Cooking for Me

Cooking for you by Robert Carrier

Cookbook Type: European, Mediterranean

Favourite Recipe: Turbot en Papillote (pg. 28)

Favourite Page: Cakes, Sweets and Desserts (pgs 104-105)

Favourite Quote: : “It has been claimed that for a food loving Frenchman, a carafe of his favourite vin ordinaire is as important to a meal as a loaf of crisp French bread. We can’t get the crisp French loaf, but for most of us today, a bottle of non-vintage plonk - whether it is Spanish, Yugoslav or French - is no longer beyond our means”. (pg147)

Rating: 4/5 Larousse Gastronomiques (📕📕📕📕)

Review:

Oh you thought Auntie was lying when she said she loved Robert Carrier. You thought it was ‘cute’ when she said you’re going to see lots of him on this website. Well, you were wrong. It’s not cute, it’s obsessive.

Welcome to our next instalment in the Saga of Robert Carrier Cookbooks. This one is a lovely little spring in your step, called “Cooking for you”, and I although I don’t know if Robert meant he’d be cooking for me, or I’d be cooking for myself, or I’m intended to cook for someone else, but again it’s a gorgeous collection of beautiful european-inspired recipes, where lovely colour photos (albeit from the 70s) and good ideas come together to get you off your auntie butts and prepare a little nosh.

This little vintage cookbook gem is a lot more approachable that many of it’s counterparts of its era, although one would argue slightly boujee. The layout of four recipes with top header photos per two page spread is …and i can’t stress this enough … so beautiful. And to make the book even more accessible, each recipe is written out with Imperial and Metric measurements, for the Chef who existed before Siri or Google entered our kitchens.

Instead of aspic and jello, Robert romances us with Devilled Crab and Steak Diane. There’s proof in this book that Gweneth Paltrow did NOT create Green Goddess Dressing - maybe just the vegan one - as this dressing is full of double whipped cream and thick homemade mayo.

Aptly designed with a sun imprinted on the cover, Auntie’s Boyfriend Robert once again shows us how to bring worldly, delicious cooking to our home tables.

Can you see the sun?

There’s a used copy on Amazon that you can try to grab if you’re as serious as I am about this man. Otherwise, just scour your local used bookstores!