Emily Roux - New French Table

To Raymonde, grandmother and mother...

This is the story of a mother and daughters culinary lives and it reflects how their food has evolved over the years.

The journey starts with soups and salads. Emily was brought up on the colourful and wholesome soups that her mother would prepare all year round. The same ethos applies to Giselles salads never boring, always delicious. One of their favourite recipes is the tantalizing , which showcases the bold colours and flavours that they enjoy using and eating.

Next, we explore the southern French food that Giselle ate as a child and later cooked for her family and friends, then moving on to the imaginative, modern dishes that Emily now makes. Emily has introduced her mother to new dishes and techniques gleaned from her travels and her experiences in restaurant kitchens worldwide, but which all stem from her familys love of cooking and sharing food.

The all-important chapter on bread-making reflects their family traditions, with recipes that Giselle learned from her own mother, using her special is a staple for Giselle, who makes it to eat at breakfast or to serve with cheese.

The book ends like every good meal with dessert. When it comes to the sweet course, mother and daughter agree that classic dishes are best, so this chapter includes many dishes that Giselle ate as a child and that the whole family still enjoy.

This is a unique record of a family kitchen and of cooking skills passed from generation to generation. And, now, with Emily passing on her professional knowledge to her mother, the story has come full circle.

We are a foodie family we love to cook and we love to eat. I grew up in a typical French household where we ate good, traditional, southern French food. I then married into the Roux family and became part of a cooking dynasty.

Food has always been, and still is, a big part of my life, but I had never thought of writing a book about it. One day when I was grumbling to my husband Michel that he had stolen yet another of my recipes for his book, his reply was: Well, write your own then! I didnt take him seriously at first I am a home cook, not a professional, so a cookbook seemed out of the question.

When our daughter Emily came back to live in London after attending catering college in Lyon and working in various prestigious restaurants we came up with a brilliant idea a mother and daughter cookbook. We decided to combine my background of French home cooking with Emilys professional expertise and enthusiasm for the new techniques and contemporary tastes. I understand how the home cook feels and works, while Emily knows how to explain what to do.

We have both learned a lot and had so much fun coming up with the recipes for this book. We have worked through from the dishes I enjoyed as a child, to the food I cooked for Emily when she was growing up, then finally, to the meals we make together today.

Born into the most gastronomic of families and raised in London, my passion for food started at a young age. Playing with pots and pans instead of dolls seemed to be the norm for me. My mother always took great pleasure in providing me with fresh and healthy French food.

Many people think of French food as very rich, packed with butter and cream, but that is the northern style. The food of the South, where my mother comes from, is much closer to that of the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on fish, vegetables and olive oil.

I left the UK at the age of 18 to train at the renowned Institut Paul Bocuse in Lyon. After graduating I worked my way through the difficult echelons of a kitchen brigade in several Michelin-starred restaurants all over France. Some of these professional kitchens gave me the opportunity to travel all over the world. Today I love using the latest ingredients and innovative cooking techniques to bring a new twist on classic recipes.

In this book we show how cooking in our family has come full circle my mother was taught by her own mother and she has now passed down her knowledge to me.

Sometimes all you need is a bowl of soup: it warms you, its healthy and whats more, its a great way of using up vegetables, even those that are slightly past their best. Ive always eaten a lot of soup and, growing up, my mother would serve it at the start of every meal during autumn and winter. She always had plenty of home-grown vegetables to hand and would make many different kinds of soup from them.

Ive continued the tradition and Emily was brought up eating nourishing soups. I like to stick to one or two vegetables as a rule and let their taste shine through, rather than piling in a mishmash of lots of different sorts, then build up layers of flavour with ingredients such as ginger, chestnuts and walnuts. The flavours I use are more adventurous than my mothers and Emily has always appreciated them, even when she was a small child. These days, Im even more daring and enjoy making things like are testament to that.

This soup is packed full of flavour and bursting with vitamins; the perfect pick-me-up for a cold winters evening.

serves 4

1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

onion, finely sliced

3 garlic cloves, crushed

2 courgettes, sliced

400g (14oz) leeks, sliced

200g (7oz) cavalo nero or kale

200g (7oz) spinach

500ml (18fl oz) water

1 bunch of coriander, leaves chopped

1 bunch of parsley, leaves chopped

salt and freshly ground black pepper