The French Kitchen: A Comprehensive Guide to Cooking
French Cuisine Cookbook Culinary Techniques Gourmet Cooking Food Reference Vintage Cookbook Provençal Cooking Cordon Bleu Training
First-edition hardcover copies of Diane Holuigue’s 1983 classic, The French Kitchen: A Comprehensive Guide to Cooking, are scarce—especially in Australia where this copy was sourced. Wrapped in its original dust-jacket, this vintage volume distills the rigor of French Cordon Bleu training into 400+ pages of step-by-step techniques, classic sauces, pastry fundamentals and regional Provençal dishes that rarely appear in modern cookbooks. Buyers who want the authentic foundations—velouté, bouillabaisse, coq au vin, croissants, pâte à choux—get them here in one authoritative reference rather than scattered across dozens of newer titles.
What makes this particular copy collectible is the combination of first-edition status and the charming personal inscription on the fly-leaf (a handwritten note, not by the author) that dates the book to the year of publication—perfect for gift-giving or display. Despite light pencil annotations on a single page and two page-edge marks, the book remains tight, un-torn and free of dog-ears, making it clean enough for kitchen use yet pristine enough for a culinary library shelf. The dust-jacket is fully intact, preserving the elegant French country artwork that has become iconic among vintage cookbook enthusiasts.
Home cooks, culinary students and collectors all prize The French Kitchen because Holuigue organizes lessons by technique rather than recipe count: you master sautéing, braising, stock-making and soufflé timing first, then apply those skills across hundreds of variations. The result is true kitchen confidence—exactly the reason first editions now trade hands at collector prices. Owning this 1983 Australian printing delivers both nostalgic charm and the original imperial/metric measurements that later reprints quietly dropped, ensuring every dish turns out as the author intended.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
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