disservice as both books go well beyond the remit of just providing recipes . The cookery book over the last ten or fifteen years has established itself as a lucrative market in its own right , encompassing both the cult of the celebrity - Delia, Jamie et al - and the instruction manual niche , deconstructing basic techniques in order that now any one can produce a half-decent meal .
Some books . however , transcend the genre ; Elizabeth David's ' French Provincial Cooking ' , threaded with memories of the people and places she loved , introduced a whole generation to France and the joys of french cooking. ' Ripailles ' by Stephane Reynard , is of the same ilk, even if its presentation is totally different. Beautifully designed , based loosely around the tradition of brasserie food and and the culinary centre of Lyon it manages to cover in a most idiosyncratic way - with recipes, pen portraits of farmers, fishermen , cheese makers , and ( most literally pen-portraits ) the entire first fifteen French Rugby team at the time of publication , pages of sketches of details of different types of duck whistles, cigars , the game of boule, the equipment required to catch pigeons , and the entire lyrics to ' Oh Claire de la Lune '..............
.......this is indeed a sketch book of France , a wonderful introduction to its food, its customs, its people, its quirks and its foibles . The food is not fine dining, it is honest brasserie food - the traditional dishes of France , beautifully presented and photographed ; most dishes are pictured at the point of going to the table, nowadays almost an imperative for a good cookery book . We have cooked a few of these recipes and they taste as good as they look . If you want to understand France and the French read this book. 
The second book , similar in many ways to ' Ripailles ' , is ' Movida Rustica ' by Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish , visually delightful and a most interesting introduction to spanish food and spanish food culture - totally different to France. Everything in France stops for lunch , from 12.00 until 2.00 pm.......in Spain they don't even think about lunch until 2.00 pm, and the restaurants in the evening consider 10.00 pm a reasonable starting time....10.00 pm ? The small town that we live in in France, an hour away from Spain at the most , is shut up and dark by then . Given this nocturnal life-style, the early evening is given over to grazing and the tradition of tapas , the centre of Spanish social life , and the book covers this social aspect in detail.
What I find fascinating is that two wildly different cultures have evolved in essentially neighbouring countries ;
two countries, two different food traditions - and two excellent books ; these are both well designed , well presented and serve as wonderful introductions to the delights of the country and the cooking.
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