Available:*
Shelf Number | Material Type | Copy | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 641.5944 | 1:E-BOOK | 1 | 1:ON-DEMAND | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
John Baxter was born in Randwick, New South Wales in 1939. He is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker. He has lived in Britain and the U.S. as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989. He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction.
For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris. In 2015 his title, Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light, made The New Zealand Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Confronting the disturbing fact that in 2011, two thirds of French restaurant owners confessed to concocting their meals with "bought, canned, frozen, or boil-in-a-bag portions," John Baxter (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World) undertakes a delightful task. He researches, in the broadest sense, the nearly forgotten techniques and ingredients of the classical foods of his adopted country. Baxter, an Australian who now resides in Paris, crisscrosses the literary, historical, and geographical landscape in search of emblematic French foods including roasted ox, bouillabaisse, and ortolans, those tiny birds drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole, with a napkin draped over the diner's head. What emerges from his travels is a spicy, humor-filled accounting of the culinary and literary history of a nation defined by its gastronomy. Baxter touches on the reason French people don't like cake, the poetic rightness of onion soup, what makes the truffle the plutonium of vegetation, and why the French never embraced vegetarianism. "To eat meat, the leaner the better, signifies prosperity," Baxter writes. This is one of those delicious books that tickles the psyche, seduces the senses, and effortlessly enlarges the intellect simultaneously. Baxter skillfully blends what could be considered merely entertaining food trivia into a satisfying full-course meal. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Despite the fact that France taught the Western world how to eat well, the sorts of foods and cooking techniques that made French cuisine preeminent have disappeared or are becoming so rare that classic French cooking cannot be found even in France. Baxter has seen this contemporary phenomenon, and it gives him more than a little distress. So he has set out to assemble the necessities for a great definitive French repast. Some items, such as truffles and caviar, appear regularly in markets but are in such demand that prices can be daunting. Rascasse, an ugly fish deemed indispensable to true bouillabaisse, no longer fills Marseille's fish markets. And consumption of ortolans, once the gourmet's ne plus ultra, has been legally banned from French tables due to the tiny birds' endangered-species status. Baxter's command of French history and culture offers the reader a cornucopia of anecdote and detail worth savoring.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Australian emigre Baxter (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World), travels across France to create the ideal banquet using the country's "lost" dishes. What follows is a disarmingly whimsical stroll through the French landscape and the parameters of a meal-aperitif, starter/canapes, entree, fish, meat, poultry, cheeses, dessert, coffee and sweetmeats, and digestif-that combines an immense amount of history and information with deft writing. Baxter explores the stories behind ingredients, names, and traditions-what defines an aperitif (and how one might be judged by one's choice), why and when cream was first added to coffee, and how bouillabaisse, fondant, and socca were first created-without the information ever feeling trivial.ÅVERDICT The most valuable (and equally endangered) tradition restored by Baxter is the oral one. Local characters, friends, chefs, and enthusiasts enliven his quest and reveal each element in the evolution of the menu to be part of a collective cognitive lineage. A must read for foodies, Francophiles, and armchair travelers.--Benjamin Malczewski, Ypsilanti District Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.