Présentation de l'éditeur
A glorious, edible tour of Paris through six decades of writing from Gourmet magazine, edited and introduced by Ruth Reichl
For sixty years the best food writers have been sending dispatches from Paris to Gourmet. Collected here for the first time, their essays create a unique and timeless portrait of the world capital of love and food. When the book begins, just after the war, we are in a hungry city whose chefs struggle to find the eggs and cream they need to re-create the cuisine from before the German occupation. We watch as Paris comes alive again with zinc-topped tables crowded with people drinking café au lait and reveling in crisp baguettes, and the triumphant rebirth of three-star cuisine. In time, nouvelle cuisine is born and sweeps through a newly chic and modern city. It is all here: the old-time bourgeois dinners, the tastemakers of the fashion world, the hero-chefs, and, of course, Paris in all its snobbery and refinement, its inimitable pursuit of the art of fine living. Beautifully written, these dispatches from the past are intimate and immediate, allowing us to watch the month-by-month changes in the world’s most wonderful city. Remembrance of Things Paris is a book for anyone who wants to return to a Paris where a buttery madeleine is waiting around every corner.
Contributors include Louis Diat, Naomi Barry, Joseph Wechsberg, Judith and Evan Jones, Don Dresden, Lillian Langseth-Christensen, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, and Jonathan Gold.
Extrait
Paris in the Twenties
Irene Corbally Kuhn
The year was 1921. The month was May. The city was Paris. And I had just bought a new hat that I remember to this day: an exquisite, wide-brimmed straw hat trimmed with an enormous silk violet. I was about to start work as fashion editor, general reporter, and the only woman on the ten-member staff of the four-year-old Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.
The world had passed through the long darkness of the “war to end all wars” and was more than ready for the frenzied gaiety and brief brilliance of the roaring twenties. Paris was packed with Americans—and, for the most part, the French were happy to have us. Artists, writers, composers, dilettantes, bankers, businessmen, army officers, diplomats, and journalists, we had little in common beyond a passion for Paris and tended to travel in separate circles that only occasionally intersected. The journalists were a most clannish group. We did not mix with the literati, which is to say the Americans who came to Paris to write novels. We were, however, most gregarious and mixed with everyone else, because a story could come from anywhere. And frequently it did.
The Paris Chicago Tribune was one of the two principal English- language daily newspapers published there through the 1920s. The other was the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. Although their names were similar they had little else in common. The Paris Chicago Tribune, known as “the Trib,” was a grubby gamin compared with that sober, prosperous burgher, the Paris Herald Tribune, known as “the Herald,” and whereas the competition between the two was friendly, it was often fierce. The Herald had been around a long time; the Trib was a brash newcomer, founded to keep the troops of the American Expeditionary Forces stationed in France during World War I in touch with news from home.
The Herald had editorial offices; the Trib was put out from a single, dingy room on the upper floor of a building on the rue Lamartine—an unremarkable street running off the rue Lafayette on the Right Bank. There were no desks, merely scarred, battered plank tables to support the decrepit typewriters, of which there were never enough to go around. Rickety chairs, a Telex machine, a few telephones, and a half dozen or so naked lightbulbs dangling from a painted-tin ceiling completed the décor. A few of the bulbs were covered with makeshift shades fashioned from newsprint, alarmingly charred. This inel
