The Food of France
by Waverley Root
Buy on AmazonA celebration of French cuisine and culture, from a culinary adventurer who made his mark decades before Anthony Bourdain arrived on the scene. Traveling through the provinces, cities, and remote country towns that make up France, Waverley Root discovers not only the Calvados and Camembert cheese of Normandy, the haute cuisine of Paris, and the hearty bouillabaisse of Marseilles, but also the local histories, customs, and geographies that shape the French national character. Here are the origins of the Plantagenet kings and Rabelais’s favorite truffle-flavored sausages, and the tale of how the kitchens of Versailles cooked for one thousand aristocrats and four thousand servants in a single day.…
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"He’s an American and you can travel with him. Outsiders always observe and know exactly what’s going on. He goes through all the regions and he writes about the regions and chooses recipes. He’ll tell you about the people, the landscape, the architecture and from that the food. In the Touraine you’ll get woodcuts of a beautiful château and you’ll be told: ‘Touraine is the heartland of France and the heartland of haute cuisine.’ He’ll give you the classic haute cuisine recipes. What he mostly describes are the ingredients you’ll find and what you do with them. ‘The difficultly of obtaining chicken blood at the corner grocery doesn’t quite account for the disappearance of the perfectly made boudin.’ So, he very often looks at the white and black puddings in the charcuterie, and if you’re travelling you’ll know what the basic language of gastronomy is in that area. A lot of guts, tripe and andouillette and lots of imported spices, wonderful dairy, cheeses. It’s very rich land. Lots of pigs."
French Cooking · fivebooks.com