Memoirist Elizabeth Bard
states that there are two kinds of croissants.
The first is a “brioche”; the
second, flaky. “I like flake, a croissant with an outer
layer so fine and brittle that you get crumbs all over yourself from the very
first bite.”
Bard’s delectable
memoir, Lunch in Paris, features
multiple recipes—for swordfish, ribs with honey, mackerel, duck and
blackberries, French onion soup, carrot soup, and salmon. Also, “Fennel Salad with Lemon, Olive Oil, and
Pomegranate Seeds,” “Goat Cheese Salad with Fresh Figs,” “Choux Pastries,” “Summer Ratatouille,” and more. To top it off, an essay on French cheeses and
lots of chocolate.
But the main course of Lunch in
Paris is the story of how Bard met, romanced and wed her French husband, Gwendal,
in Paris. She was twenty-five years old
at the time, a graduate student in art history, in London. Gwendal was a graduate student in computer science,
who longed to be a filmmaker.
Their first meal together—at
his tiny studio apartment—was an impromptu lunch concocted of onion, carrots,
ham, and tagliatelle pasta. “It was the best thing I’d ever tasted,” she
writes. “This is amazing,” she said. “You have to give me the recipe.” “ ‘There is
no recipe.’ he said, smiling. ‘I use
whatever I have. It never tastes the
same way twice.’”
That first lunch, on their
first date, was one of many featured in the book. There is a sumptuous lunch at L’Hermès—a fancy restaurant with an
offering of “duck with braised cabbage and apples.” There is lunch with his parents. There are lunches during Bard’s stint as a
tour guide, and a pre-wedding dinner with both sets of parents, at which—except for the
bride and groom—no one spoke the other’s language.
Even so, Bard purports
to have decoded the reason French women are slim. Petite
portions. “A French portion is half of
an American portion, and a French meal takes twice as long to eat,” she
writes. She concluded this after she analyzed her slender French mother-in-law’s
eating style: no snacks, drinks lots of
water, no soda, drinks wine, and eats petite
portions.
During the courtship, as
Bard shuttled back and forth between London and Paris, she was a bit
off-kilter: “The boys I’d been out with before went to the same schools, came
from the same towns. . . . Although
[Gwendal and I] were roughly the same age, we didn’t have the same cultural
references.”
It’s a tale of love in
two cities; but Lunch in Paris is not a Charles Dickens novel. For this is a modern story, a modern love
(he cooked for her!). It’s love, dating, a wedding and marriage,
Parisian style. When he proposed,
Gwendal said, “I know what I want.” He
just wanted to be happy, and to share
his life with her. (Bard and her friends
wanted success.)
Lunch
in Paris is a delectable, delightful hybrid memoir—travel and food. (The language is wonderfully descriptive—not
just white, but “the color of warm milk.”)
A chick-lit memoir—with recipes and
romance—that depicts the realities of living in Paris, and the romantic
ways of one Frenchman.
--Yolanda A. Reid
Check out these
websites: www.elizabethbard.com
www.facebook.com/LunchinParis
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
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