Amanda Hesser's The Cook and the Gardener: A Year of Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside describes her year of working as a chef at a chateau in the Burgundy region of France. While at the chateau, Hesser works closely with the gruff and taciturn gardener, Monsieur Milbert. M. Milbert, along with his aging wife Madame Milbert, are of an older generation of French kitchen gardeners whose lives ebb and flow with the movement of the seasons. Hesser comes to the chateau as a young American cook who wants to know everything about where her food is coming from. At the beginning of their relationship, M. Milbert is quite gruff and short with her, but as she eventually wins him over with work in the garden and gifts of homemade bread and jam, he and his wife Madame Milbert tell Hesser more and more about the traditional ways of Burgundy's rural life.

The book is structured to follow the seasons and combines Hesser's observations about food, the garden and life in the French countryside with recipes for French country/bistro food - food that highlights the seasonal produce that is coming from M. Milbert's garden. Hesser is an extremely good writer, and the sections written about the garden and anecdotes about the recipes are quite nice. However, I would say that - in the end - this is more cookbook than anything else, and that is where I'll be shelving here in my house. It is certainly not a gardening book, as Hesser is not a gardener and rarely imparts any of M. Milbert's garden wisdom.

As a cookbook, I do not particularly like the structure the book takes on. I only have one other cookbook structured with the seasons (The Silver Palette Good Times Cookbook), and I find I rarely use it. I would much rather have the traditional cookbook groupings (meat, poultry, vegetables, etc.) in a "working" book - I want to be able to compare various recipes for chicken before choosing one. But, even given that, I found several recipes in The Cook and the Gardener that I hope to try soon: Braised Chicken with Scallion Puree, Grilled Lamb Chops with Warm Tomato-Mint Vinaigrette, Fresh Corn-and-Cilantro Salad, Chicken Roasted with Oranges, Rosemary and Bay Leaves.

One other thing I appreciated in The Cook and the Gardener was the number of recipes for preserves that Hesser included. I love to make preserves, and I find most cookbooks that focus on garden produce forget about the abundance of fruit there is in the summer. And I would love to try Madame Milbert's recipe for Cassis (blackberry liqueur, and the base for Kir and Kir Royale) which is included in the book.

Overall, while it's structure as a cookbook is somewhat lacking, this was a pleasant book to read - especially in the dead of winter. ( )