DIRT

An American family revels in French culture and cuisine.

Journalist and foodie Buford, a writer and editor for the New Yorker and former longtime editor of Granta, follows Heat (2006), his chronicle of cooking in Italy, with an ebullient, entertaining memoir of life in Lyon, where he, his wife, and two young sons settled so that he could indulge his desire to learn French cooking. Planning to stay six months, they wound up living in the city, renowned for its gastronomy, for several years, during which Buford worked for a baker, gained admission to an acclaimed cooking school, and toiled among the staff of a famous restaurant. The first months were difficult, he admits: “each member of our small family had come to doubt the wisdom of the project.” But he and his sons learned French (the children more quickly than their father), the boys assimilated to school, and his wife pursued her ambition to earn a diploma as a wine expert. Buford honed his skills as a chef and enthusiastically steeped himself in the culture of the French kitchen, where apprentices suffer “unregulated bullying and humiliation.” As the author demonstrates, French kitchens are no less hierarchical and combative than those in Italy, and nothing less than perfection is tolerated. It “was all about rules: that there was always one way and only one way” to peel asparagus, for example, devein goose livers, and construct puff pastry; that the three principles of a French plate are “color, volume, and texture”; and that the secret of glorious bread, meat, cheese, and wine is the soil. “What makes Lyonnais food exceptional,” Buford writes, is “a chef’s access to the nearby ingredients” from local farms, mountain lakes, and rivers. “Lyon,” he adds, “is a geographical accident of good food and food practices.” He describes in mouthwatering detail the many dishes he cooked and ate and the charming restaurants the family visited.

A lively, passionate homage to fine food.