by J. Michael Wheeler
I’m sure it was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that made me fall in love with French food. Not Taillevent French food, but the café, the bistro, la bar. Before I ever ventured to my culinary nirvana I was steeped in Hemingway’s France: his baguettes, his well-lit tables, his wines. Then I read his almost-contemporary in Paris: A. J. Liebling’s wonderful adventures in eating: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. Next came, of course, Julia Child and actually trying to cook coq au vin. And surprisingly, it was very good. But not as good as that first coq au vin on that first trip to France.
And then we were hooked. My former wife and I made frequent trips to Paris and Nice and Burgundy. I was able to arrange my schedule (I ran my own marketing and design studio) to allow several 2 or 3-week trips to France a year. And since that meant only 28 or 42 chances to have a meal (we didn’t really count breakfasts in the tally) we poured over Patricia Wells’ A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, and A Food Lover’s Guide to France. Then there was the Michelin Guide and Le Guide du Routard. Each trip yielded notes and restaurant business cards: recommendations for places to try on the next trip.
And then we found the market streets, and the neighborhood boulangerie, and the wine shops and the cheese shops, and my god, we really needed to live here. And so we did. For four years we were able to dig deeper into that culinary world: the smaller wines, the regional cheeses, the season cycles of eating in France, and cooking at home. In the fall we would bring home bags of mushrooms from the mountains that appeared on Rue Cler. In the spring new cheeses would arrive. The arrival of winter oysters, Christmas’ Bûches de Noël, the joy of cafés in the cold months.
Eventually that adventure (and the marriage) ended and I returned to the States. I thought I would be returning to a culinary desert, but in fact, I was heartened to find that we in the States have discovered food. And in the several years I have been back I have been examining and exploring what we are doing here. New awareness, new local products, new local adventures.
And then Ruth Reichl, Editor in Chief of Gourmet burst my bubble. The March issue of Gourmet is dedicated to the rustic cooking of provincial France: the food of the bistro, the café and country restaurants. The food that rocked my world. It reminded me, that while we here in the States have really come a long way in the culinary world, we are only now developing the skills, the ingredients, and a tradition of cooking, and more importantly, a tradition of eating, that is the very fabric of life in places like France and Italy.
Hemingway said France looms larger in memory and I think her food looms larger still. Reichl’s Letter from the Editor in this month’s issue brought back all of those culinary memories that so excited me. It made me realize, that in the day-to-day, I had lost touch with that excitement and wonder and discovery. The memory of a small bistro, exploring French food shops, a time past, a life changed. How is it that this thing, food and cooking and eating, is so important to us? Liebling opens Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris with Proust’s madeleine; Reichl’s Letter from the Editor flooded me with a melancholy for meals past. Isn’t that strange?
Reading List
Hemingway: A Moveable Feast
Leibling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
Wells: A Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, and A Food Lover’s Guide to France