Cooking with the 60-Minute Gourmet: 300 Rediscovered Recipes from Pierre Franey's Classic New York Times Column

Three hundred newly discovered recipes drawn from Pierre Franey's famed "60-Minute Gourmet" columns in The New York Times

The master chef's legions of fans will be delighted to learn of such surprising culinary good fortune. Prepared with Pierre Franey's characteristic flair and ebullience, this new collection offers three hundred recipes that appeared in The New York Times but were never before published in a cookbook. These recipes are as delicious as those in his two earlier 60-Minute Gourmet collections and combine everything that was great about Pierre Franey's cooking: fresh, flavorful, low-fat ingredients, ease of preparation, and the commandment "Don't spend all evening in the kitchen!"

Following a successful career as a restaurant chef, Pierre Franey became a food writer for The New York Times in 1975, when he accepted the challenge to write a regular column featuring recipes that would take less than one hour to prepare. Though he was initially concerned that the time limit might detract from the quality of the dishes, he quickly recalled the delicious foods prepared in his childhood home in France, which often took very little time to cook. Over the two decades that his column appeared, he developed thousands of dishes that can--indeed, must--be made in only minutes to bring them to a state of absolute perfection.??????????

Cooking with the 60-Minute Gourmet is a dazzling collection of great recipes. The book opens with appetizers, salads, and soups, then moves into meats, poultry, seafood, pasta, and, finally, desserts. Among the many delectable recipes are Green Bean and Red Pepper Salad, Lobster and Wild Rice Salad, Double Veal Chops with Braised Spring Vegetables, Sirloin Steak with Crushed Peppercorns, Roasted Baby Chickens with Spicy Mango Barbecue Sauce, Shrimp with Snow Peas and Tomatoes, Fettuccine with Goat Cheese and Asparagus, Broiled Fennel and Zucchini with Parmesan Cheese, Summer Fruit Salad, and Poached Pears in Red Wine and Cassis.

A special tribute to Pierre Franey is offered in a fond Foreword by his lifelong friend the master chef Jacques Pépin. The recipes have been collected and updated by Bryan Miller, a longtime collaborator of Franey's, with help from Claudia Franey Jensen, one of père Franey's daughters, who has also contributed an Introduction. As a step-by-step guide and an inspiration for better eating, this great cookbook will soon be considered a must in every home cook's library.

Julia Child may have been responsible for helping American cooks ease into French cooking techniques, but it was Pierre Franey who brought it all home with his New York Times recipe column, "The 60-Minute Gourmet." Franey took the fear and drudgery out of stylish, flavorful cooking and injected healthy doses of fun. Many were his fans, and many a weekly dinner menu was planned with a hole in the middle to allow for Franey's latest culinary exploration. The best part was the timing. With the basic ingredients on hand and with a little skill under the belt, any home cook could, in fact, get out of the kitchen in 60 minutes and put on the table what many would consider a gourmet dish.

Thanks be to Bryan Miller and to Pierre Franey's family for gathering up 300 of the great teacher's recipes from his column and assembling them for Cooking with the 60-Minute Gourmet. So true to context are these recipes that you can hear Franey tell you what the ingredients are as you read the list, and hear him explain how a dish goes together as you read through the directions--which is to say, there's magic in these pages.

In chapters that include appetizers, salads, soups, poultry, beef, pork, veal, lamb, seafood, pasta, vegetables, and desserts, you will find the likes of Garlic Potatoes, Ziti with Mussels and Broccoli, Salmon with Sorrel Sauce, Broiled Skirt Steak Cajun Style, Indonesian-Style Chicken Breasts, Pumpkin Sage Soup, Tomato and Lentil Salad, and a Cold Lobster Appetizer with Spicy Mustard Sauce. Check out Franey's spicy mango barbecue sauce (he serves it with roasted baby chickens). There are celebrity chefs today who call such a sauce new and bold, which only shows how far out ahead Pierre Franey always was. --Schuyler Ingle