East of Paris features Austrian cuisine as interpreted by David. Universally respected as a highly influential chef, David has been recognized since 1987 by a variety of august bodies including the James Beard Foundation.

East of Paris embodies the characteristics of the ideal cookbook. It's a beautifully presented hardback cookbook with over 345 pages packed with recipes and pictures. You cannot help but to decide to cook something as you look at the lush illustrations that accompany virtually every recipe.

I had no idea that there were such a broad range of dishes in Austrian cooking. While some of them have some very strange names, the ingredients are familiar and the dishes generally delicious. David embraces the Austrian culture in this book and includes classic cooking techniques and regional dishes that make it all the more authentic.

Aimed squarely at the home cook, there is a good range of complexity, making it easy to use this cookbook for a midweek dinner or a weekend dinner party. The book is broken into sections including fall, winter, spring, summer, signature dishes, traditional sweets and coffee house favorites, pantry, wine notes and sources. The pantry section is very handy with details of basic stocks and techniques. The wine section is just one page and not particularly helpful.

Pia's mother is Austrian and as a result she claims to be the world's expert at goulash soup. Actually that's not fair of me, she really does make a great goulash soup. You can tell how good it is because it definitely makes your nose run and wakes up your taste buds. David's recipe is reasonably demanding in terms of ingredients, but very easy to prepare. The secret of a good goulash soup is cooking it for long enough so the meat begins to soften and becomes really tender. This is a nice recipe with intense flavors and a rich velvety taste. We like it fairly spicy so we went heavy on the jalapeño. Although it's great for leftovers and reheats really well, we had none left after our tasting.

The signature dishes are the most complex and would be ideal for a dinner party. Marinated sea scallops with passion fruit and black truffle or warm beet salad with caraway seeds and walnut oil give you an idea of how innovative this book is. The pictures that accompany the recipes are excellent and give you a good hint as to how your efforts are supposed to turn out.

I'm getting really fond of cookbooks that are divided into seasons. There's nothing worse than finding a great recipe that calls for a vegetable not available at that time of year. By dividing the book into the four seasons, David has made it easy to select a recipe that you can be sure of finding the ingredients for. Some of the required items would need you to shop around a bit, but there is nothing too arcane and at the back of the book there is a handy list of sources.

So, overall this is a great cookbook. It could keep a home chef happy for a pretty long while. The dishes were definitely designed to maximize taste and flavor and to make heavy use of fresh ingredients. The cuisine of Austria is a surprise and a treat, especially for those unfamiliar with the area. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone interested in expanding their repertoire beyond Italy and France.