OP: Pierre Franey's Low-Calorie Gourmet
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Times Books, New York, 1984. Hardcover. Good. First printing.
“I have changed my mind,” is perhaps the best opening line for a health-focused cookbook that I’ve seen.
French-born Pierre Franey (1921–1996) charmed American home cooks with approachable, 60-minute cuisine on his TV cooking shows and impressed them while helming the best French restaurant in the US, Le Pavillon. But he was not immune to shifting culinary trends.
Four years after co-authoring Craig Claiborne’s diet book, the result of the latter’s own health needs, Franey produced his own Low Calorie Gourmet (1984). Both projects revealed to the chef that it was wholly possible to make good-tasting food without using heavy sauces or heaps of butter as a crutch.
While Claiborne’s book reduces salt and cholesterol based on his particular needs, Franey’s largely eschews cream, flour-based sauces, and excesses of salt and butter for a lower caloric content. And, consistent with his 60-Minute Gourmet brand, the recipes are intended to be simply and swiftly prepared.
Fear not, though, Franey is committed to appealing meals that won’t betray their ascetic nature: “Today, we desire food that punishes the body less,” he says. So dishes like poached shad roe with lemon sauce, chicken breast au vermouth, and veal scaloppine with mustard seed, for example, are “dishes that are as low in fat and thus as low in calories as I could make them without doing violence to my sense of how food ought to taste.”
Our copy is in Good condition only, the jacket dampstained and chipped, and the interior bearing some soiling. First printing.
