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Let's Cook French: A Family Cookbook

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Let's Cook French: A Family Cookbook
By Claudine Pepin
Illustrated by Jacques Pepin
Wind Blown/Quarry Books, 2016. Cookbook.

French cuisine is equally notorious for being delicious and for being very difficult to prepare. The recipes in this book, though, prove that delicious French food can be fun and easy to make. This book represents everything that is good about children's cookbooks - the pages are beautifully illustrated, the recipes are simple and unpretentious (the tarte recipe explains that it is okay to buy puff pastry rather than make it from scratch), and there is a good amount of teaching in the pages. There are lessons in how to cook, and also lessons in French culture and what makes the French attitude towards food different from our own.

My favorite part of this book, though, is that the entire cookbook is bilingual! On facing pages, recipes are written in English and repeated in French exactly. This is one in a series of books following this model (the others are Italian and Spanish) to teach culture and cuisine to families. Definitely check this book out for your young Francophiles!


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