Michel Biehn's Healthy Recipes: International Cuisine from a Provencal Table

Rating:
Summary: Enjoy the Experience of Reading a Really Bad Book
Review: Reading this glossy volume from a culinary series by the French publisher Flammarion, translated into English by an Englishman is similar to watching a howlingly bad movie where the main interest is in locating all the mistakes in continuity, editing, and dialogue, in French, with English subtitles.

The odd thing is that this series includes an excellent, albeit glossy, survey of French cooking by the great Paul Bocuse, which I found to be a worthy addition to anyone's collection of French cookbooks.

The gaffs in the book range from minor to astronomical.

The important thing to remember is that this is a book on healthy eating. When Americans read a book on this subject, they expect at least some semblance of basis in accepted scientific findings of the day, even if the usual encumbrance of footnotes and other scholarly reference devices are absent. A quick look at such popular titles as 'Nourishing Traditions' by Sally Fallon demonstrates my case. This excellent and popular book is simply dripping with scholarly references. The book being examined in this review has no references to scientific findings whatsoever. Even worse, the primary nutritional foundation of the author's culinary arguments is based on the conjecture that one should not eat animal protein and carbohydrates at the same meal. The author says he cannot remember from whom he heard this bit of wisdom, but that he thinks it was someone from California. I'm not kidding. This book really says that. The book follows this undocumented principle throughout, even to the extent of revising recipes for Salade Nicoise to create two, one with the potatoes and one with the tuna.

The very first thing that gave me a clue that we are not dealing with a serious cookbook here was the layout of the 'recipes'. Almost every cookbook with recipes published for serious cooking (Including the contribution of Paul Bocuse to this series) are written with separate lists of ingredients and their amounts followed by a procedure. Good books further separate headnotes on background and sidebars on technique from the main procedure. This book does none of that. The entire description is in plain text, as if it were lifted from a novel, except that I think that if Tony Bourdain put a recipe in one of his novels, he would write it as if it were in a proper cookbook.

Another major gaff is in the author's statement that breakfast should be one of the largest of the day, with time spent to eat it sitting down, with some deliberation, with more food than you eat at dinner. This is followed with references to 'an adequate breakfast' that is composed of nothing more than toast with peanut butter and honey, fruit juice, and tea. This fits our picture of a classic 'Continental Breakfast' rather than a large meal.

Practically every other page seems to contain a little howler in either the text or the pictures. I suspect some may be lapses in translation. Others almost seem like they are due to the pictures and captions being done by someone who had not read the book, let alone wrote the book. One picture shows a glass of milk, apple, and cheese with blueberries with a caption citing a glass of orange juice and a bowl of muesli. Incredible.

It is not hard to form the opinion that the real rationale of this book is as a vehicle to display photographs of a very elegant, very Provencal chateau that it would seem the author had some role in renovating. It may almost seem that interior decoration is the author's true vocation. He just happens to write fluffy books on culinary subjects as a sidelight. The only thing which puts a lie to this picture is that the author's story of how he came to the decision to lose weight and his general techniques for accomplishing this have a ring of authenticity about them. Aside from the pretty pictures, one could get a fair amount of inspiration and hints about good eating from this book.

I suspect this book may have been done to fulfill some contractual agreements for a certain number of works between the publisher and the author. I give it two stars rather than one because of the entertainment value similar to the experience of watching a truly bad Ed Wood sci fi movie. Buy it if you like pictures of French chateau and can find it on the bargain pile for less than $10. The $35 list price is a joke.