individual steps. All the author has succeeded in doing is to show that the complexity can be broken down into a lot of steps and that what may look simple to a talented professional chef who has been in the business for over thirty years, still looks daunting to the amateur. The observation by Daniel Boulud on the difference between amateurs and professionals still holds. Professionals simply see things differently by virtue of having done the same preparations thousands of times over.
Since Delouvrier fails in making his primary contention, which can set his book apart from all the others, what is the value of the material otherwise? As always, it all depends on what you are looking for.
The book is organized in almost exactly the same style as Daniel Boulud's `Café Boulud Cookbook' with seven chapters of recipes instead of Boulud's four. The chapters are chronological, each dealing with a different stage in the author's career, beginning with his fairly straightforward versions of dishes from la cuisine Bourgeoise such as cassoulet and coq au vin through the author's interpretation of haute cuisine dishes at his very expensive Manhattan venues. The chapters are:
Family Cooking, Boulogne-SurGesse, France
Hotel School and the Early Years, Toulouse, France
Café de la Paix, Paris, France
Journet Through Discovery (Montreal)
Les Celebrites, New York City
LesPinasse and Four Stars, New York City
Basic Recipes (Pantry preparations)
The book does have the author's reminiscences which are entertaining and have a strong family resemblence to memoirs written by several other French chefs.
So the question remains, `Why should I buy this book'.
First, I think the recipes are very good, with the ones in the first four chapters being much more accessible to the amateur than the fifth and sixth recipe. The pantry recipes are interesting in that they show the chef is doing high end French technique. Stock recipes, with a few little twists, may have come right out of the Culinary Institute of America.
Second, the recipes in the first two chapters include some regional specialities outside of Provence and Lyon. The recipes in the last three chapters do include some Oriental influences, but not much.
Third, almost all the recipes are for entrees. Not too much space spent on desserts or salads. The mix of meat, fowl, fin, and shellfish is about right, with very few recipes for rabbit or other game style protein.
Fourth, the headnotes offer interesting comments on the source and nature of the material and the preparation. Good, but not dramatically better than other books.
If you already own a copy of Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' and Jaques Pepin's books on technique, the basis for buying this book narrows down to getting the book to see this chef's take on things plus some recipes from Gascony.
There are no wine pairings, which I don't miss. The photography is competant. There are no ingredient sources listed, but then, there are not a lot of rare ingredients. Just lots of them and some relatively expensive ingredients.
If you want a book like this, I would recommend one first look at Boulud's book cited above. If you really like that kind of book and want more, then I recommend this book to you.
