Le Cordon Bleu at Home

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book on French cooking
Review: While Cordon Bleu provides the essentials to fine French cooking, my copy had one glaring weakness - the binding fell apart in no time and the publisher, William Morrow, was unresponsive to my complaints. As Cordon Bleu will find extensive use in kitchens, a sturdy binding is critical. If the binding were not a problem, I would consider Cordon Bleu to be one of the few essential cookbooks (the others being Joy of Cooking and Jacque Pepin's La Technique), at least for those who wish to cook gourmet meals as found in Michelin Guide starred restaurants.

Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile addition to any cookbook library
Review: While I would advise that The Way to Cook is a better learn-to-cook-from-a-book option, this book does offer a good introduction to French cooking techniques. Some of the recieps are heavy on butter and eggs, but c'est la vie -- that's French cuisine. I've prepared a number of the recipes in the book, and found that often they seemed very complicated but the book walked me through them well enough to teach me some new culinary tricks and provide confidence in putting together a multi-course meal that in the past would have seemed like too much work. I've taken classes at Le Cordon Bleu (in London), and avidly studied French cooking and while this isn't the single essential guide you'll need, it's a good introduction to French cooking and if you follow it faithfully, it does reproduce the fundamental lessons taught at the world's most famous cooking school. A good companion book might be the Le Cordon Bleu Practicial Techniques Book, which is more heavily illustrated and thoroughly detailed.