Eighty-four recipes, and every one of them starts with an egg. Rose Carrarini, who founded the Rose Bakery cafés in Paris, has the kind of authority that comes from having done one thing superbly well for a very long time and seeing no reason to complicate it.
This reissued edition — with new paintings by botanical artist Fiona Strickland — is a cookbook in the old sense: a book about cooking, not about the person who cooks. Welsh tea cakes, walnut cake, orange crème caramel, quiches and tarts and French toast that belongs to a weekend when nothing else is required of you.
Carrarini sits on the shelf near Elizabeth David — not in ambition or scope, but in the quiet conviction that good ingredients handled with respect will do most of the work, and that the cook’s job is to get out of the way.
Keep it near the stove. Reach for it on a Saturday morning when the light is good and the eggs are fresh and the only plan is breakfast.
