Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [141]
Paris in a Basket: Markets—The Food and the People, Nicolle Aimee Meyer and Amanda Pilar Smith, with a foreword by Paul Bocuse (Könemann, 2000). The focus of this book is on outdoor food markets and it’s organized by arrondissement, so you can really see what everyday food shopping is like in each neighborhood. Paris just has so many more markets than we do here in the States, and there is a detailed market guide (indicating the days of the week the markets are set up) at the back of the book. This is especially helpful to those travelers who may be renting an apartment or who are staying in a place with a little kitchen.
Parisian Home Cooking: Conversations, Recipes, and Tips from the Cooks and Food Merchants of Paris, Michael Roberts (William Morrow, 1999). This is Nach’s favorite French cookbook, written by a former American chef and restaurant consultant who moved to Paris. It’s basically a book about what French people eat when they come home from work, everyday cooking by people who are not professional chefs but who share the French love of very good food. The recipes are for weeknight cooking, and this is the book for anyone who comes away from Paris vowing to make a difference in the way they cook. Roberts will help remind them how simple it is to cook ordinary French food.
Related Culinary Books of Interest
A Meal Observed, Andrew Todhunter (Knopf, 2004). This wonderful little book is a seductive account of a long, luxurious dinner at Paris’s celebrated Michelin-starred restaurant Taillevent (named after the cook to Charles V and Charles VI, alias Guillaume Tirel, who allegedly wrote the first French cookbook, Le Viandier) and an account of what went on in the restaurant’s kitchen. Todhunter was in the enviable role of apprenctice-cum-reporter and spent several months working in the kitchen, which, though highly orchestrated, was “less an atelier than a gun deck on a ship of war, a place of shouts and fire.” He is a likable guide and a fair observer. Whether a traveler has the good fortune to dine at Taillevent or another Michelin temple, this book is a superb insider’s introduction to haute cuisine in France. (And the single recipe included, for Marquise au Chocolat et à la Pistache, is delicious!)
Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, Michael Steinberger (Bloomsbury, 2009). In 1997, Steinberger believed that “nothing left me feeling more in love with life than a sensational meal in Paris. I refused to entertain the possibility that French cuisine had run aground.” He knew that “it was now pretty easy to find bad food in France if you went looking for it,” but as far as he was concerned, “France remained the first nation of food, and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being willfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.” But just after the turn of the millennium he reached the same conclusion as Adam Gopnik, who suggested in “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?” (The New Yorker, April 28, 1997) that “the muse of cooking” had moved on to restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Sydney, and London, and that it was increasingly difficult to find places to eat in Paris that exuded the same dynamism. In chapters detailing a brief history of French cuisine, the enormous bureaucracy involved in owning a restaurant in France, the meteoric rise of Spanish cuisine (in 2008 the fabulous seaside town of San Sebastián boasted eighteen Michelin-starred restaurants—more per capita than any other city in the world)—the suicide of Burgundy chef Bernard Loiseau, the dining guides and ratings, fast food, cheese and wine, Alain Ducasse, the lack of multicultural staff, and more, Steinberger has written a convincing and eye-opening account of the decline of French cuisine. There were, and are, bright spots, however, in his tale, which is very much worth reading by anyone with