The book’s dust jacket breathlessly proclaims it as “the definitive account of one of the world’s great culinary cultures,” but “Dirt” is something better: a delightful, highly idiosyncratic exploration of how, as Buford puts it, “a dish is arrived at not by following a set of instructions but by discovering everything about it: the behavior of its ingredients, its history and a quality that some chefs think of as its soul.”
Along the way he tangles with the bêtes noires of every Anglophone in France - the language, the bureaucracy, the arrogance - and embarks, to the great nationalistic dismay of all around him, on a quixotic investigation to prove an Italian origin theory for pot au feu and other French classics. But most enjoyable (for us, if not for him) are the apprenticeships in which he sets out to master the five mother sauces, bake the perfect baguette and construct the same misleadingly named “duck pie” by which one year’s candidates for the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (a kind of culinary knighthood) were judged. The quest will see him consuming with Rabelaisian enthusiasm the region’s cheeses and quenelles and poulets en vessie, and playing bemused supplicant and interrogator to a cadre of beatified chefs, including - holiest of holies - Paul Bocuse himself. Moving himself, his wife and their two young boys to Lyon, Buford sets out, with characteristically self-deprecating humor, not merely to learn the techniques of French cuisine, but to understand its essence. “I know I am pregnant again when I find myself in the anchovy aisle, tracing my fingers along the tins,” she writes, and in that juxtaposition of destiny and canned fish is something that all of us, regardless of our reproductive history, implicitly understand. A teenage afternoon is perfumed with dreams of kissing Han Solo and thick slices of sourdough toast dripping with butter and homemade apricot jam a love of croissants becomes the dagger of an eating disorder in the hands of a dance instructor critical of her weight a love affair is admitted in the willingness to spend a week’s worth of food money on butternut squash and sage ravioli the fierceness of her love for a newborn is recognized in the appetite for ice cream that follows a difficult birth. In epigrammatic, nearly poetic diction, Grant, a ballet dancer turned pastry chef turned damn fine writer, reminds us of how transformative the junctures where food and life collide can be. Culinary memoirs tend to follow templates - the life-altering bite the singed forearms at the hands of a tyrannical kitchen overlord - so to find one with a truly distinct perspective is thrilling.
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