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and Other Culinary Adventures in France
by Mort RosenblumIn France, you are what you eat. Mort Rosenblum applies his superb nose for news and fine fare to the food-drenched culture of a country that takes its cuisine as seriously as its politics.
In France, you are what you eat, and no one knows this better than Mort Rosenblum. Here, this internationally acclaimed journalist and James Beard Award-winning food writer for his last book, Olives, applies his superb nose for news and fine fare to the food-drenched culture of a country that takes its cuisine as seriously as its politics.
Wending his way through the French countryside, Rosenblum takes readers on a tour of The Roquefort country, where he finds two families left in a tiny village; they talk to their sheep, but each has ignored the other for three generations. In Paris, he finds Alain Ducasse, with six Michelin stars, hard at work building an haute cuisine empire. He visits a snail rancher, oyster rustlers, and the fabled Chateau Petrus. Bruno the Truffle King rhapsodizes to him about fragrant black fungus.
Looking at the way the French live through how they cook, eat, and market their cuisine, Rosenblum offers a picture of a country at war with the clichés that both define and degrade its national character. At a time when the public can't seem to get enough of all things French, here is a deliciously informative book that's food for thought and a feast for the senses.
A God in France
"The destiny of nations depends upon how they feed themselves . . .The pleasure of the table reigns among other pleasures, and it is the last to console when others are lost."
- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
"In France, one dines. Everywhere else, one eats."
- Montesquieu
Only in France could a loaf of bread come with a technical support phone number and an instruction manual thick with philosophy. Lionel Poilâne, who produces such bread, would be a mere baker in any other country. To the French, he is a national treasure, an artist whose medium is a 100-ton oven. In his black velvet string tie and gray workman's smock, tossing his Prince Valiant hair to punctuate a point, he assures a nation of a mere 60 million inhabitants that they still hold the lantern for billions of less enlightened mortals.
"Bread is the soul of civilization," Poilâne remarked one morning in the seat of his empire, a little redbrick boulangerie on the rue ...
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