Rating: 
Summary: For those who own many cookbooks, quite simply the best
Review: Richard Olney's <Simple French Food> is not the one cookbook one cannot do without; it is not the one book that will transform a beginner into an artist; but it is the best book among other "best" books for those who love food above all and who as a consequence of that appreciation love the marvelous chemistry that is cooking and hence those who are passionate, as Olney was passionate, about understanding what is involved (what must be given and what must be done) in order to cook -- simple -- French food. Simple here ought not be equated with "easy" (there are native French cooks [as Olney was not] who tell us very well how to cook French classics without the preludes that belong to classic cuisine, and have written cookbooks telling us their secrets for easy French food in a fast hour -- or in fifteen or even ten minutes). Rather Olney's adjective refers to food that is what it is. And all excellence turns on achieving just such simplicity. This simplicty is what Nietzsche meant by his (alas! persistently misunderstood) effort at rehabilitating the basic sense of the German "schlecht" -- "schlechthin," "schlicht": as basic or plain in the way that a cru bourgeois is so often the better wine (passed over when the ambitious make a wine purchase to impress friends), and this is the simplicity that the French mean in their utterly non-English way of understatement: qualifying a wine less in confectionist's terms than its basic "drinkability." Olney addresses the mystery of simplicity by analysing the alchemy of the dish as such: what goes into what is made -- the ingredients, including the countryside but also the tradition, the society, the assumptions, and the range of variation with availability and with the season -- and he caps this off with recipes that provide a heuristic precision (and here the conventional intepretation of a book on "simple French food" coincides with the esoteric one) and the beginner or the experienced cook finds himself/herself captivated by a dish that is exactly what it ought to be. This is a book less for those fond (although Olney was fond) of James Beard than for those who admire the elegance of Claiborne; a book for those who appreciate the preludes (above all) and afterthoughts accompanying the recipes in the <Joy of Cooking> (only the original bears any kind of comparison). Olney's book is a musical reverie, that still stands as the best kind of tribute to the perfection of the simple and remains, I say this in hommage to his passing, in the company of all books on gastronomic excellence, the best.
Rating: 
Summary: Actually very complex recipies
Review: The recipes in this book may be for "Simple French Food" but they are not simple recipes. Unless you have a good background in food preparation and know many sauce and preparation techniques, all of which are French words, you'll be lost in this book. If you're looking for some simple recipes to make for dinner, or even for company, this is not it unless you're a trained chef.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Wordy
Review: This is a good book if you are interested in studying foods and ways to cook, not necessarily quick and simple recipes. For the amateur chef, like myself, this book tends to make assumptions that you know many cooking definitions. I found the book too wordy. The recipes I have made are delicious and are truly French.
Rating:
Summary: Too Wordy
Review: This is a good book if you are interested in studying foods and ways to cook, not necessarily quick and simple recipes. For the amateur chef, like myself, this book tends to make assumptions that you know many cooking definitions. I found the book too wordy. The recipes I have made are delicious and are truly French.
Rating:
Summary: A classic.
Review: This is a modern classic, and regularly acknowledged as such. Its charm is in several parts. First, there is Olney's distinctive prose, which is a literary pleasure in itself, then there is the way he avoids as much as possible set recipes (though there are lots of splendid recipes here): his idea being rather to communicate an attitude towards preparing good food, illustrated with possibilities (if you happen to have some of this to hand, do this, if you have that, then do the other, alternatively, try something else entirely). It also says something about his definition of simplicity that while he is, to put it mildly, uncompromising in his attitude to food, it is possible for someone living in a shared student flat to learn a lot from him (as I did). I'm currently on my second copy, the first having deteriorated, in the course of years, into a bundle of loose sheets.
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