To translate recipes from French to English, you don’t have to learn how to speak French. In fact, although a general knowledge of French is helpful, it is possible, as has been my experience, to become quite proficient in translating recipes without such knowledge. In my case, the process started with one recipe. In January 1997, I was in the town of Bergerac in southwestern France. I purchased a cooking magazine that was running a feature on tarts. (I knew there was a feature on tarts because there was a picture of one on the cover!) My wife had previously requested that I learn how to make a leek tart and I figured that the magazine would have a recipe for one. Besides, the cost was less than 10 francs, or less than $2, and the magazine contained a lot of pretty pictures. I took it back to California, and with the help of my wife’s college French and a slim, weathered French-English dictionary she had bought in college, we were able to cobble together a workable translation in about an hour.

     Now, five years later, although I can sight-read most recipes in French, there are still two primary tools I rely upon to

help translate recipes: a small volume of food terms and an electronic dictionary. Even someone just starting to learn to read French recipes can easily get along with just these two items. (I make this statement after spending a few hundred dollars on various dictionaries and reference books that now gather dust on my shelf.) The book on food terms is the L’ABC de la Gastronomie Française, or The A-Z of French Food. This slim, pocket-size volume of about 4,000 definitions is the most complete work that I have found on the subject. The electronic dictionary is version 1.3 of the Harper-Collins French-English Dictionary with about 100,000 entries. It runs on my Palm handheld and is available for many other systems. The advantage of the electronic dictionary over one in book form is that words can be accessed very fast by just entering the first few letters. This is especially helpful with verbs, because the form of the verb used in the recipe is not always the root form displayed in the dictionary. As letters are entered, a list of possible matches is displayed and the root word can then be selected.