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The Paris Cafe Cookbook : Rendezvous and Recipes from 50 Best Cafes

List Price: $26.00

Author Daniel Young brings home to American cooks the charm, culture, and food of the fifty best Paris cafe's. Unlike the bistro, the cafe' is a place where you can sit for as long as you like with only a drink -- but the food is so tempting, you'll want to order more than just a cafe' au lait. Here are more than 150 recipes for classics like Coq au Vin and Boeuf Bourguignon, which satisfy cravings for hearty comfort food. Many French favorites such as Pommes Dauphine (Croquettes of Pureed Potatoes) are surprisingly simple and can be prepared in under thirty minutes. Desserts like tarte tatin and chocolate-hazelnut-filled crepes are quintessential French treats and wonderfully easy to make.

Sure to transport even armchair travelers, The Paris Cafe' Cookbook presents stories of rendezvous and routines from the author's travels to cafe's from Ma Bourgogne, situated in the oldest square in Paris, to the Web Bar, a new cyber cafe'. Evocative black-and-white photographs and colorful illustrations accompany the essays and recipes, making this cookbook a delightful gift for food lovers and Francophiles.

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The Paris Café Cookbook brings home a food experience peculiar to a single city and singular kind of establishment. In Paris, the birthplace of the café, these establishments provide a sense of family cooking where little of it exists at home any longer. Daniel Young, restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, has produced a delightful and informative book.

Young begins his book with a long elaboration that defines the Parisian café, setting it apart from brasserie and bistro, though some can be either. Though his book is set up to follow a standard pattern (appetizers, sides, main dishes, and desserts), the divisions are broken up by short essays describing each of the 50 cafés Young has selected. This is as much tour guide as cookbook at this point.

But it also anchors to a specific place and sensibility the food described in the recipes. Sure, Pot-au-Feu recipes are a dime a dozen, but Young gives the reader the Pot-au-Feu to be found at Brasserie Stella--as well as the Brasserie itself. Steamed Chicken with Tarragon Sauce is sure to elicit no big surprises, yet this is the recipe served at Pétrissan's. The Stuffed Artichokes with Ratatouille Niçoise can be found at Les Fontaines or at your very own dinner table. Café food is not elaborate or technique intensive. You can, in fact, do this home cooking at home.

That's what is so delightful about The Paris Café Cookbook: anyone who can't make it to Paris 16 times in three years to work on a book about Paris cafés can simply cook the food at home, establish the right ambience, sit down, dine, and pretend. Let taste be your guide. --Schuyler Ingle Read more...

Adele - Week One

An American in Paris

List Price: $14.95

It's 1925, and Henrietta Adams (christened "Henri" early in the novel, in a conscious evocation of Henry Adams) is a breathless girl in Paris, ostensibly engaged in art journalism for the American magazine that is funding her visit, but in fact seeking sapphic embraces in Natalie Barney's salon of aristocratic inverts and Gertrude Stein's more high-minded gatherings. Acquaintance with Hemingway, Picasso, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and other luminaries helps Henri round out her education. By night, she explores lesbian clubs in masculine attire, searching for an elegant woman to love. Despite some fine writing, especially in the second half of the book, An American in Paris has two serious flaws. Margaret Vandenburg has not picked up on the formal diction or manners of the early 20th century. She depicts Stein, for example, as a sort of slangy softball dyke, yelling across the room, "Hey Alice," and other anachronisms, annoying to anyone familiar with the literature or history of the period. Also, at times, the book can read like a Platonic dialogue, an excuse for discussing ideas rather than a fully fleshed-out work of fiction with complex, faceted characters moving through a carefully observed world. This improves over the course of the novel, however, and readers who press on past halfway will find themselves staying the course and wishing Henri could get a little more illicit knowledge of the Parisian underworld before returning to Puritan America. --Regina Marler Read more...

Foreign Tongue: A Novel of Life and Love in Paris

List Price: $13.99 Price: $5.60 You Save: $8.39 (60%)

Paris, the storybook capital of romance—of strolls down cobblestone streets and kisses by the Seine—may not be the ideal location to mend a wounded heart. But pragmatic professional writer Anna, who has been unlucky in love in L.A., has come here with keys to her aunt's empty apartment. Bilingual and blessed with dual citizenship, she seeks solace in the delectable pastries, in the company of old friends, and in her exciting new job: translating a mysterious, erotic French novel by an anonymous author.

Intrigued by the story, and drawn in by the mystery behind the book, Anna soon finds herself among the city's literati—and in the arms of an alluring Parisian—as she resolves to explore who she is . . . in both cultures.