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 title" may belong to another edition of this title.