I write a lot about French food and wine, from why it’s so hard to find a real Camembert to the mushrooms that are grown in Paris’ underground Catacombs. It’s not often that I find a book that teaches me quite so much about a topic that I have such a vested interest in (aside from a very specific or very academic text), but when I happened upon The Food and Wine of France, I was pleased to discover some of the many, many things I still have to learn about one of my favorite topics.
The Food and Wine of France feels, to me, to be a compilation of essays Behr wrote for his The Art of Eating magazine. Some are much longer than others, but most follow the same format: a personal narrative where Behr travels to an area – Champagne, or the bouchons of Lyon, or a bakery in Paris – and then zooms out to provide a more global view of the topic at hand, be it the history of the baguette or the regional variations of a very specific goat cheese. It’s refreshing in that it doesn’t seek to provide one overarching rule for something that innately has so much variation, and yet Behr’s storytelling manages to create cohesion regardless.
The piecemeal way in which this book was built means that it lacks one narrative arc, but if you’re interested in esoteric French food stories, it’s the book for you. To wit, after returning it to the library, I’ve already purchased my own copy.