I was inspired by books from people like Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher to take up a career in cooking, but there were few practical recipes to pinch from these books. They were useful more for the feel for good food and cooking. Actually, in the late 1960s and 1970s there were very few recipe books of the slightest use to the small-scale restaurant cook.
There were grand tomes on Buffet work (with a capital B) and the splendours of Edwardian "French" cooking; and there was the dreaded Repertoire de la Cuisine by Saulnier with its never-ending lists of garnishes but little else.
So, when I first came upon Secrets of the Great French Restaurants by Louisette Bertholle (first published in English in 1974) I thought it was going to be a load of garbage. It was lent to me by another chef, and I soon found out that, far from being irrelevant, for me it provided an insight into a fascinating period of French restaurant cookery when the classical canon of dishes was being challenged by a heartier and more rustic outlook on grub.
The dishes were from all sorts of restaurants, and the recipes more or less worked. I recall a recipe from La Reserve at Beaulieu - its trademark "loup de mer de la Reserve". The bass fillets were coated with a persillade-like stuffing and braised with Proven‡al herbs, then finally the cooking liquor was transformed into a beurre blanc. The contributing chef drily observed that he had no hesitation in sharing the recipe as he knew most cooks would be too lazy to make it properly.
Another recipe idea that I appropriated and altered to suit myself was a bourride of chicken. Bourride is a fish soup flavoured with orange peel and saffron then thickened with garlic mayonnaise. It worked a treat with chicken and was a mainstay of my menu for years.
There was more. Red wine eel matelotes and fish stews, for instance. Too much to mention, really. The book is long out of print now, and I lost my tattered copy in the move from Gidleigh Park to Ludlow. But I remember the storehouse of good ideas still - and I know that I wasn't the only person who pinched recipes from it (but that would be telling).
Shaun Hill, chef-proprietor, The Merchant House, Ludlow.
Please note that this book is out of print but can be bought second-hand. It has been catalogued under more than one ISBN number and publisher. You may also find it available under Pan Macmillan (ISBN 0-333-33459-0) or Random House Value Publishing (ISBN 0-517-64268-9). If you want it in French, it was published as Les Recettes Secrètes des Meilleurs Restaurants de France by Albin Michel (ISBN 2-226-03495-1).
Secrets of the Great French Restaurants
Louisette Bertholle
Macmillan
ISBN 0-025-10450-0