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I love reading about French food.  I hate eating French food.

It began with a browse in the Fayetteville (Arkansas) Public Library where I came across Peter Mayle.  I was intrigued by one of his book titles, A Year In Provence, an area I was interested in based on other reading pleasures.

Mayle is such an engaging writer I feel I am his wing-man as he gallivants about France conversing with endearing French characters he meets along the way.  I would love to share a meal and glass of wine with him. He seems so at ease, always mildly amused and curious, and fully open to being a student of the French culture with any willing native teacher.

A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence, two of Mayle’s early books, focus on his efforts to move from Devon, England and settle into Provence, a southeastern region of France; both are peppered with many references to the area’s food. Some of his other works—Encore Provence and, especially, French Lessons—focus almost exclusively on the food of France.

His writing alerted me to the peculiarities of French cuisine:  pastis, the sweet anise aperitif sometimes compared to cough medicine; the “particularly assertive bouquet” of a pungent cheese from Liverot; and other delectables such as snails that one “should eat through the nose, not through the eyes.”  I don’t eat shellfish; I abhor pungent cheese; I haven’t had cough medicine since I was a child, but Mayle’s delightful descriptions make it all sound like so much fun.

Mayle’s excursions all about France, and especially in Provence, gave me a curiosity for any other books about Provence that I came across.  Sure enough, in a local thrift store I found a large tome titled The Art of Eating.  I had never heard of M.F.K. Fisher at that point, but the 50^th anniversary edition’s introduction mentions her living in Aix-en-Provence when she got a copy of the book’s first edition.  I spent a weekend in that city, back in my 20s, so I bought the book and haven’t looked back since.  I have become so endeared to Fisher’s writing about eating that I use it to inspire my own writing about reading.

Often described as a food writer, her first book Serve It Forth is by her own words “…about eating…and what to eat and…people who eat.”  Fisher focuses on the actions of eating, which is just as anthropological as it is gustatorial.  Consider the Oyster put her on the top of the list of food writers for me.  Reading that 60-page essay had me salivating and hungry.  And, I do not yet eat shellfish. 

My favorite book in the collection of The Art of Eating is by far The Gastronomical Me, in which she recounts her life up to the point of writing this particular essay.  Much of that history was spent in France before World War II, and the honest descriptions of her own bloom into a gourmand endears me to her. First, she learns the exquisite art of eating in French restaurants. Then she traverses French provinces experiencing nuanced wine flavors. She is astonished by the sheer artistry of an out-of-the-way rural stream-side restaurant that serves a whole cooked trout that looks as though it is still in the act of curling through the waters just outside—through it all I accompanied her, ate with her, laughed and cried with her.  France itself beckons.

I’ve read other books of hers since, including a recent reprint of many of her magazine articles, A Stew Or A Story, which include her later excursions to France, and especially Provence.  But in her Art of Eating she frequently mentions an obscure French writer from the early 1800s, Jean Brillat-Sevarin, and his book, The Physiology of Taste.  When perusing the food section of my favorite local bookstore, Pearl’s Bookstore in Fayetteville, I came across that very book only to discover it had been translated by M.F.K. Fisher herself.  I bought it, of course.

Both Brillat-Sevarin and Fisher write about eating duck and eel from the Dombes, a marshy area north of Lyon and west of Switzerland’s Geneva.  Their mentions of all sorts of foods coming from this land include the assertions that they taste of the earth and water of this region.  I see how Fisher had grounded herself in the cuisine of place and people by her close reading of Brillat-Severin.  I yearn for that same connection, even as I shiver at the anticipation of eating mollusks or duck foie gras.

Brillat-Severin is celebrated in the food-writing circle for being one of the first to write about being a gourmand—an enjoyer of good food eaten, especially with others, in a particular place.  He writes elegantly and specifically, distinguishing the “pleasure of eating” from “the pleasures of the table.”  The pleasure of eating is basic, and associated with taste; the pleasures of the table “are known only to the human race,” and relate to place, time, things, and people.  Charles Spence in Gastrophysics scientifically proves him right: our eating circumstances highly influence our taste sensations.

I read The Physiology of Taste a year or so ago. Since then I’ve browsed yet another writer of French cooking and eating—Bill Buford and his two books Dirt and Heat.  While writing this review, I pulled Brillat-Severin’s book off the shelf and was astonished to learn Buford had written the introduction to the 2009 edition of Fisher’s English translation.  I stopped writing this article to re-read his introduction; small world indeed.

Buford wrote that introduction between his first food book, Heat, and his second, Dirt.  In my own characteristic backwardness, I read Dirt first; I came upon it first and it directly relates to French cuisine.  In the book, Buford relates how he first apprenticed with a French chef in the United States, then moved with his family to Lyon, France to more fully experience cooking the cuisine.

In Dirt, as he is relating his chefly aspirations in France, Buford often mentions his earlier excursions through Italian cooking, both here in the States and in Italy.  After finishing the laugh-out-loud, kitchen-informative, cooking-inspiring, and historically-intriguing Dirt, I just had to seek out Heat, the account of his training in Italian food preparations.  In both books, he conjures up a theory about how Italian cooking in the Renaissance had directly influenced French haute cuisine, and—like a good journalist—he develops that theory through his various apprenticeships and focused book research in both countries.

I have told many friends about a passage in Buford’s Dirt that is like an aperitif to my own eventual French food eating.  He relates how his two young sons attended an elementary school in the low-income neighborhood where they lived.  The school had weeds growing through the cracks in the playground’s asphalt. The demographics included a large percentage of immigrant children. There was little money for certain education-related frills.  But the lunches included three courses; were served to the seated children by matrons who knew just how much each child could eat; were eaten silently; and never once repeated a single dish throughout the entire school year.  There was no pressure to eat all the food; but if one course was not finished, then one could not eat the next.  The emphasis was on enjoying the sensation of eating.

As an aspiring apprentice chef, Buford often cooked for his family at home.  He was rather humbled one day when his first-grade sons critiqued his omelet-making skills.

In Dirt, but also in Heat, he frequently mentions the menu he and his crew mates are preparing for the evening’s customers.  These menus almost always include parts of animals I never considered as even edible before: tripe (intestines), testicles, hooves, stomachs, etc.  But one aspect he also emphasizes is the importance of the food’s sourcing.  He quotes one highly-regarded Italian butcher who mentored him about meat quality: “It’s not the breed, it’s the breeding.”  From a French baker who had lines of people down the street every morning explaining why his bread was so desired: “It’s the wheat.”  And so on, highlighting the highly opinionated people who taught him just how important is the food’s geographic origin and how it was raised or grown.

Perhaps part of my hesitation to eat certain foods here in the states is I simply cannot stomach the idea of eating beef or pork that comes from a CAFO (Confined Animal Feedlot Operation).  I eat lamb because efficiency experts have not yet figured out how to convince lamb to eat corn instead of grass, or tolerate living in confined quarters, or meekly accept eating the body parts of their compatriots.

I dream of living in a land where people train their children to truly appreciate the act of eating; where working class people have a tradition of eating out in restaurants that boast affordable, high-class food; where one can taste the earth where the animal or plant was raised and people love talking about that taste.

Perhaps I’m just not quite hungry enough yet.  Maybe I am too cerebral and disconnected from the land where I currently live.  Maybe I haven’t searched out those few and far-between locals who do appreciate, for example, the subtle flavors of the high prairie Ozarks compared to the deep-hollow Ozarks.  Likely I just wasn’t raised in a culture that taught first-grade children about food so well they could critique their parents’ cooking.

So yes, I do not yet eat beef, pork, or eel; pig’s blood, tripe, or lamb’s brain; marrow out of the bone, butter and olive oil and cream all in one sauce; nor veal, frog’s legs, or foie gras.  But based on reading these books, it is now my—perhaps unreasonable—goal to travel and live in Southern France and experience all the terroir of its food.