Setting the Table for Julia Child by David Strauss

Author:David Strauss [Strauss, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Off the Beaten Path

Samuel Chamberlain created a new kind of guidebook to take advantage of his own skills, while serving the needs of Gourmet readers. As Chamberlain announced in the introduction to Bouquet de France, he approached France “with camera, sketchpads and tastebuds.” The product was a guidebook, cookbook, and coffee-table book all rolled into one and aimed at the “food-conscious American.” Like the traditional guidebook, Chamberlain’s volumes provided readers with hotel and restaurant options while suggesting cultural sites worth visiting. It was, in this sense, a combination of the green (sites worth visiting) and red (restaurants and hotels) Michelin guides. In addition, each of his three travel books presented recipes in a supplementary “treasury” at the end of the book, while two of them interspersed more recipes in each chapter. And the lavish illustrations qualified all three volumes as coffee-table books.28

Conventional and distinctive at the same time, Chamberlain’s philosophy of travel sought to draw readers off the beaten path so they would engage more deeply with the local people and culture and spend less time at better-known tourist sites. This theme echoed many travel writers of the past two centuries. However, few had provided detailed accounts of provincial restaurants in almost every region of France, Italy, and Great Britain. In order to take advantage of less traveled routes without amenities and to allow for last-minute changes in the itinerary, Chamberlain also advocated travel by car and a reliance on the picnic for the midday meal.29

Chamberlain borrowed some of his ideas about travel from Maurice-Edmond Sailland, the French epicure, who, as a joke, dubbed himself Curnonsky (literally “why not sky?”) to exploit the cult of Russian culture in early twentieth-century France. During the 1920s, Curnonsky and his companion Marcel Rouff wrote twenty-eight volumes on La France Gastronomique, which evaluated restaurants in every region of the country. These books were the product of a series of automobile trips to the French provinces and expressed the authors’ enthusiasm for linking fine dining and touring by automobile. In addition to reports on French restaurants and inns, they also incorporated regional recipes. As a result of these publications, Curnonsky was voted “prince élu des gastronomes” (the elected Prince of Gastronomers), although he preferred the less pretentious and more accurate “Sa rondeur” or “His plumpness.”30

In educating his American audience about French life and cuisine, Chamberlain borrowed heavily from Curnonsky, whom he had met in Paris in the 1920s, and also recommended the Guide Michelin for France and Italy. Like Sa rondeur, Chamberlain believed that the automobile would enable readers to explore small restaurants, towns, hotels, and monuments in out-of-the-way places; it would also transport the six-hundred-page guidebooks Chamberlain was writing. However, he put his own stamp on these books by marrying information about food, wine, and restaurants with a presentation of the visual charms of provincial towns. His illustrations documented aspects of everyday life from street scenes to local markets to five-hundred-year-old houses, and they served as a model for amateur artists, who Chamberlain urged to follow in his footsteps by sketching, painting, and shooting their way through Europe.

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