Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Cookery / food & drink etc

COQUILLES, CALVA & CREME

Joanne Dryansky G.Y. Dryansky

Exploring France's Culinary Heritage: A Love Affair with Real French Food

A celebration and critique of the French culinary landscape and a gastronomical excursion across the French countryside in search of the unsung cooks who are still doing it right.

A culinary memoir that brings to life some of the most fascinating, glamorous food years in France and reveals gastronomical treasures from gifted artisans of the French countryside. Dryansky’s stories are the stuff of legend—evenings with Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, historic wine auctions and memorable banquets—but Coquilles, Calva, and Créme is more than memories. These same memories prompt a journey across modern-day France, through kitchens, farms, and vineyards, offering a savory experience that can be duplicated by the reader afterward with numerous recipes, most of which have never before been recorded. In the world of today’s professional cooking, publicity-chasing and performance has overshadowed the importance of dining and the food itself. Too often the modern restaurant is a mixture of bizarre novelty and paradoxical clichés. Truly great dining happens when you’re fully engaged in the moment, acknowledging the range of associations that emerge, as Proust wrote, from sensory experiences. From small cafés in Paris to Normandy, Alsace, the Basque country, and beyond, Dryansky takes us on a sweeping sensory journey, with a voice as thoughtful as Kingsolver, as entertaining as Bourdain, and as cogent and critical as Pollan. Gerry Dryansky has called Paris home for more than thirty years, two decades of which he spent as the senior European correspondent forCondé Nast Traveler. He has written for magazines and newspapers around the globe and lives in France with his wife, Joanne, who is the coauthor of this volume.

Available products
Book Published 2012-06-01 by Pegasus

Comments

For those who long for that French holiday they’re never likely to get, at least not this year, “Coquilles, Calva & Creme,” by G.Y. Dryansky with Joanne Dryansky, will be sheer torture. I mean that in the best sense. Read more...

He then takes us on an eclectic excursion across France -- not to fancy, famous restaurants and kitchens, but to hidden, humble, sometimes primitive ones, where wonderful, unexpected things unfold, and the magical melding of deeply engaged eating with every other part of life is illuminated. The book includes some pretty cool photos and artwork, too. Dryansky is not a mere critic; he is a man of letters who gets what most Americans do not about France's culinary heritage. A real feast for the soul, this one. Read more...

"Coquilles, Calva, & Crème" (meaning scallops or shellfish in general, the great Norman apple brandy called Calvados, and of course that deadly cream) is an evocation of the kind of cooking that made French food famous in the first place. It comes garnished with two subtitles—"Exploring France's Culinary Heritage" and "A Love Affair With Real French Food"—and most of its pages are indeed devoted to such exploration and to expressions of such love. Read more...

I have had the incredible good luck to have eaten dozens and dozens of French meals with Gerry Dryansky, and he was never wrong. I mean, never. We would travel down some little street, to some little restaurant, and then: delight, pure pleasure. There’s nobody I know, in Paris or New York, who understands French food the way Gerry does. And surely nobody who writes about it as well as he does.

The prose is as rich and delicious as the highlighted meals, and the authors also include some of the chefs' recipes for confident or adventurous home cooks to try. A journey that will delight the palette and nourish the soul.