The Last Banquet

"Foodies and Francophiles alike will relish this debut novel about Jean-Marie d’Aumout, whom we first meet crunching beetles as a starving orphaned son of nobility in 1723. He goes on to be educated as an aristocrat, fall in love frequently and serve as witness to a century of vast changes. Jonathan Grimwood details d’Aumont’s outsized appetites: for the bliss of Roquefort, for raw trout, for the braised heart of a wolf whose neck he has broken in the woods. His many adventures include corresponding with Voltaire and becoming Lord Master of the Menagerie at Versailles, but The Last Banquet always comes back to the faculty of taste. Flamingo tongues cooked “in the Roman style,” anyone?"