My mother spotted and purchased for me copy of the 1961 edition of Larousse Gastronomique. This book is not something else, it is THE real thing. There’s over a million words, arranged into alphabetized recipes; encyclopedia-style. It appears in the ‘further reading’ section of Les Halles Cookbook as the go-to book to settle disputes:

If you ever find yourself in a drunken brawl with a bunch of chefs or food nerds over questions of historical culinary minutiae, or “correct” ingredients, [I’m going to call you later on this Tony] this mammoth, irreplaceable work should settle the matter

The butter section spans a good 5 pages, whereas the eggs section spans 25. There are dozens of recipes for aubergine, a couple for turtle.. you get the picture. It has it all, and I will be referring to it constantly from here on in.

Im going to take the time to link to some guys blog, who tried to pull a Tom&Tony a.k.a a Julie&Julia on Larousse Gastronomique, and pulled out after 100 or so recipes. A mere fraction of the gazillion or so recipes, but still a commendable effort.

Later in the week I took off down to Mt Ruapehu for a spot of snowboarding with the lads. On the way back we stopped at a wild game shop, but thats a different story..
One evening I whipped up a Poulet Basquaise with couscous for the team before we sat down to a settle things once and for all over a game of Settlers of Catan. This ties in nicely with a link to letterstobourdain.com, where Davy is trying to figure out if Tony is as good a chef as he is a writer, by cooking his way through Les Halles Cookbook. He’s over half way now and his writing is worth a good read. I suggest you – my sophisticated reader – check it out, especially his recent post on cooking Chacroute Garnie at a LARP. Man, thats like 42 trillion nerd-points right there. Legend.