Mort Rosenblum
List Price: $28.95
By: G. K. Hall & Company
Amazon Marketplace: 5
new & used starting at $4.75
|
Buy at Amazon.com
|
Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Cooking by Ingredient -> Meat, Poultry & Seafood -> Poultry
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Gastronomy -> General AAS
Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
What a disappointment! 1 out of 5 stars.
14 of 19 people found this review helpful.
I was ecstatic about receiving this book for Christmas, as it was heavily touted on the local NPR station and on this site. My enthusiasm was not rewarded.Mort Rosenblum has been to lots of parts of France and, on the way, taken good notes. He also is convinced that his experiences point to the decline of 'the better days' in French cuisine, etc. and that you will care. What he doesn't do, however, is help you care by telling you what brings that decline about, how to regain this Eden, if it's inevitable, what the moral to his tale is, etc.. In short, the cause is a nice platform for him to try out his tedious and bombastic style while he tells you what it's like in France a la Rosenblum.
Cuisine is, of course, not dead in France, though the country continues to change in the face of an evolving Europe and modernity encroaches, as ever it has. Rosenblum tells you that, but without taking the next logical step: urging you to go see it. If you can't go to France to experience directly all that entails for the lover of food (which you should, with an open mind and gastronomical vigor), pick up a humble and compelling tale like M.F.K. Fischer's _Long Ago in France_. If you do, you'll spare yourself the patronizing ramblings of Rosenblum that often strain for creativity and languish until they pass into the bizarre, as in this analogy, "Still, if Roquefort is marbling its way into the United States, the way those blue pockets spread in wheels of cheese, there is still some way to go."
The only way you can like this book is if you don't have an affinity for food writing or France to be offended or if your generous nature overwhelms your critical mind. Mr. Rosenblum needs you to say, "ain't that man clever." If you can't, you'll not gain from his book.
Editorial Review:
Wending his way through the French countryside, Rosenblum takes readers on a tour of France. In Paris, he finds Alain Ducasse, with six Michelin stars, hard at work building an haute cuisine empire. He visits a snail rancher, oyster rustlers, and the fabled Chateau Petrus. Bruno the Truffle King rhapsodizes to him about fragrant black fungus. Looking at the way the French live through how they cook, eat, and market their cuisine, Rosenblum offers a picture of a country at war with the clichs that both define and degrade its national character.
