While this might sound like a cookbook, it’s actually a travelogue focusing on the foods of various regions in France.
While this might sound like a cookbook, it’s actually a travelogue focusing on the foods of various regions in France. Instead of providing information on what visitors should see during their travels, Waverly Root reveals what they should eat. Root, who made his living as a foreign correspondent and has written several volumes on his penchant for food, is an excellent guide whose descriptions will convince globetrotters that there’s much more to travel than sightseeing.
Root separates France into three distinct regions characterized by the fat of choice in their cooking: Butter in Normandy, goose fat in the southwest and olive oil in the south.
The book won the 1990 James Beard Cookbook Award.
Its breadth and personality come through as clearly as they did then. Root's inquiring mind and desire to see things as they were, on the ground - in other words the things that made him a great reporter - fit the subject especially well.
"The Food of France" is unique. No writer in English has, before or since, so doggedly tracked through Auvergne villages or the Breton seacoast or the grandeur of the Loire valley seeking those who made the wine, aged the hams, salted the fish, created the cheeses. And talked to them. Then put it all in simple language for us to read and enjoy - in the flesh if possible, otherwise vicariously.
But it's also a little out of fashion. For example he defines French cooking according the fat used: butter, goosefat, olive oil. A practical, simple way of explaining different approaches to cooking. Since he first published in 1958, though, several generations have passed in which avoidance of fat of any kind - especially, horror of horrors, butter! - has been a commandment which believers must obey.
Thus in recent years peoples' eating habits have been such that using fats to characterize and analyze cooking must at first glance seem egregiously offensive. As well as incomprehensible. (Or, in the case of butter, mystifying, as the food police [wonderful term] have now declared "Ooops! Sorry, folks. Butter's OK after all!)
Similarly Root writes about foie gras, veal, young lamb, etc., with the fervor and the enthusiasm of the well-served. Without a hint of interest in the conditions in which these marvelous foodstuffs may be produced. A secular sin, in today's world.
So it's a little out of date, and not at all modish. I had the pleasure of meeting Root during the early 60's, when "The Food of France" was still on best-seller lists. He was exactly what he seemed: an extraordinary writer, conscientious and even picky about getting his sources right. And he liked to eat and drink. My advice to the reader interested in France and French food is, read the book as you would a historical document. Forget about whether it's OK to eat foie gras, forget about the health benefits (or not) of cooking fats, and enjoy a passionate writer at his very best, on a subject which interested him more than any other.
Dick Aherne, Paris
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