Bruno's Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from a French Country Kitchen

As I have shared in more than one post, I am a big fan of Martin Walker's crime series featuring Bruno Courrèges, policeman of fictional St. Denis, a small village in the Dordorgne in France. More than a policeman, Bruno is completely comfortable in the kitchen, and every book features several occasions in which Bruno prepares wonderful meals for his friends and colleagues. The mysteries themselves are usually pretty interesting, but honestly, it's the food and the cooking, gardening, harvesting, canning, and foraging that are the real reasons I love these books.

For Xmas, my husband gave me a copy of Bruno's Cookbook: Recipes and Traditions from a French Country Kitchen, written by Martin Walker and Julia Watson. I am slowly reading the cookbook, not only for the recipes but for the anecdotes, excerpts from the books, and insights into life in the French countryside.

The book is organized differently from most cookbooks--each section focuses on the source of the type of food featured, so the first section is on the vegetable plot and market, so there are recipes for haricots verts (green beans), Sarlat-style fried potatoes, leek/potato/sorrel soup, and a red onion tarte tatin, which I am dying to make, among lots of other tasty veggie dishes. 

There are also sections for the fisherman (Walker and his fictional Bruno live along a river and just a couple of hours from the Atlantic), the hunter (featuring duck, goose, pigeon, boar, etc.), the butcher, the cheesemaker and dairy man, the baker, the forager (truffles, anyone?), and the all-important winemaker, which has wines, liqueurs, as well as entrees and desserts cooked in wine.

It's a very snowy day in Colorado today, and I am thinking that I need to jump ahead and read about Pot Roast Chicken Henri IV-Style. That just might be what's for dinner tonight.

Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of France

Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of  the French Countryside by Martin Walker is the last of my R.I.P. mysteries, bringing my total for the month to 5!

As expected, I really enjoyed this mystery and will be a devotee of Bruno from henceforth. Thank goodness there are a number of books in the series already, so I can read the next one whenever the mood strikes.

In a nutshell, Bruno is sweet single policeman taking care of a little rural town, St Denis, in the picturesque Dodorgne valley in southwest France. We are tentatively planning a trip to Paris next summer, and now I am finagling how to spend an extra week exploring this region, which btw is where the famous paleolithic cave paintings were discovered.

Bruno not only is the sole policeman for the town, but he also plays tennis and teaches kids at the tennis club, makes his own vin de noix (a walnut liqueur), cooks heavenly meals, and has a sad romantic backstory.

The story itself was well-crafted and interesting--involving racial tension, neo-Nazis, remnants of WWII and French colonialism, as well as hedonistic teens and indulgent parents.

But, you don't read Bruno for the mystery, you read these stories for the atmosphere, the ambiance, the recipes, French rural life and landscapes.

If this at appeals to you, you might want to check out Martin Walker's website on his beloved Bruno. Here's how Walker describes Bruno:

Who is Bruno Courreges?

Bruno cooks, he hunts, he builds his own house and grows his own food. He organizes the parades and festivities and fireworks displays and keeps order in his fictional home town of St Denis. A pillar of the local tennis and rugby clubs, he teaches sports to the local schoolchildren.

Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off Brussels. The country folk of the Perigord have been making their foie gras and their cheeses and sausages for centuries before the EU was ever heard of, and see no reason to bow to its rules and regulations now.

Bruno also catches criminals.

But Bruno applies his own sense of justice in doing so, which sometimes put him at odds with the local Gendarmes, with the professional detectives of the Police Nationale, and with the politicians in distant Paris.