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Daniel: My French Cuisine is Daniel Boulud’s most personal book and the most comprehensive documentation of his work at restaurant DANIEL in New York.
Boulud grew up on a farm outside Lyon and began his apprenticeship at the age of fourteen. He worked his way through the kitchens of Roger Vergé, Georges Blanc and Michel Guérard before arriving in New York, taking over Le Cirque and, in 1993, opening his own restaurant on the Upper East Side. Since then, DANIEL has remained one of the few places in the United States where classical French cuisine is practised at the highest level without being turned into something else, and Boulud is one of the most decorated French chefs outside France.
The book is divided into three parts. The first brings together more than 75 of the restaurant’s signature dishes, presented as they are actually prepared in the kitchen and with the precision they demand. The second shows how Boulud cooks at home for friends, with twelve considerably simpler menus where the ambition lies in the ingredients rather than the technique. The third section deals with the French classics that few chefs still make, dishes that require days of preparation and which, above all, represent a culinary heritage to be preserved.
This section is written by Bill Buford, author of Heat and Dirt, who followed Boulud in the kitchen and writes about the dishes with the same curiosity and self deprecation that characterise his own books. It is unusual for a cookbook of this kind to have a proper author attached to it, and it shows.
The photographs are by Thomas Schauer.
This is a book for anyone who wants to understand what French haute cuisine looks like when practised today, rather than how it was described a hundred years ago. It is demanding to cook from and equally rewarding simply to read.
Number of pages: 416
Number of recipes: 75 restaurant dishes plus twelve menus for the home
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 9781455513925
Language: English
First published: October 2013
