COOKBOOK REVIEW : The French Cookbook Paradox

CHEZ NOUS: Home Cooking from the South of France By Lydie Marshall ; (HarperCollins: $25; 303 pp.)

CUISINE A LA VAPEUR: The Art of Cooking with Steam By Jacques Maniere, translated and interpreted by Stephanie Lyness ; (Morrow: $25; 318 pp.) *

The past few years have not been wonderful for primers of French cooking. And no wonder, seeing that some of its greatest glories now touch off reactions suitable to a mooning at a church social.

There is compensation, however, in other kinds of good French cookbooks, especially ones dedicated to provincial byways and lively personal approaches. These will probably continue to be the most interesting among the somewhat reduced ranks of French cookbooks for Americans.

Two recent efforts illustrate how the field branches away from the old mainstream. They have little in common besides being French and being highly idiosyncratic, underscoring how seldom publishers try to sell the classic verities. One is about as simple to use as a cookbook can get. Cooking from the other is a project requiring much forethought and preparation.

Lydie Marshall’s “Chez Nous” is exactly what the title implies: a collection of dishes liked, and considered practical enough to show up regularly, in the Marshall household. “Our Kind of Grub” would translate the title neatly.

Because the author is a cooking teacher with homes in Manhattan and Provence, her notion of meals produced without extraordinary fuss might be expected to be a little grandiose. Not so. The surprise of this book is that most of the recipes involve simple ingredients put together in a way many of us could manage with ease.

As one who did much laborious script-following and running around after esoteric ingredients during former cults of “authentic French cuisine,” I was initially taken aback by Marshall’s approach. She doesn’t seem to give a hoot about choosing the perfect pear or hunting for artisanal cheese, and she often has you unceremoniously chuck the simplest mixtures into a food processor before chucking them into the salad bowl or saucepan.

So just what is supposed to be French here, with so little attention to detail?

Keep looking--more to the point, keep cooking--and the picture will emerge like one of those magic-eye stereograms.

Marshall never pretends to be replicating any specific French tradition or patenting a one-of-a-kind style. But after she has cheerfully put together a few dozen straightforward and full-flavored vegetable dishes or simple salads, you start getting a glimpse of some busy, no-nonsense woman grabbing a fistful of useful fresh ingredients and fashioning them into a good family dinner with a certain reasonable investment of time but without one bit of gourmet affectation.

Call it French, French-American or Marshall-esque, it’s a way of cooking that seems equally appropriate for a hard-pressed farm cook or a suburban homemaker trying to squeeze in real meals between job demands and family flak.

*

Making the most of “Chez Nous” does require spending time to prepare a few important items in advance. Anyone who skips these will lose the strong personal note with which Marshall invests her simple cooking. What she calls a “light broth,” the mother stock that turns up in many dishes, is my idea of a concentrated, carroty, well-salted one. But what a kick it gives to her rich, intense soup of dried porcini and fresh white mushrooms!

The basic bread dough used in all the pissaladieeres and various other recipes is a potato-based formula that, as she readily admits, is “not at all Provencal.” But if the eggplant pissaladieere is any clue, it’s the best imaginable vehicle for the fresh, robust, Provencal flavors that one associates with the dish. (The leftovers of the dough made an excellent small loaf in their own right.)

But although Marshall does assume a commitment to constructing such foundations instead of buying them, what she purveys is still good plain cooking. Most of the time you will look in vain for recherchee seasonings and complex subtleties. The white bean stew is exactly what one expects from beans, olive oil, onions, garlic, tomatoes and a little salt; gardiane de boeuf is what happens when an uncomplicated stew is laced with black olives and fresh thyme; her puree of green peas and garlic is as straightforward and good as it sounds.

As with all cookbooks, the reader must grope past some editorial ambushes. Having a crucial sentence of the bread dough recipe break off in the middle on Page 77 is idiocy above the common measure. Even without such sabotage from the proofreaders, the Marshall approach to recipe writing is not for people who require heavily detailed instructions even on obvious procedures. It’s a good bet that she cooks this kind of food all the time without a recipe; the ideal user would be someone who can pick up on an idea from very simple clues.

“Cuisine a la Vapeur” is about as far as you can get from Marshall’s sturdily practical French-ish riffs on simple boundary-hopping themes. It takes one particular technique hardly known in traditional French cooking and develops it into an extensive new French province.

Be aware that you can’t just walk into this territory. Even veteran cooks would be well advised to use the book like an explorer’s map, figuring out how to outfit themselves for the expedition and knowing that they will not always end up exactly at the stated coordinates.

This version of the late Jacques Maniere’s “Le Grand Livre de la Cuisine a la Vapeur” (published in Paris in 1985) has received a lot of care in the Americanization. The translator, Stephanie Lyness, has not just tested a bunch of formulas in order to run them through the editorial mill with American ingredients and measurements, she has also turned the U.S. adaptation into a running account of the judgment calls she felt bound to make as she worked her way through Maniere’s recipes. She also spends a great deal of time commenting on the pros and cons of different steaming arrangements; in fact, I don’t know of any better overall guide to the practical requirements of the steaming method.

But the book as a whole is not a methodical overall initiation into the possibilities of steam cooking and, to be fair, it doesn’t pretend to be. It is not the fault of “Cuisine a la Vapeur” that we don’t have half a dozen other cookbooks on the subject to choose among. Still, potential buyers should know that they are tangling with a demanding and sometimes eccentric work, the American-adapted record of one particular chef’s determinedly individual cooking style.

As an eager advocate of steam cooking who first learned the general idea from Chinese prototypes, I can say that very little of what is simple and accessible about the method will strike users of this book. The recipes call for hard work in maneuvering a 10-pound goose in and out of a steaming arrangement (to skim off the fat), in weaving strips of fish into a latticed “mosaic,” boning chicken legs and butterflying the breasts to stuff them for Maniere’s escargots de poulet and browning meat under a broiler or in a frying pan after steaming it. Even the simpler recipes lean toward studied effects based on unusual ingredients and glamorous sauces.

The recipes also come smack up against one of the big problems in steaming: giving directions that will work for different setups. It’s something like getting to know individual microwave ovens. The width and depth of inner and outer vessels, or the fit of the lid, can make the difference between a dish that is fantastically a point and one that is simply blah or that causes such a headache that you wish you’d never started.

Since Maniere’s original “Grand Livre” has not been published in this country, I don’t know how he addressed this challenge. Lyness usually recommends several choices of equipment without saying much about the different wrinkles each might present. She also tends to say, “place on the steamer rack,” when I think the arrangement of the food warrants more detail. Consequently, I had better results when I cheated by fooling around a bit with the recipes than when I followed instructions to the letter.

A cabbage dish that Maniere called croquant (crunchy) was pleasant but not particularly crunchy. A salad he dubbed un peu folle (slightly crazy), based on an assortment of vegetables with shrimp and chicken livers, had problems with the timing, and steaming seems to emphasize the disparity of ingredients in this kind of dish.

Tuna steaks with a tomato-green pepper sauce were reasonably nice, not gorgeously succulent; the suggested amount (7 ounces of fish per serving) was twice as much as needed. My best results were with an unctuous curried mussel soup and a whole chicken steamed over a chicken stock that later goes into a creamy egg-enriched sauce. (Buying a really good chicken is well worth it for a subtle dish like this.)

With all the reservations I’ve spelled out, it may sound contradictory to say that I expect to cook often and with pleasure from “Cuisine a la Vapeur.” But in an area generally associated with a pall cast over vegetables, this is cooking of true novelty and originality. It is also the sort of book about which a handful of tested recipes don’t tell you much except that recipes can have their limits.

Some cookbooks have to become constant companions over time before they yield their real value, and this is one. Not only does Lyness’ scrupulous running account of how she gradually learned to love Maniere’s difficult work possess great charm in its own right, but it points to a salient truth: Here are ideas to be mulled over and experimented with.