Catching up on French non-fiction

Waaay behind on book reviews, so it's catch-up time.

First up, Hot Sun, Cool Shadow: Savouring the Food, History and Mystery of the Languedoc by Angela Murrills and illustrated by Peter Matthews. This is my second book for the What's In a Name reading challenge which is being hosted by the Carolina Book Nook, covering the category of 'A temperature'.

The Languedoc (the name means Language of the Occitans I believe) region of France is in the south of the country and stretches from the River Rhone to The Pyrenees and the border with Spain. Angela Murrills and her partner, Peter Matthews, both living in Vancouver, fall in love with the area and this book charts ten years of visits leading up to them buying a house there. It's a celebration of their love of food, French food primarily, and their explorations of the region in order to try different dishes. The famous dish of the region is Cassolet, a casserole dish of confit duck, beans, sausage, pork, garlic etc. The author discovers that there's no one recipe, everyone has their own way of making it, this is hardly an unusual thing though. I also enjoyed the retelling of the history of the area, who built the Midi-Canal for instance, it was Pierre-Paul Ricquet, and as seems to be quite common, he died 6 months before it was opened. (There's a lovely TV series from 2007 made by Rick Stein where he does a canal trip down the Midi-Canal, available on dvd, as I have it, or on Youtube I suspect.) Murrills also covers the making of Vermouth, Pizza (the French say they invented it, not the Italians), denim (it's from Nimes thus d'nimes - 'denim'... I love all this language stuff!), cheese, wine, copper pans from Durfort, the list is endless. This is truly a delightful book, one of the best I've read on France and its food. It's quite clear the couple are obsessed with French food and every time they had to go home to Vancouver I must admit I felt quite sorry for them. Whether they're actually living there full-time now I don't know, this book was written in 2005 so it's possible they might be. I would like to think they are.


Lastly, One Sip at a Time: Learning to Live in Provence by Keith Van Sickle.

This book is in the same vein as the previous one, only the author is American rather than Canadian. It's much shorter and written quite differently, with short chapters that recount something that happened to the author or an opinion on a topic. The author and his wife lived in Switzerland for a while during which time they visited France quite a bit. Back living in the USA they missed France and took to spending a few months a year in that country, the idea being to improve their French to the point where they were able to make friends and converse with said new friends. This they managed to achieve with varying degrees of success, but naturally there were mishaps and adventures along the way. This was an entertaining book, a very quick read, the author's style is extremely conversational and self-deprecating. It's one of two and I bought them both for very little for my Kindle. Look forward to reading book two.

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