This is to French cooking, what 'Silver Spoon' is to Italian, '1080 Recipes' is to Spanish and the recent 'Vefa's Kitchen' is to Greek. Which is to say, it's published by Phaidon, it's huge and it has many many recipes that are both authentic and usually very easy to make at home too. Not to mention, delicious.
The food is often such that you could not get at a restaurant, but would be served in many French homes if you went to stay for a few weeks. At least, that's the impression it gives... (and since i idealize the french I'm happy to go along with it.) The truth is, Ginette Mathiot was an exceptional cook with great flair and knowledge of French Home Cooking, and this is her masterpiece, first published in the 1930s I think.
Clotilde Dusoulier (of her blog/cookbook 'Chocolate and Zucchini' fame) has adapted the current edition, and it is absolutely, gobsmackingly, fantastically great. [any book that has a recipe called 'silly biscuits' is perfect by me].
Here's an example of what is so charming about this book: there's a recipe for crunchy Chestnut biscuits called 'Casse-museau'. Casse museau, we are told, translates as 'muzzle-breakers'. I love that kind of useless fun information. I like food with funny names.
The book is organized into the following chapters:
Sauces and Basic recipes, Hors-D'oeuvres, Milk eggs and cheese, soup, fish, meat, poultry, game, vegetables and salads, pulses rice and pasta, fruit, milk and egg puddings, ices,cakes and pastries, sweets preserves drinks.
If I'm not mistaken that pretty much covers everything you could desire. The sort of recipes you might expect are all here, like Beouf Bourguinon. But there are some surprises too... like... Melon Marmalade. I really want to try Melon Marmalade.
The chapters that stand out for me so far are the 'Milk eggs and cheese' (you could basically eat eggs a different way each day for months following this book) and the vegetables and salads section.