Remembrance of things Paris : sixty years of writing from Gourmet

by Ruth Reichl

Paper Book, 2004

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

Kathie Werner Collection

Publication

New York : Modern Library, 2004.

Description

Cooking & Food. Essays. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:A glorious, edible tour of Paris through six decades of writing from Gourmet magazine, edited and introduced by Ruth Reichl For sixty years the best food writers have been sending dispatches from Paris to Gourmet. Collected here for the first time, their essays create a unique and timeless portrait of the world capital of love and food. When the book begins, just after the war, we are in a hungry city whose chefs struggle to find the eggs and cream they need to re-create the cuisine from before the German occupation. We watch as Paris comes alive again with zinc-topped tables crowded with people drinking caf� au lait and reveling in crisp baguettes, and the triumphant rebirth of three-star cuisine. In time, nouvelle cuisine is born and sweeps through a newly chic and modern city. It is all here: the old-time bourgeois dinners, the tastemakers of the fashion world, the hero-chefs, and, of course, Paris in all its snobbery and refinement, its inimitable pursuit of the art of fine living. Beautifully written, these dispatches from the past are intimate and immediate, allowing us to watch the month-by-month changes in the world�s most wonderful city. Remembrance of Things Paris is a book for anyone who wants to return to a Paris where a buttery madeleine is waiting around every corner. Contributors include Louis Diat, Naomi Barry, Joseph Wechsberg, Judith and Evan Jones, Don Dresden, Lillian Langseth-Christensen, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, and Jonathan Gold.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member etxgardener

I love France and I love food. So what can be better than a book devoted to both. This book is a collection of essays written over the past sixty years for Gourmet magazine and so many are a delight. A person has to be soulless not to be charmed by "The Christening" in which a Parisian mother

brings the plans for the party to celebrate her child's entry into the church to the hospital with her as she is about to deliver her baby and one cannot help to sigh over "Paris's Haute Chocolaterie." And then there is the sensation of being born too late when one reads "After the War" written in 1947 when the author bemoans the fact that the average check a Maxim's is an outrageous $16.00 and that a meal in an average bistro has "increased tenfold" - to $1.00 (!!).

In our hard economic times when travel - well, at least my travel - has become extremely limited, a book like this one is a delicious bon bon to be consumed in little bites to savor over the days, or to be gorged upon in one big gulp.

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LibraryThing member simchaboston

I always enjoy reading about France, though I must admit this collection wasn't as fun the second time around. The assortment seems heavily weighted toward tales of France's past culinary glories, skipping past a couple of decades on its way to the present day, and I would've preferred fewer pieces

but longer ones as well as more variety in the authors anthologized (even though I recognize how good Joseph Wechsberg's writing is). Still, it was fun to imagine the places talked about, and it's always good to get a little French into my brain before going to Paris.

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LibraryThing member Anne_Green

How could a Francophile food writer not be intrigued by a collection of sixty years of food writing about Paris? I looked forward to reading this book with keen anticipation and on the whole it didn't disappoint. Compiled by Ruth Reichl, for many years the editor in chief in Gourmet Magazine, it's

an anthology of dispatches to Gourmet Magazine from various columnists based in Paris. It covers a period of sixty years, spanning the years immediately post World War 2 to the early 2000s. As Ruth Reichl states in the introduction, there were several decades when Paris was "a shrine for everyone who believed that eating well was the best revenge" and it's the best of those years that are represented in this book.

Once Paris emerged from the doldrums of the war years and their associated privations, it didn't take long for it to reassert its rightful position at the pinnacle of the gourmet world and the essays in this book are a testament to that Paris and the magic it conjured. Several writers tend to predominate, obviously because they were correspondents for larger chunks of time and the book reflects the writing style of those writers pretty much to the exclusion of the others. In particular, essays by Naomi Barry and Joseph Wechsberg are gems of history and fascinating insights into a world that has largely been displaced by more recent developments. It's a reminder of a Paris we all probably still think of in a nostalgic mood, even while acknowledging that it's a world that belongs to yesterday.

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