Bon Appetit: Travels Through France With Knife, Fork and Corkscrew - Hardcover

Mayle, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316857025 ISBN 13: 9780316857024

Publisher: Little Brown Uk, 2001

Synopsis

The early part of Peter Mayle's life was spent in the gastronomic wilderness of post-war England. But a business trip to Paris at the tender age of nineteen began an enduring fascination with the French and their love affair with food and wine. In Bon Appetit!, he brings hilariously and affectionately to life a nation that can get passionate about a frog's leg or a well-turned omelette and organise a marathon fuelled only on Medoc.
Preparation, of course, is everything, and Peter Mayle has spent long hours with knife, fork and glass. He visits Livarot, where his nose encounters its far from modest fromage, and revels in the spectacle of the annual competitive cheese-eating contest; he attends a church service in Richerenches to celebrate the truffle; in Martigny-les-Bains he learns the best way to eat snails; in Vittel, haven of the frog-fancier, he becomes the first English confrere.
What he discovers in the high level of enthusiasm that turns eating and drinking into a celebration. And while the French take their passions seriously, the French who come to these events don't take themselves seriously at all. Warm, witty and mouthwatering in equal measure, Bon Appetit! is proof that the old saying 'Lovely country, France. Pity about the French,' is only half correct. Over ten years ago Peter Mayle transformed our feelings about Provence, now he captures the irresistible essence of France herself - and her food.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Mayle's trilogy about Provence has sold millions of copies throughout the world.

Review:

Mayle continues to milk (maybe not quite le mot juste considering the litres of wine consumed in the name of research) his Francophile love affair in this gastronomic tour de France. Using the numerous food and wine fairs and f tes which take place throughout the year across France as his pegs, Mayle attends a church service to give thanks for the "breathtakingly expensive" black truffle, savours frogs legs to become a member of the Confrerie des Tastes Cuisses de Grenouilles de Vittel, is inducted in the mysteries of preparing and eating snails at a Foire aux Escargots where he consumes several dozen despite learning that a snail's natural diet consists of a toxic salad of deadly nightshade, poisonous mushroom and hemlock, and celebrates the elite Bresse chickens at Les Glorieuses in Bourg-en-Bresse. And even when he is reluctantly persuaded to check into a health spa, he is fed a diet of "duck, lamb, guinea fowl, pate, cheese, butter, eggs, a little foie gras, potato soup and huge croissants for breakfast". All healthily cooked, of course, the Cuisine Minceur method. As with his Provence books, encounters and conversations with the locals provide fertile copy, and there is much here for the foodie, wine buff and Francophile. But perhaps it doesn't have quite the same broad-ranging appeal of A Year in Provence to emulate that book's million-selling status.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown Uk
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0316857025
• ISBN 13: 9780316857024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240