It doesn’t take a refined palate to savor Ripert’s culinary adventures.
The acclaimed French chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin delivers a breezy account of his life in France and Andorra before he moved to the United States in his early 20s.
Ripert (Avec Eric: A Culinary Journey with Eric Ripert, 2010, etc.) makes it clear that food was always the warm center of his life, and his descriptions of the meals he prepared or devoured will make even the most ascetic reader hungry. As a boy, the author took refuge in a restaurant in his little town, where the chef indulged him with bowls of chocolate mousse or spoonfuls of caviar while his glamorous mother was off running the boutique she owned. Bored with academics, he left high school to go to a no-frills vocational boarding school, where he learned knife skills and “took naturally to the non-negotiable, army-like rules of the brigade system” in a restaurant. After an apprenticeship where he boned pounds of anchovies and peeled dozens of potatoes every day, working from 8:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night, the 17-year-old moved to Paris, where he learned to transform the “32 yolks” of the title into a proper hollandaise sauce and lived in fear of daunting chefs. Ripert worked first for Dominique Bouchet and then for Joel Robuchon, neither of whom cut their underlings any slack. The author keeps his tone light, even as he describes forbidding work environments, constant anxiety, escalating anger, and the pressures of being low on an aggressively male pecking order. His pleasure in good food—whether he’s following his grandmother to a town market, where he “swooned at the fragrance of anise, clove, and mint,” or preparing lavish restaurant dishes plated with 90 equally spaced dots of sauce—makes for some vicarious gastronomic thrills.
It doesn’t take a refined palate to savor Ripert’s culinary adventures.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9298-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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