Coming August 2011, the latest titles in the ‘Classic Voices in Food’ series

July 19, 2011 - PRLog -- Simple French Cooking for English Homes
Xavier Marcel Boulestin
£12.99, hardback

First published in June 1923, Xavier Marcel Boulestin’s book was an immediate success, which did much to popularise French cuisine in the English-speaking world. In this charming book, Boulestin dispels the myth that French cooking is complicated, rich and full of nondescript dishes with pretentious names by offering up over 200 delicious recipes – including traditional favourites such as Sorrel Soup, Pommes de Terre Boulangère, and Galette au Chocolat – which are simple and easy to make. The book also reveals both that many of the very best French dishes are made up of ‘remnants’ and that there is very little waste in the French kitchen. Written in an engaging style and filled with anecdote and advice, Simple French Cooking is a timeless classic that demands to be included in any keen cook’s collection.

About The Author
French-born British chef, restaurateur, and author, Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878– 1943) has been called ‘the most subtle, imaginative, and liberating food writer of his day’ and was a major influence on the work of Elizabeth David. In 1925, Boulestin opened Boulestin’s Restaurant Française in London. It was called ‘the prettiest restaurant in London’ by Cecil Beaton, and writer Edward Laroque Tinker declared in The New York Times that at Boulestin’s ‘one gets the most perfect and récherché dinner to be found in all London’. Boulestin followed the success of his restaurant with cooking courses and popular books, and wrote many articles about food in Vogue and The Manchester Guardian. Boulestin was also the first television chef, appearing on a BBC programme in television’s earliest experimental days, in 1937.


The Gentle Art of Cookery
Mrs C.F. Leyel and Miss Olga Hartley
£14.99, hardback

Part of a striking upheaval in attitudes to food and cooking between the wars, this book was published to immediate success in 1921, providing a level of detail that was unusual amongst its contemporaries, while inspiring its readers with its daring recipe selection. With chapters entitled ‘Dishes from the Arabian Nights’, ‘The Alchemist’s Cupboard’, and a startlingly original chapter of ‘Flower Recipes’, in which Hilda Leyel and her assistant Olga Hartley revive the medieval use of flowers for food with recipes such as Rose Ice Cream and Nasturtium Salad, this book can’t help but capture the imagination of even the most jaded of recipe readers.
Combined with its intensely modern focus on vegetables – with six chapters devoted to vegetables, pulses, nuts and grains – revival of old tastes and suggestions of new ones, this book points towards the assured and sophisticated work of modern molecular gastronomy and demonstrates how elegant and innovative British food
can be.

About The Authors
Hilda Leyel (1880–1957), who wrote under the name Mrs. C. F. Leyel, was an expert on herbalism and founded the Society of Herbalists (later the Herb Society) in England in 1927, as well as opening the Culpeper Shops chain of herbalist stores.
Author of a book on herbalism, called Elixirs of Life, Leyel was also a fellow of the Royal Institution, and an officer of the Académie Française. Suffragist, journalist and author of the post-war novel Anne, Miss Olga Hartley was Hilda Leyel’s assistant, and helped her with the writing of The Gentle Art of Cooking.

For further information on both titles, to request a review copy (due beginning of August 2011) &/or an author interview, please email food@quadrille.co.uk.

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