2,457: Mastering the Art of French Eating by Ann Mah

It’s Paris in July month, jointly hosted by Bookbath and Thyme for Tea and, although I’m late to the party as usual, I’m glad to be here, posting about a wonderful book which I suspect should best be read just before making a visit to France as otherwise it is likely to cause intense pangs of longing to the non-French reader.

The phrase “When good Americans die, they go to Paris” has been ascribed to many authors including Oscar Wilde, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thomas Appleton but, regardless of who first came up with this aphorism, Ann Mah, the author of Mastering the Art of French Eating and a self-confessed lifelong Francophile, must have felt like she’d died and gone to heaven when her diplomat husband is given a three year posting to Paris.  Shortly after arriving, however, their dreams of living in one the world’s most romantic cities are shattered as he is summoned to Iraq for a year.  Lonely and worried for his safety, she is suddenly required to create a new life for herself in a new home.

As well as reaching out both to the expat community, to friends of friends and to the colleagues she meets while volunteering as the programs manager at the American Library, Mah, an avid foodie, encouraged mainly via Skype by her other half, launches herself into an investigation of the history and culture of some of France’s most iconic dishes.  Along the way, she takes trips to their regions of origin, meets chefs and aficionados and partakes fully of some of France’s most renowned fare.

Most of the items she chooses to focus on are brasserie and bistro such as Paris’ steak-frites, the choucroute garni of Alsace and the cassoulet of the South West.  Reading her descriptions of the meals she ate and her encounters with local champions of the dishes is enough to make one’s tummy rumble, something which, in my opinion, is a good indicator of the quality of a book about food.  As well as these staples, she touches on a couple of more unusual regional classics, the Provençal soupe au pistou and the crêpes de sarrasin of Brittany and learns of the real passion with which the locals treat their culinary heritage.  Of course, it’s not all plain sailing - Mah admits defeat at the, how shall I put this, intestinal odour of true AAAAA approved andouillette from Troyes which, to be fair, although I have acquired the taste, I can understand - Mrs F wasn’t overly impressed when I ordered it at the excellent Brasserie Zedel here in London as its odour is truly of the farmyard.  About the only grumble I really had was her contention that aligot, the cheese and mashed potato concoction of the Aveyron region is not very well-known outside the area.  I can’t speak for the US, of course, but here in the UK, it has featured in a Delia Smith cookbook (the bestselling cookbook author of them all here) as well as the late Mireille Johnston’s A Cook’s Tour of France, albeit masquerading under another name - so it’s not exactly a secret.

Mastering the Art of French Eating is part travelogue, part memoir, part foodie investigation but it is, as much as anything, a love letter to France and Paris in particular and a bittersweet tale of involuntary separation.  Mah’s exploratory trips into the French regions are nicely interspersed with the story of her life in Paris, which, although difficult as life can be for the trailing spouse of a diplomat (something even the title alludes with its nudge towards another lonely diplomatic wife in Paris - Julia Child who also found purpose and solace in French cooking), is also full of new experiences.

Mah, the daughter of Adeline Yen Mah, the author of Falling Leaves, is a gifted writer who conveys a real sense of place and of feeling as well as being a dab hand at foodie description.  I thoroughly enjoyed Mastering the Art of French Eating and would recommend it to anyone who likes France, food or travel-writing.  Thank you very much to Penguin for allowing me to read this via Netgalley.

2,524: The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby

I’ve always enjoyed long train journeys.  I like the feeling of being close to the country through which you are passing and having the leisure to observe it without having to concentrate as one does whilst driving.  It’s less antiseptic and homogenous than modern air travel, where one airport could be another, and far less strenuous than cycling.  Some of my favourite train journeys have been the overnighter from Moscow to Leningrad I did in 1987, the trip down the East Coast and South of the US I made a decade later and the journey I made from London to the Swedish part of the Arctic Circle I did with Mrs F on our honeymoon a few years ago.

One trip we haven’t made though is the Trans-Siberian (or Trans-Manchurian if you drop Vladivostock and head down through Mongolia to China) Railway and this remains an ambition of ours, a trip we hope to do when and if I finally get to retire.  It’s probably the most famous railway of them all, stretching nearly 6000 miles from Moscow to the Russian Pacific coast and passing through seven time zones.  As Eric Newby described it in The Big Red Train Ride, “The Trans-Siberian is the big train ride.  All the rest are peanuts.”

Newby, the author of many travel books, including the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, made the journey with his Slovenian wife, Wanda, in 1977.  Back in those days, of course, the Soviet Union still existed and the Communist authorities tightly controlled the travel schedules of those foreigners it permitted to enter the country.  The Newbys were therefore required to travel with Otto, a German photographer, and Mischa, a guide from the official Intourist travel agency, whose role was not only to help them but also to shepherd them and ensure they saw only what the authorities would want them to see.

The Big Red Train Ride is a bit of a curate’s egg.  On the positive side, it is an interesting historical record of the way in which foreign travellers in the Soviet Union were treated during the Communist era and also a picture of life in rural Russia at that time. There are evocative word portraits of the limited availability of food stuffs and consumer products and some amusing vignettes of bizarre official visits arranged for the Newbys and Otto by Intourist.

There are also some entertaining passages detailing life on the train and, in particular, the attitudes of the female train conductors, some of whom appeared to be acting almost as guards, attempting top prevent the Newbys from getting access to the other part of the train where the travellers were Russian.

However, Newby runs into the problem that writers are almost bound to experience when writing about train journeys.  Trains are, by their very nature, closed environments and make finite stops for limited periods of time.  This can make for limited source material for the hopeful author.  Writers such as Paul Theroux gets round this problem either by using a number of train journeys in their books (The Great Railway Bazaar, Riding the Iron Rooster) or by making extended stops along the way (The Old Patagonian Express).  Unfortunately for Newby, he has neither of these opportunities.  The Trans-Siberian is a single train for the length of its journey, with the same passengers for most of the way and, at the time he weas writing, he was only allowed to alight at certain specified stations and then only for eh amount of time Intourist would let him.

It may be that a Paul Theroux could still have made something of this, especially in light of the wonderful descriptions of his travelling companions on the Orient Express in The Great Railway Bazaar but, to be honest, I don’t think Newby is in the same league as Theroux as a writer and, in any event, he was pretty much restricted to being with his wife, Otto and Mischa for much of the journey and there is only so much one can do with such a limited cast.

What this means, though, is that Newby has to pad the book out somewhat with potted histories of not only places he visits but also places the train just happens to be passing and, although some of the information is interesting, there is is just too much of it for a travel book.

Overall, this is a patchy book, worth reading if you are interested in Russia, train travel or the Trans-Siberian itself but eminently skippable if you are not.

2,530: 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames

In one of those serendipitous events that seem to be a frequent occurrence in the lives of many writers, Andrew Eames was staying in Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, where he was introduced to the mother of the owner who was persuaded to retell the story of how Agatha Christie and her second husband, Max Mallowan had come to dinner with her and her husband.

As Eames later found out, in the aftermath of the breakdown of her first marriage and her infamous eleven day “disappearance”, Christie had, on a whim, decided to take the train to Iraq for a holiday.  Outlandish as this may seem today, in 1928, when she took her trip, this was a perfectly “doable” exercise, which took eight days, using two luxury trains.  It was on this trip that she first met Max Mallowan, a young archaeologist and, having married him in 1930, she would spend her summers for the next 30 years assisting him on his digs in Syria and Iraq.

The route of Christie’s original trip took her through a veritable gazetteer of modern trouble spots: the Balkans, Syria and Iraq and, spotting a good “hook”, Eames decided to recreate her journey in early 2005, before the Iraq war but at a point where it looked inevitable.

The resulting book, 8.55 to Baghdad, traces this journey and interweaves his impressions of these countries today with his quest to find traces of Christie’s journey in the places he visits, starting in Sunningdale, the scene of the last years of Christie’s unhappy first marriage, where Eames catches the titular 8.55 train, which actually takes him to Victoria to catch the Orient Express.

Eames’ concept is quite a tricky one as he is trying to fit two very distinct stories into one book: the personal history of a middle class novelist in the 1920s and the story of the impact of conflict in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries.  Although, for me, he doesn’t quite manage to carry the whole thing off, it is, nevertheless, an enjoyable piece of travel writing.

There are some vivid passages in the book and, given the material to work with, Eames is capable of telling a good story, in particular, his journey through Iraq with a spectacularly mismatched bunch of tourists, all clearly members of that weird sub-species of travellers who are drawn like lemmings to grim places for their holidays.

He is also very good at illustrating, through the accounts of his personal encounters, the general humanity and kindness of people who can often be perceived as nameless and faceless representatives of countries with whom we are in conflict.  Eames reminds us that, regardless of where we are from, most of us are reasonably decent people, just trying to make a life for ourselves and our families.

Although Eames professes to be a Christie fan and to be interested in following her steps, 8.55 to Baghdad doesn’t really show this and the Christie bits seem to be a little half-hearted and even suggest a lack of familiarity with her and her books.  Indeed, he confesses at the beginning to not even knowing who Max Mallowan was.  The book feels like Christie was just a tool to link his travels together.

I also found that his historical interludes, whilst interesting, were a bit shallow and came across as if he’d done a little bit of basic research to fill out his personal stories, rather than showing any detailed knowledge.  It’ a bit of a quibble but it detracted from the book for me.

Overall, though, despite these issues, I enjoyed the book, although I suspect that it won’t stick long in the mind.  It was, however, sufficiently interesting and informative that I will be checking out his other travel book, Blue River, Black Sea.

2,552: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.  When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.  Nothing has worked.”

Travel writing and I have a bittersweet relationship.  In a world in which I didn’t have to work for a living, didn’t have responsibilities and didn’t have a penchant for luxury hotels with cool, Egyptian cotton bed linen and cocktail bars, I would be a traveller, dragging Mrs F and mini-Falaise to all parts of the compass, just to see what’s there.  Deep down though, that kind of lifestyle wouldn’t really work for me.  I’m always glad to get home from a trip, I don’t deal well with the discomforts of travel and I don’t have the social skills that seemingly enable travel writers to get into story-worthy situations.

All that means that I love reading about travel but always suffer the contradictory pangs of wanderlust and inner knowledge that I’m just not cut out for that kind of life.  Nevertheless, travel writing remains one of my favourite genres and Travels with Charley has been a part of my collection since I first read it in the mid-1990s.  So, when the Classics Circuit announced its Steinbeck tour, I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with it.

In 1960, a depressed and ill Steinbeck, having long moved away from his roots and feeling a need to reconnect with America, bought a pick-up truck and had a small cabin built on its flat bed.  He then set off on a long loop around America with only his French poodle, Charley, as a companion.  Never revealing his own identity, he sought to meet and engage with people throughout the country.

What emerges is part travel journal, part memoir and part opinion piece.  Steinbeck notes a decline in local cultures as cities expand, with a homogenous culture spreading its wings.  He sees the beginnings of the destruction of the environment, the iniquities of racism and the growth of consumerism.

His emotional journey is a little like a drive through gentle, rolling hills.  He has moments of joy, such as his love of Montana, his pleasure at the variable weather of New England, his new impressions of San Francisco and the kindness of many of the strangers he met, like the garage owner in a nameless town in Oregon who searched and searched to find him new tires on which to continue his journey.

Of course, like the hills, his journey had valleys as well as peaks and there are episodes of palpable sadness like the visit he makes to an old hangout, Johnny Garcia’s bar in Monterey, which descends from joy to bitter recrimination as both he and Johnny realise that people change as time passes and nothing stays the same forever. He also experiences the nostalgic ache of looking into the valley where his parents’ ranch was in Northern California and remembering old times.

There is also anger, most explicitly in his description of the demonstrations against the integration of a school in New Orleans, where a gaggle of middle-aged matrons, known as the Cheerleaders, orchestrate the taunting of a tiny black child and of the white father and child who dared to defy the mob by going to school.

“But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate.  In a long and unprotected life, I have seen and  heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow?”

The contrast between the powdered, supposedly God-fearing matrons of Louisiana and the tiny, frightened children, both black and white, is almost visceral.

There’s an overarching sense in Travels with Charley of the impermanence of things, of the ever-changing nature of people and places.  Maybe this is so obvious because of the changes that Steinbeck had sensed in himself with his depression, his illness and his alienation from that part of America that had driven his writings.  Steinbeck had always been a physical man and, maybe, his physical decline affected his view of the changes in America since he had last been rooted in the land:

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."

Indeed, according to Steinbeck’s son, he made his trip because he sensed he was dying and wanted to see his country one last time.  Fortunately, he was to live for another eight years and would see himself awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Earlier this year, a writer in the USA retraced Steinbeck’s journey and wrote a piece, claiming that much of Travels with Charley was made up, including the amount of time he spent apart from his wife, the amount of time he spent in his truck, Rocinante and most of the dialogue.  Indeed, there is something very stagy and artificial about many of his encounters.

But, does this matter?  I’ve always suspect that much of the best travel writing has something of the fictional about it.  I don’t really believe that all of the reported conversations can be word for word accurate or that every single encounter happened.  It doesn’t matter.  Unless a book sets out to be a factual description of a place or a piece of journalism, I’d rather read a better book that has been “enhanced” than a more mundane book that remains strictly accurate.

In the end, regardless of the facts, Travels with Charley is a beautiful, melancholic, piece of writing with flashes of humour and some serious opinions that still ring true today.

If you’d like to read more posts on Steinbeck’s works, the other tour participants today are:

Bibliographing on The Acts of King Arthur

Becky's Book Reviews on either The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden