“J’aime la pomme de terre. La frite croustillante a l’exterieur, fondante a l’interieur, juste salee. Les pommes rissolees, avec leur parfum de beurre.”

This is still in French but mostly it is recipes which are easy enough to follow with half a GCSE. And stunning photographs of what you could be aiming at.

It is a wonderful coming together of different skills. Frederic Anton is a Meilleur Ouvrier de France and head chef at Paris’s three star Michelin Le Pre Catelan. The instructions are concise and to the point. The photographs are by Richard Haughton who lists among his other clients David Bowie, Robert Plant and Cadbury’s etc. The production is from La Chene, a beautiful silver edged tome on thick, shiny paper printed by Toppan Leefung in China. Hats off to everyone.

If you wanted to know what a recipe book could be apart from a rambling ego trip this is a good first stop.

The theme is universal, the potato. So we have the potato as high art baked in salt, mashed with seaweed and as you might expect as frites, boulangeres, as gnocchi, as tortilla each one a supreme gastronomic creation in the hands of the master and his kitchen.

The soups like this Potage Sante are stunning:

Someone may write a potato novel in the future that tops this work for literature but for the moment we have a marvellous, practical homage that is the slide rule.

One word of caution. You may need to order up a cart-load of extra butter to cook most of these recipes, it might better have been called Butter With…the ratio is often 10 to one….