Roger Verge's Cooking with Fruit

Has more than 130 easy-to-follow recipes that feature all kinds of fresh fruit, offering imaginative choices for every occadion, mood and season.

Roger Verge's Cooking with Fruit is filled with luscious color photos and tempting recipes you can almost eat with your eyes. You can also enjoy sensual, poetic entries describing 33 fruits, from apples and apricots to mulberries and litchis. Certainly, it is easy to imagine a waiter at Roger Verge's world-famous restaurant, Le Moulin de Mougins, respectfully setting one of these colorful, creative desserts in front of you.

While reading this book is entrancing, it clearly is a work written in French and translated into English by someone not quite fluent in the language. This has its charms, but requires extra reading time, and some degree of caution in the kitchen. For example, few American cooks know what it means to mix an egg "with sugar and cream until it binds together." Then there are Corinth grapes--a fruit little known outside of France. Still, many other fruits are more familiar, and cooks can peruse 130 recipes. It's not against the rules to make substitutions to save time, such as using your own favorite tart pastry recipe in place of the one in this book, which is made with a whopping five egg yolks and a cup of butter. Then the joys of Verge's inspired Pear Tart with Cocoa can be yours. And if the Banana-Pineapple Fruit Juice, which calls for the puree of four pineapple slices and a banana, is too thick to sip, you can add a splash of rum or apple juice to thin the consistency. For these, and treats like Fresh Peach Mousse, a little tweaking is well worth the effort. --Dana Jacobi