Je Sais Cuisiner

I love cookbooks. I realize that they are quickly becoming obslete archaic publications, as we can all be Google chefs who pull recipes from cyberspace with the click of a button. We have no need for glossy pages and indexes because the internet will offer us with a million choices when we want to make chocolate chip cookies. While true, I vastly prefer recipes from cookbooks. Recipes in print bear a certain gravity that those illusively floating on the web do not. Anyone could put a recipe on the internet, and you have no actual way of knowing if it is good. I could make a website and advise all kinds of terrible kitchen techniques and title it “Brownies in 60 seconds” or “Meatless meatloaf” and I am sure that someone would attempt my recipes. But with a cookbook, you know that someone has tested each recipe over and over before allowing it to grace kitchen shelves. Cookbooks mean glossy pages, photos, and turning pages dreaming of dinners. This vastly overshadows the enjoyment of clicking through Google search results. I am somewhat of a cookbook addict, always wanting more and different ones, or ones that specialize in one specific area. I also like cutting out recipes from magazines and newspapers, sometimes getting around to trying them, often not. But the potential is always there. I was the only high schooler I know of who eagerly awaited Family Circle each month.

Living in an apartment of ten square meters, my culinary ambitions have been put to the test. When one’s kitchen consists of two hot plates, a mini-fridge, microwave, and sink, one must dream small. I refuse, however, to let my kitchen dominate my cuisine. I will remain domestically daring despite my diminutive accommodations. I try to experiment with lots of French dishes, as they call for items hard to come by in the States, but easy enough to find in Paris. Knowing this, the family I babysit for gave me a cookbook for Christmas. Not just a cookbook, THE definitive French cookbook (or so they told me). Je Sais Cuisiner (“I know how to cook”) by Ginette Mathiot, is to French cooks what The Joy of Cookinge  is to Americans. It is basic and simple, but covers all the traditional dishes. I love reading my cookbook, looking up lots of words that I don’t know and dreaming of the dishes I will make. Of course, the lack of a stove limits my choices but never the less, je sais cuisiner!

The cookbook is often full of surprises. The other day I was reading through it and stumbled across the section on how to prepare cheval – horse. I gasped at the savagery of these French, but then remembered that these are the people who thought to shove a tube town a duck’s moth, pump it full of grain, then slaughter it and eat the fattened liver, aka foie gras. I quickly turned past those disturbing horse pages and settled on a pasta dish. My pasta niçois (“coming from Nice”) called for a delicious sauce of tomatoes, mushrooms, and fried eggplant along with sautéed garlic gloves. Yum. Furthermore, France is freezing at the moment. Cooking in my Polly-Pocket sized apartment has the added advantage of warming the space otherwise lacking in central heat. My dinner was a success, yet in choosing a recipe I did overlook another element factor pertaining to cooking in small spaces: you better like the smell of what you are making because it will be there for the next week. The pungent garlic gloves that so perfectly seasoned my sauce have continued to be so gracious as to rest with me ever since my dinner 5 days ago. At least my room doesn’t smell like cooked horse.

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