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Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
John Baxter
#UC3092
Paperback, 270 pages; 2008
$13.95
 Members' Price: $11.86
According to legend, François Vatel, chef to the Prince de Condé in the time of Louis XIV, greeted news that the seafood had not arrived for a Friday banquet by going home and running on his sword. Maybe that was a little extreme. But I knew how he felt.
Cooking for the in-laws may seem a slender theme for a whole book, but the sweetly obsessive John Baxter tells a story of it that is as rich as the family recipe for twenty-five-egg mousse. It helps that the story is set in and around Paris, where he moved to marry his wife, Marie-Dominique. A self-taught chef who grew up in Australia on soggy vegetables and perfectly rectangular loaves of white bread, Baxter relates the glories and anxieties of cooking Christmas dinner for his adopted French family. His prose blazes with the warmth he feels for them (unforgiving palates and all), for Paris, and, certainly, for French cuisine. In separate chapters he waxes reverently on cheeses, grapes, and apples, and each ingredient leads down a winding path of memory, of holidays and meals past—and of the mad preparations that preceded them. Seasoned with wry humor, Immoveable Feast is the sort of dish one wants to savor but gobbles instead.
(BB)
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