The Little Paris Kitchen by Rachel Khoo

Written by (Rachel Khoo)

If you’ve been tuning into The Little Paris Kitchen on BBC Two lately, you’ll know what Rachel Khoo is all about. Six years ago, she upped sticks from Croydon and headed to Paris to train at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school. She didn’t speak a word of French, but that didn’t seem to matter as she quickly got the country’s cuisine under her belt. She now runs the smallest restaurant in Paris (two diners at a time is all she has room for in her tiny Parisian flat), and has just released her latest recipes book: The Little Paris Kitchen. With the same title as her debut BBC Two TV show, it features all the recipes you see on screen and a good few more.

Having drooled over her takes on Oeufs en cocotte and Croque Madame Muffins on screen, I’ve rustled them up for breakfast. There’s nothing like starting the day with a breakfast that’s been injected with some French savoire faire, and Khoo’s own personal style is stamped firmly on each recipes. She takes French classics and plays around with them, conjuring up lighter versions, deconstructed versions and Anglicised versions. If you can tear yourself away from her TV show long enough to open a page in her recipes book, your stomach will love you all the more.

What really comes through with Khoo’s book and TV series is her love of feeding a crowd. It might be a small crowd in that Parisian flat of hers, but her passion for edible creations is suitably infectious. An infectious tone is just what you want when you open a recipes book, and The Little Paris Kitchen has that in ladlefuls.

Published by: Penguin/Michael Joseph

Reviewed by: Helenka Bednar