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The Food of France |
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The Food of France |
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by: Waverley Root
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.0944 EAN: 9780679738978 ISBN: 0679738975 Label: Vintage Languages: Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 496 Publication Date: June 02, 1992 Publisher: Vintage Release Date: June 02, 1992 Studio: Vintage Editorial Review: Product Description: Embraces not only the marvels of French cooking but French history, language, landscape, and customs as well. Here is France for the traveler, the chef, and the connoisseur of fine prose. Maps and b & w line drawings throughout. Amazon.com Review: While this might sound like a cookbook, it's actually a travelogue focusing on the foods of various regions in France. Instead of providing information on what visitors should see during their travels, Waverly Root reveals what they should eat. Root, who made his living as a foreign correspondent and has written several volumes on his penchant for food, is an excellent guide whose descriptions will convince globetrotters that there's much more to travel than sightseeing. The book, along with Root's The Food of Italy won the 1990 James Beard Cookbook Award. Related Items:
Average Rating:
 Rating: - A Foodie classic in the truest senseThe topic, broadly, is the relationship of cuisine to its Terroir. the text is incredibly engrossing and informative. This author's place in history and time -- an American, writing in the 1950's about knowledge acquired between WWI and WWII, combined with his writing talents, make this book indispensable to both the traveler and the chef. What an insight into what makes the French so... well, French. Root famously divides France into three geogra-culinary categories: those who cook with lard, those who cook with oil, and those who cook with butter. Helpful Maps, good index make it an excellent guidebook. I am so proud to have a good used hardcover of this book in my Library. Rating: - Travel through France in your Easy Chair! A true must read.This is by far the best book I have ever read on France and what makes it such a unique and beautiful country. Yes, it was written a good time ago, but unlike America history is something to cherish and is very present in France. Mr. Root captures the pure essence of France through it's food. I would strongly encourage anyone traveling to France or returning from a trip to read The Food of France. As a food writer from a day when writers told stories Mr. Root takes you into each of the regions of France provides you with tidbits of unknown and known history and the food that was shaped by it. Mr. Root knew his food very well and enjoyed it in a way that many would only hope to, a true pleasure in gastronomic reading. Rating: - A delightThis book is an irresistible read for anyone with a love of food an an interest in the history, geography and culture of regional France and its food products and cuisine. Root writes beautifully and it's impossible not to become as enthusiastic as the author as he shares his vast knowledge of each region of France and its culinary traditions. A book to return to again and again. Rating: - Still Fresh and Informative After All these YearsNow finishing my second reading of this tremendous book, all the while suspecting that Waverly Root was really a well-disguised poseur and not really the erudite man-of-the-world he appears to have been, I have to finally admit that, in addition to being one hell of a fine writer, he must also have been one of the most broadly-informed gourmands ever. True, occassional anecdotes and opinions of his betray the fact that the book was originally published 50 years ago, but the scope and intimacy of his knowledge with pretty much every provincial outpost, grand boulevard, and Basque backwater in France is astounding. I suspect he read and took to heart the 1950s edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, since many of the culinary practices he describes hardly deviate from what the Great Book says, but he provides so many examples of eating experiences that could be nothing but first-hand that I have to conclude that he actually DID spend his 30+ years in France doing little but travelling, eating, and drinking. These culinary expeditions are a treasure now: many of the regions he sampled so amply have been globalized to oblivion. His enthusiastic, almost childlike [but, nonetheless, world-wise] forays into the Haut Pyrenees, for example, record a local tradition of farmhouse cooking that is no more. But he was no mere chronicler of foods: his essays are leavened with witty, insightful, broadly-informed and fascinating anecdotes and contextual notes geographical, historical, literary, and agricultural. In this sense, I believe he was one of the pioneers of the broad, anectdotal form of journalism that remains perhaps the most effective means of presenting the world to an armchair audience. I have to forgive his peculiarities. Even his apparent contempt for Champagne seems inconsequential when I read his descriptions of travelling into darkest Corsica, sampling the wild, unrefined local wines, and immediately perceiving their perfect suitability to the food of the region. I am not aware of any other food and wine writer from that era who so heartily insisted on describing food and wine as a marriage. He wrote 20 years before Richard Olney brought his own sophistications to the table, and, understood in this context, his predilections must have been radical at the time. I urge you to read this book with a willingness to forgive the occassional signs of age. They are few and forgivable. Please savor the writing, with its erudition, lovely sense of timing and flow, gentle humor and enthusiasm. Please also consider it as the eloquent indictment of globalization that it is. To read a book written in the uncritical heyday of postwar American optimism and to find in it laments that the old world was slipping away, a victim of commerce and centralized policymaking, is a poignant experience indeed. This book is an education like few others.
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