Légumes

Vegetables are perhaps the most abused of all the foods we cook. Too often they are served as a sodden mass of disorganized fibers with both color and flavor destroyed in the cooking process. But, when properly treated, their jewellike characteristics improve with cooking.

The French method of preparing vegetables differs sharply from ours. But if you have eaten vegetables in France, you will gladly switch to the French method of cooking nature’s most colorful foods.

All vegetables with chlorophyll fall into six main groups, each of which can be compared to the parts of a plant; that is, root, stem, leaf, flower, fruit, and seed. Categorizing vegetables in this way will help you in their proper preparation because each category should be cooked according to its own particular characteristics. Some vegetables fall into more than one category, but I list them in only one.