The Gold Cookbook is my favorite cookbook, it was last published in the 1950’s. It was written by Louis DeGouy in 1947, and is a true Kitchen Bible. Louis was a former chef at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Chef DeGouy’s passion for food and its history stands out in each recipe of this massive volume, a passion which, thanks to him, I have come to share. DeGouy’s recipes are works of art.
The Gold Cookbook, has a very wide range of recipes. It also covers the basic techniques used in cooking. DeGouy provides separate chapters on baking bread, barbecuing, fondues, meats, variety meats, seafood, making sauces, soups, salads and many other topics. Despite being published in 1947 the techniques and recipes provided remain very useful today.
One of my favorite things about the book is the coverage DeGouy provides about making compound butters, sauces and rouxes, he not only devotes and entire chapter to them, but they are covered throughout the rest of the book. For example many of his meat recipes, include a sauce specific to that particular recipe.
The book itself is thick with thousands of gilt-edged pages, uniquely, the recipes are not indexed by page number, rather each recipe has its own number.
It’s also unique in that the ingredients list is worked into the text of the recipe. So you have to read the recipe before you know what the ingredients are. His recipes are more than just recipes each is also a story, often of the history of the recipe, with tips to make the recipe better, recipe variations, and interesting tidbits of information on cooking. The book is a virtual cooking school, and in all the years I have looked and hundreds of cookbooks later I have never found better.
The Gold Cookbook, has no photographs.
There are no recipes using pre-packaged or processed ingredients, no use of canned soups, frozen bread-dough, or ready to bake biscuits in cardboard tubes.