Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [64]
A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from my Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg (Simon & Schuster, 2009). The title of this wonderful, wonderful book does not give any clue that it has to do with Paris, and certainly when I picked it up I had no idea that the word “Paris” would appear in it even once. But it turns out that Paris is a very special city for Wizenberg, as she has spent lengths of time there over the years, studying, living, visiting, and eating. She lived in the eleventh arrondissement after college, in a “petite piece of paradise,” and in that year she learned she loved to cook. Wizenberg says that the only reason she travels is for an excuse to eat more than usual. “I couldn’t tell you what the inside of Notre-Dame looks like, but I do know how to get from the greengrocer on rue Oberkampf, the one with the green awning, to that terrific fromagerie way down in the seventh, near Le Bon Marché.” Though she clearly has a sense of humor, it’s not humor that sustains this book. Wizenberg cares deeply about food—browse her blog (orangette.blogspot.com) and read her monthly column in Bon Appétit—but also about family. When she tells the story of her father dying and I got teary-eyed (on the train, no less), I was crying not only because I was thinking of my own wonderful father (who also has passed away) but because I truly cared about Molly and what happened in her life. She has a winning way of drawing people to her, and when you finish the book you feel like you could pick up the phone and call her. She shares a number of recipes at the end of each chapter, which are among the very few that have appeared in a book like this and that I actually tried—with super results. I don’t believe I will spoil anyone’s pleasure in reading this book by sharing some lines from the final chapter. What life comes down to, Wizenberg says, is winning hearts and minds. “Underneath everything else, all the plans and goals and hopes, that’s why we get up in the morning, why we believe, why we try, why we bake chocolate cakes. That’s the best we can ever hope to do: to win hearts and minds, to love and be loved.” Read this book!
Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas (2008) and We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light (2006), both by John Baxter and published by Harper Perennial. Of these two, I enjoyed Immoveable Feast best, and not only because I learned that Baxter had been a visiting professor at my alma mater, Hollins College (now University), in 1974. He writes that Hemingway meant the title of his famous book (A Moveable Feast) to allude to periods in the Christian calendar—notably Lent and Pentecost—that change their dates depending on when Easter falls. Similarly, as Baxter explains, there is more than one “right” time to discover Paris. “Its pleasures can be relished at any moment in one’s life. But the phrase is subject to another interpretation. At certain times of year, the spirit of Paris moves elsewhere. Its soul migrates, and this most beautiful of cities briefly falls empty.” The two times of year when this happens are during the month of August and at Christmas. Baxter, who is married to a French woman, delightfully and humorously recounts a Christmas meal he made for his French family while revealing much about French customs and traditions.
Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes, Elizabeth Bard (Little, Brown, 2010). I was prepared to like this book but was surprised to really love it. From the first few pages, I felt Bard could also have been describing me. I felt a kindred spirit when I read, “Wherever I’ve been in the world, museums have