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La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange by Evelyn Sainte-Ange
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Cookbook
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Reviewed By
Sue Dyson and Roger McShane
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Madame E. Saint-Ange is an enigma. Little has been written about her in the English language and we can find very few accounts of her life in the French language either.La bonne cuisine de Madame E. Saint-Ange is a beloved classic of the French cooking literature. We are lucky that Chez Panisse co-founder and lover of all things French, Paul Aratow, decided to take on the mammoth and exacting task of translating her extraordinary work into English.Madame Sainte-Ange published her book in 1927 and it quickly became an institution throughout France much like Pellegrino Artusi's Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking or Stephanie Alexander's The Cooks Companion.One of our complaints about translations and adaptations of cookbooks is that they often 'dumb down' the author's intentions. Or, worse still, they ravage the recipes seeking to provide modern home cooks with the so-called nirvana of 'three ingredients and three minutes of preparation". This inevitably turns the book into irrelevant pap. Paul Aratow has avoided this and has fairly faithfully transmitted the tone and intention of the author across the language barrier. He has bravely and correctly resisted the pressure to transform the book into a set of sterile recipes for the modern microwave.So, enjoy the imperious Madame Saint-Ange and adapt her recipes with care and cleverness and you will have a much, much more satisfying experience than you will from one of those instant recipe books that are so popular now.
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