Reading Food : Cookbook Favorites--The Volumes That Changed Our Lives

In college I lived on hamburgers and tuna casserole like everybody else until I found a tattered Indian cookbook in a new apartment. For three years after that, I sat at the keyboard of a mighty spice Wurlitzer, glibly varying recipes by varying spice mixtures. All flavors were good; all flavor combinations were equal.

Then some old college friends got interested in French cooking, which I had always thought of as a fussy and probably fraudulent business of truffles and cream sauce, and they cooked me some dishes from the English writer Elizabeth David’s first book, “French Country Cooking.” I tried them expecting to mock, but found I couldn’t. To my chagrin, it had just dawned on me that some flavor combinations are actually better than others.

One of the dishes was a variation on the lamb and potato stew known as navarin , made with spring vegetables that give it a light, sweet, spring-like flavor. Unfortunately, delicate baby turnips aren’t available all year and winter carrots tend to be thick and coarse, but at least you can always get frozen petits pois (though the freezer bag may just call them small peas). Properly speaking, then, you should only cook this during spring, but I get a hankering for this dish even during the winter because it recalls those dinners that changed my life.

NAVARIN PRINTANIER (Spring Lamb Stew)

3 tablespoons butter

3 pounds lamb shoulder or breast, cut in squares

3 small onions, sliced

2 tablespoons flour

2 1/4 cups chicken or beef broth

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

2 teaspoons rosemary

1 crushed clove garlic

1 bay leaf

1 pound new potatoes, as small as you can find

1 1/2 cups diced carrots

3/4 cup diced turnip

1 1/2 pounds frozen small peas

Melt butter in stewpot. Brown meat over medium heat, remove and then brown onions. Remove onions, fry flour in butter until light brown, then slowly add broth, stirring until smooth.

Return meat and onions to pot with salt, pepper, rosemary, garlic and bay leaf. Simmer covered until meat is nearly cooked, about 1 hour.

Add potatoes, carrots and turnip and cook slowly for another 35 to 40 minutes. Then add peas and cook until done. Makes 6 servings.

Adapted from “French Country Cooking” by Elizabeth David (Penguin Books: 1966).