Le Livre Blanc by Anne-Sophie Pic

If the Design Museum ever produced a cookbook, it would look like Anne-Sophie Pic’s latest collection of recipes. From the pure white front cover – with its title carved out in industrial- style font – to the silver-edged pages, this is a modern, striking cookbook, destined for coffee tables as well as kitchens inside fashionable apartments in Paris, London and New York.

Le Livre Blanc showcases the innovation that has led Anne-Sophie to hold such a high position in French cuisine, but the 50 recipes inside are steeped in tradition and family history. As the daughter and grand-daughter of two famous chefs, Anne-Sophie grew up at the family’s restaurant, Maison Pic in Valence, which earned three Michelin stars back in 1939. Her creativity on the plate – precise and beautiful, captured with stunning high-end photography – is matched by the creativity within the book’s stark white pages.

The book has two sections – photography at the front, recipes at the back. Every picture and recipe is numbered, and you find yourself flicking from section to section to combine the two. It’s a design and layout that reinvents cookbooks. And with another eye on the future, Pic says some pages have been left totally blank because her “unstoppable creativity hasn’t yet finished filling blank pages.” Or perhaps you’d like to add your own culinary inventions…

Originally published in the October-November 2013 issue of France Today