The step by step photos make it extremely easy to create dishes without the stress of fearing to miss an important step.

I forgot to say that I have been raised on French Food, and the book offers both variety and an excellent selection of dishes.

1 of 1 found the following review helpful:

Excellent!  Feb 22, 2004
By Theresa McCAnn
wonderful, the best cook book I own and that is saying a lot! simple, easy to follow recipes, some photos for ease of reference. I've had the book for 10 years and continue to use it as my main book, especially for guests, parties, etc. Everything tastes superb!

3 of 4 found the following review helpful:

A real disappointment  Dec 07, 2000

The book contains a variety of recipes that call for ingredients such as snails, mussels, shrimp, kidneys, beef, chicken and veal, but the step-by-step photographs were disappointing. They didn't show techniques or processes of cooking, just, on average, three snapshots of adding chopped ingredients to the pot or arranging ingredients for a salad. This book, along with the Essential Italian cookery book, didn't walk you through the recipes step-by-step, and the selection of recipes were disappointing to me, since I was looking for lighter and modern French fare. The recipes in general contained fairly simple instructions, but they were mostly for heavy dishes and ingredients.