Help me learn advanced French food and restaurant vocabulary.

Belatedly, I notice you're in Boston. One of Harvard-Radcliffe's libraries has a massive collection of cookbooks and menus, and the papers of Julia Child, among other food things. I never visited but I used to work with one of their historians. If I remember well, the Schlesinger library is one of the few libraries at Harvard open to the public. At the very least, they have http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2013-reading-historic-cookbooks.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038542454X/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. How to use the book (because otherwise it is just a cookbook) Get a provincial map of France. Start marking all the recipes by region as well as the ingredients used. You'll see some staples used across regions, as well as some ingredients that only appear in specific regions, and/or for specific seasonal dishes. Expand your recipe base by looking up other recipes and the roots of where they come from. Drop on wine and cheese, and you'll soon start to see how the french supply chain works. From this, you should be able to start breaking down a french dish and recognizing what makes a burgundy from Burgundy (and why), the types of seafood particular to Normandy, and a multitude of geographic reasons that French food tastes the way it does. If you can, start sourcing ingredients from those regions. From learning the country food, you'll start to make sense of what elevates food up to the next level... Also, if you can, go sit down and talk with Chef Tony Maws. Given what you do and your level of interest, he is probably the closest accessible expert in Boston (Cambridge).

A fantastic French food blogger is Clotilde Dusoulier who writes http://chocolateandzucchini.com/ which contains general writing about food as well as recipes. Most of her entries have a http://chocolateandzucchini.com/vf/ as well.

Following on from my last suggestions - the recipes from hervecuisine on Youtube allow you to select a transcript of what is being said which gives you the material in writing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feoeOZ2bfpY

I think that, although not focused on French cooking and certainly no textbook, Bourdain's enjoyable http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062231375/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ certainly introduced me to some of the French terms and particularly how they are used in real life commercial conditions. Perhaps more accurately, the book gave me enough of a knowledge base that I could better understand how to delve into aspects of French cooking about which I otherwise wouldn't have known.

Please ignore my above answer as it is woefully insufficient.

Maybe Crown Publishing's Americanized version of http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=larousse+gastromonique&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=4341974069&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=133999096247760147&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&ref=pd_sl_32t7z3e8zh_b is closer to what you are seeking.

If you haven't already found http://www.marmiton.org you should check it out. I'm a big fan of using google images for ingredients I'm unsure of. Also, a good French dictionary is helpful though can be a bit difficult to decipher since it is totally in French. I like using the French dictionary instead of a French to English dictionary because there are some words that don't really translate. Lastly if you want practice get a subscription to Régal, a great French cooking magazine. They will ship to the US. It includes a great section that focuses on specific ingredients (e.g lemons from Menton).

Accuracy is important. (I stopped using Memrise when I realized that there were occasionally mistakes in the spellings of the user-generated French vocabulary.) If accuracy was a problem with user-generated Memrise lists, the solution is to make your own Memrise lists. I only use SRS decks that I have made myself. I am a multilinguist with about the same general vocabulary across my languages but different specialized vocabulary depending on the language. For example, my Greek has a lot of theological vocabulary while my Japanese has a lot of legal vocabulary. And as it happens, my French has a fair amount of culinary vocabulary. I think you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. You can do this yourself by reading what you want to read. Find a French menu that you would like to read. When you find a word you don't know, look it up. You can do the reverse as well. For example you say you want to learn the word for "boil". It is really simple to go to a dictionary and voilà! You will find "bouillir". Then add these words to your Memrise decks (or other SRS deck) and study away. It is hard to tell from your question if you speak any French proficiency at all, but I take that it is pretty limited. I am sorry to say that there is no shortcut to language learning, so if you want to be able to read French recipes and menus, you are going to need to learn French. Just going through a deck of culinary nouns and verbs alone will not help you follow the instruction of "Faire blanchir les germes de soja, pendant 30 secondes, dans l'eau bouillante. Egoutter et réserver." This was the first step from the first recipe I pulled from http://allrecipes.fr. If your general French is good enough, browse recipe sites such as that to learn the vocabulary from the recipes. If your general French isn't good enough, you need to make it good enough.