What it’s about: Did you ever read that story in The New Yorker from a few years ago, about a writer who moved to Lyon with his family and apprenticed with a baker named Bob (real name “Yves,” mais tout le monde l’appelait Bob), when it truth it was about diligence, humility, and the beauty of community-making? Did you know it was an adapted excerpt from Bill Buford’s latest memoir, published in 2020? This book chronicles his five years in the French heartland in pursuit of why we hold the culinary traditions of France in such high regard—both in our minds and our palates. Buford’s writing is passionate, endlessly curious, and meticulous (a scene of a pig’s butchering is intense, an explanation of the French visa process is illuminating), and this tome—clocking in at over 400 pages—will keep you satiated over multiple trips to Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, and elsewhere.
You should read this when: You’re looking to read an adventurous story, like an epic saga, but you’re also in the mood for a glimpse into the culinary world—something like “Odysseus, but in France.”
The book’s opening lines: “On a bright, chilly, autumnal afternoon in 2007, I met Michel Richard, a chef and the man who would radially change my life—and the lives of my wife, Jessica Green, and our two-year-old twins—without my quite knowing who he was, and in the confidence that, whoever he might be, he was someone I would never see again.”
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