30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASE
Ginette Mathiot was a teacher, not a pastry chef. She published Je sais cuisiner in 1932, at the age of 25, and it has been a fixture in French homes for almost a century. This book is her baking book from 1938.
The comparison with Julia Child is an obvious one, but it works in the opposite direction. Child taught Americans to cook French food. Mathiot taught the French to cook their own, and hers are the recipes that generations of French households actually baked from.
More than 350 recipes. Éclairs, madeleines and tarte Tatin sit alongside jams, marmalades, compotes and preserves, which looks haphazard until you understand that this was never a pastry chef's book but a household manual. The recipes are short and matter-of-fact for the same reason.
That is also its strength. No displays of technical virtuosity, just the French classics in their simplest and oldest form.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 336
Language: English
First published: 1938 in French, this English edition 2025
