The French Kitchen: A Comprehensive Guide to Cooking
Food & Drink French Cuisine Cookbook Culinary Techniques Gourmet Cooking Leisure & Lifestyle Collectible Cookbooks Classic Recipes
First-edition hardcover copies of Diane Holuigue’s “The French Kitchen: A Comprehensive Guide to Cooking” rarely surface in collectible condition, and this 1983 Australian imprint is the one serious cooks hunt for. Printed on the heavier, matte-finished stock that later reprints abandoned, the book’s 480+ pages deliver the full syllabus Holuigue developed while running her Melbourne Cordon Bleu school: every mother sauce, pâte feuilletée turn, and Provençal braise is photographed in step-by-step colour spreads that still look vibrant four decades on. Because the title was never mass-distributed outside Australia, most copies stayed “down under,” making a clean first printing with its original dust jacket a genuine scarcity on the secondary market.
Buyers prize this volume for its master-class structure. Instead of the usual menu-driven chapters, Holuigue arranges techniques in ascending complexity—stock, roux, soufflé, pastry, charcuterie—so each recipe reinforces the last. The result is a self-taught curriculum that takes a home baker from a simple gougère to a perfect croquembouche without ever feeling textbook-dry. Margins are spacious enough for notes (previous owner added a few pencilled timings, easily erased), and the sewn binding lies flat at the critical stage when you need both hands free for folding brioche or pinning a duck confit.
Beyond technique, the book is a time-capsule of 1980s French-Australian food culture: kangaroo fillet with green-peppercorn sauce sits beside a classic cassoulet, while the wine notes reference Victorian vineyards that were then up-and-coming. For collectors, the intact dust jacket—showing Holuigue’s own Provençal kitchen sketched in ochre and teal—is the key value driver; torn or sun-faded jackets are common, but this example retains its gloss and unfaded spine lettering. A discreet gift inscription on the flyleaf only confirms the copy’s single-owner provenance and does not affect readability or display appeal.
If you want the definitive English-language manual that professional chefs themselves admit they “borrowed” from mum’s shelf, this is it. Unlike later omnibus French cookbooks, “The French Kitchen” fits in one sturdy volume, slides neatly between other gourmet references, and appreciates in value as fast as it improves your boeuf bourguignon.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
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