Larry left these books for me when he was in NZ last year, and I've just finished the second one today. The author wasn't someone I was familiar with, but apparently he was wellknown in the States as a novelist.

Before he decided to be a writer he trained as a chef, and worked at some of the great hotels in Europe in the 40s and 50s, back at a time when those huge hotels, relics of the belle epoque era were falling out of fashion, and gradually disappearing.

These were hotels where ' the staff quarters were seven stories up under the slates of the roof, with two hundred staff in each wing, ( men east, women west) and room above the central block for two hundred more - the maids, the valets, and chauffeurs brought by the guests.'

A world that disappeared with the devastation wrought by the second world war.

His description of being trained in those kitchens - where there was a rigorous separation into different specialities, and a ghastly adherance to rules and regulations handed down from the time of Escoffier, paint a world that has long gone now.

But it makes for intriguing reading nonetheless.

And then in the "Cookbook", he describes in his leisurely prose how to cook a few dishes in a style more reminiscent of a novel than a cookbook. And that is deliberate becos he argues that most cookbooks don't teach people how to cook, they are more just a list of instructions that don't provide the right kind of information.
By contrast he doesn't even list ingredients, but instead explains to the reader the process of oldfashioned country cooking, that, had we all grown up in an idyllic country setting, we would have learnt from the knee of our grandmother. Regretfully most of us didn't get that  sort of start to our cooking career, but reading Mr Freeling is to absorb some of the instruction.

He is however, a somewhat cynical human being, and some of his asides about humans and life in general are barbed in the extreme.

    'The human being is such a creature of habit that he falls easily into laziness and monotony. He dislikes both the effort of altering his basic conceptions and the need for concentration in carrying out new or at least unaccustomed movements, and this applies to cooking and cooks as much as to musicians, politicians or physicians. The cooks falls easily into narrow and hidebound ways, and while the strength of regional cooking lies in doing the same thing over and over again until it is perfect, the weakness is that standards are blunted by repetition and rigidity. A country restaurant loses its reputation, often very quickly, when work on the three or four dishes in which it specializes becomes listless and mechanical.
Exactly the converse process takes over in 'international' restaurants, where the menu is far too big and varied, where there is a high turnover of staff, and where there is great pressure to allow vulgar, luxurious and ghastly presentation to compensate for lacklustre food cooked in a skipshod way."

Ouch!