The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France
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IACP Cookbook Award Winner (Culinary Travel) John Baxter's The Perfect Meal is part grand tour of France, part history of French cuisine, taking readers on a journey to discover and savor some of the world's great cultural achievements before they disappear completely. Some of the most revered and complex elements of French cuisine are in danger of disappearing as old ways of agriculture, butchering, and cooking fade and are forgotten. In this charming culinary travel memoir, John Baxter follows up his bestselling The Most Beautiful Walk in the World by taking his readers on the hunt for some of the most delicious and bizarre endangered foods of France. The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France is the perfect read for foodies and Francophiles, cooks and gastronomists, and fans of food culture.
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Some writers have all the fun. John Baxter, an expat twenty-year Paris-ite and writer, decides to set off around France in search of all the wonderful classic French dishes which are gradually becoming extinct. He seeks out kir and pineau and pastis and absinthe. He looks for the very best caviar. He samples macarons and cannelé and madeleines. He checks out truffles and lamphrey eels and bouillabaisse and soupe à l'oignon (onion soup) and even le bœuf en broche (an ox on a spit).
Even I, who love books more than real life at times, know the limits of reading. And this is where even a bibliophile must draw the line; I wish I could have been with traveling with John Baxter on his real journey, eating these amazing foods and dallying about the country with him. It is not to be, sadly. But this book, with Baxter's little sidetrip stories about the cook who committed suicide when his meal crashed and burned and the time Paris-under-siege had to eat zoo animals, is a lovely consolation prize.
