The foundation of French cooking is the classically simple cookery of the provinces those carefully considered, well balanced, everyday dishes executed with the traditional French regard for ingredients of the highest quality, harmoniously blended. This book contains a rich and remarkably varied collection of savory recipes from such provinces as Normandy, Burgundy, Anjou and the Loire Valley, Alsace and Lorraine, Provence, the Languedoc and the Bearnais. It includes a number of celebrated regional specialties, some of which owe their distinctive regional flavor to some local preference in the seasoning or to a method of cookery traditional to one particular district, but most of the recipes flow directly from the mainstream of French cookery.
This book includes information about the fundamental principles of French cookery: on the cooking pots to be used, on the herbs, aromatic flavorings and seasonings typical of each part of the country, and on the terms employed by French or French trained cooks all over the world.
Mrs. David opens the book with a leisurely and pleasurable tour of the French provinces, describing the individual flavor and character of the cooking of each. Woven through the rest of the book are fragments of anecdote and personal recollection, gleanings from old French cook books, excerpts from the writings of Escoffier, Brillat-Savarin, Curnonsky and Diat, among others, and the fruits of Mrs. David's own observations and experiences during her many trips around and across France.
Users of the book will find Mrs. David's detailed instructions invaluable not only in the actual preparation of the dishes but also for gaining an insight into the philosophy of French cooking. Apart from chapters on soups, sauces, hors d'oeuvres, eggs, fish, meat, poultry, game and sweet dishes, there are recipes for pates and terrines, ham and sausage dishes, for hot hors-d'oeuvre and cheese dishes and for vegetables to be served as a course on their own.
Contains a bibliography of French regional cookery books, extensive indexes and accurately detailed drawings showing the French cooking utensils and ingredients to which Mrs. David refers in the text.
"With la haute cuisine I am not here concerned," Mrs. David states in her introduction. "Although at its best it is professional cooking by chefs of the very highest achievement, many sins have been committed in its name; and . . . it is becoming rare, even in France. The feeling of our time is for simpler food, simply presented; not that this is necessarily easier to achieve than haute cuisine; it demands less time and expense, but if anything a more genuine feeling for cookery and a truer taste."

JULIA CHILD says: In 1960, after immense research, historical documentation, and on-the-spot verification, the large and authoritative book French Provincial Cooking appeared. It was considered a classic then, and so it still remains.

ANNE WILLAN says: Elizabeth opens such vistas of untried delights- think of flavouring mushrooms with mint, or of pickling plums.... Her ratatouille has been my standby ever since I tried it when French Provincial Cooking was first published in 1960. In those far-off, spiceless days the flavouring of coriander seed was a revelation.

Elizabeth David explains about the study of Cookery Books (p. 460):

There are people who hold that cookery books are uncessary. These people are usually those who innocently believe cookery to be a matter of a little imagination, common sense, and taste for food, qualities which are, of course, of enormous importance to a cook; but, as Maurice des Ombiaux says, "Let us not make any mistake, the taste which one has for good living, however lively it may be, cannot take the place of the technical knowledge, the long habit, the constant practice of the difficult and complicated profession of cookery.
One certainly cannot learn the technical details of cookery entirely from books; but if the cooks, celebrated and obscure, of the past had believed that written recipes were unnessary, we should how be in a sad plight indeed. The culinary wisdom and skill of several centuries of practitioners, both professional and amateur, are distilled into the cookery books we now inherit...