A delicious history of French food culture

The Table Comes First

Family, France,
and the Meaning of Food

By Adam Gopnik

Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pp. $25.95

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Reviewed by Susan Balée

Adam Gopnik likes to read cookbooks before bed. I like to read Adam Gopnik before bed.

Well, I like to read the New Yorker before bed, and quite frequently it's a Gopnik column that keeps me up past my bedtime.

Everyone who knows his work knows Gopnik is a foodie, a Francophile, and a witty literary type who hails from Philadelphia. He now lives in New York City; he dotes on his wife and kids (and now dog); he likes to read, to travel, to cook, and to entertain. Those essential ingredients always show up one place or another in his columns and books and, sure enough, they do here, too.

This one, however, is a grander project than he has previously attempted. It's nothing less than the history of French food culture, a topic he approaches from a variety of angles, like a housewife with a chicken she can choose to broil, braise, bake, stew, fry, or grill. The beginning is the same, but the results are as various as the methods.

Still, the beginning is the same. As in the Bible, in the beginning there was the word. "The restaurant, it turns out, was a thing to eat before it was a place to go. Restaurant, appearing around 1750, was the new name for bouillon, a chicken or beef broth."

Although women couldn't hang out in taverns or cafes, they could go enjoy this liquid restorative at a restaurant. "One by one, all the other things we associate with restaurants - menus, uniformed waiters, mirrored walls - were established, all with an eye to creating a public place that felt like home, and if not your home, then the home of somebody richer with better servants."

The first restaurants were in the Palais Royale in Paris, and the French Revolution helped to spur their proliferation. After all, what were the cooks of all those guillotined aristocrats to do with their skills? Between 1780 and 1830, Gopnik tells us, Paris as we now know it came into being, and with it came the modern restaurant. As labor specialized with the industrial revolution, so did places to eat and drink - hence the distinction in France between restaurants, bistros, brasseries, and cafes.

The first great food writer, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, emerged from the National Assembly with his head still attached and fled France for America in 1792. Like so many political refugees from Europe, he spent time in Philadelphia, in his case teaching rich girls how to speak French and play the violin. He returned to France as soon as he could, just in time to watch the English and German victors of the Napoleonic Wars pour into Paris to be "converted (and fleeced) by the cultural force of French food and flirtation."

Brillat-Savarin realized that "the soft power of food and free love (or love for hire) could be more powerful than the steel power of armies." Gopnik notes that no successful militaristic nation has ever cared much about eating. It's certainly true that I've never met a French, Italian, or Spanish native who came to America for the quality of our national cuisine. Apparently, we have other, less edible charms.

Gopnik studies the evolution of cookbooks and falls in love with another Francophile who hailed from Philadelphia, Elizabeth Pennell, the Victorian author of Diary of a Greedy Woman. This gourmand was an anomaly in her time; Gopnik calls her "the Nigella Lawson of the Age of Whistler." Pennell felt a great meal ranked right up there with great sex (indeed, it seems clear that, for Pennell, the one was the necessary prelude to the other). Ah, to dine; perchance to dream. Imagine the mouthfeel of a morel, the bouquet and warmth of a pinot noir; give in to the sugar rush of an eclair, to Eastern spices that make your cheeks blush. Gopnik pens his dead soul mate a sheaf of billets-doux, right up until he finds out something about her and her relationship to his own Philadelphia ancestors that makes his blood run cold. Not as cold as a jugged hare, but still. . . .

This book is the one you want to give your foodie friends for the next big holiday. Gopnik snuggles into his topic like a farm-raised pig snuggles into the organic mud in his sty, investigating everything from the Michelin Guide's spinoffs in France to the latest molecular cooking heating up Barcelona. He eats weeds in Central Park with Wildman Steve Brill in order to learn about the locavore movement at ground level (be sure you know the difference between lamb's-quarter and white snakeroot if the recession gets so bad you are forced to eat what you can forage in a city park). Gopnik shadows rock-star chefs at work in their kitchens and lets them introduce him to the secrets of their temples, and he has a few secrets of his own to share.

We love food because our species wears its memories of famine like a scar on the cortex. Gopnik has that other quality of the human brain in its highest form: He can manipulate language until it becomes its own sensual pleasure. As the French say about a beautiful plate of food, this book is bien-presenté. Enjoy it.