Let's try a book review

Happy New Year, y'all. Hope that you enjoyed or successfully endured the holiday season, depending on your point of view. 


I had a lovely quiet time with my family, which was festive but also restful. Many wonderful things were cooked and eaten over the course of the Christmas holiday. However, I failed to photograph or otherwise document any of them. That's partly because I'm not always good at this blogging stuff, but it's also because sometimes you just want to enjoy such moments and not be the a-hole who interrupts a perfect little meal by pulling out his phone and taking pictures. So you shall simply have to take my word for it that Christmas Eve dinner consisted of a standing rib roast of beef, a potato gratin (recipe here), and asparagus, with a rather nice trifle to follow. Christmas Day's dinner was gumbo, which I suspect will appear in an upcoming post. 

But anyway, I thought a book review might make an interesting change of pace for y'all, so here it is (we're getting perilously close to the day job on this one). Over the holidays, I read Luke Barr's Provence, 1970, a book written about the various meals, conversations, and arguments had by Julia Child, Simone Beck, M.F.K. Fisher (Barr's great-aunt), James Beard and Richard Olney (among others) during November and December of 1970. Barr's thesis is that these meetings and dinners among the culinary cognoscenti of 1970 were the start of America charting its own path from a culinary standpoint; that beginning at the end of 1970 (or in 1971) American chefs and food writers began the long, slow process of rejecting the old-world superiority and snobbery of French cuisine and winemaking and beginning to embrace a more open-minded and inclusive culinary approach—a melting pot, if you will. 

Those, like Beck and Olney, who hold to the reflexive snobbery of the old world (e.g., California can never produce wines that will equal or surpass those of France, no American can ever really understand French cooking, etc.) are not exactly presented as villains, but more as the overly proud guardians of a way of life that has ceased to be tenable. Still, it's clear that Barr, not surprisingly, is on the side of Fisher, Child, Beard and the others who were moving in a more progressive direction. 

I found the book very enjoyable, although I can't say that I find its thesis convincing. It's just too simplistic to imagine that so many major figures in the American food scene just happened to decide to change the way this country would cook and eat in one fell swoop AND that they happened to do so during the time period that coincided with Fisher's diaries from late 1970, which Barr unexpectedly discovered, prompting him to write this book. All historical writings impose a narrative structure on random and coincidental events to some degree, but this one pushes it a little too far for my taste—there are moments when I feel that Barr is telling me to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. 

But in spite of that, I enjoyed reading it immensely, just because Barr does such a wonderful job of evoking the atmosphere of those Provençal kitchens. He gives a powerful sense of how the laughter and spirit of collaboration in the kitchen of Julia and Paul Child differed starkly from the austere, serious kitchens of Olney and Beck. 

I respect their rigor and determination, but the purism and puritanism that drives the cooking of a Beck or an Olney leaves me cold. Case in point: after reading Provence, 1970, I decided to peruse Olney's Simple French Food. I stopped reading when I got to "I soak [chickpeas] overnight with sifted wood ashes and rain water." Barr makes a point of noting how much Olney's work influenced Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, and others, but I would argue that his crowning achievement may have been to make Waters actually seem practical and reasonable by comparison. Sorry, that was a cheap shot. But my point is that I will take the fun-loving but arguably inauthentic Child over pedants like Olney any day. But if you've read this blog before, I suspect you already knew that. 

But I digress. This is a fun read, and kept me thinking about the extraordinary food that must have come out of those kitchens. Hopefully, this blog will benefit from some of those musings. Bon appetìt, y’all.

P.S. Would more book reviews be something that would interest you folks? Or is your reaction more "shut up and cook already"? I only ask to be informed. 

P.P.S. Since it feels weird to do a post with no photos at all, here's a picture of my New Year's Eve repast. Front row, left to right: Taleggio, Red Anjou Pear, D'Artagnan's Duck Terrine Mousquetaire, more pears, Bleu d'Auvergne. Back row: a baguette. Not shown: red wine (a Monastrell, as I recall). Cheers.