Recent Food Memoirs I've Loved: Dirt by Bill Buford
Next up in my series of reviews of food memoirs I’ve loved:
A driving force behind the last two food memoirs I’ve reviewed has been strife. While Kwame Onwauchi has to struggle with racism and poverty, Lisa Donovan has to struggle with sexism and poverty. Bill Buford has to struggle with ... twin toddlers and the French.
Buford uproots his family (a wife and two toddling twins) for what's known in publishing as a "stunt memoir" (do something crazy for a year, then write about it); his stunt is to be an apprentice in a French kitchen, without knowing much French and being more adept with words than a kitchen knife.
Hardly a hardship, right? Indeed, here's how one reviewer on Goodreads described this book:
"Well connected Rich Guy moves to France to cook. Really a tough read in this post-Covid world where we are anxiously hoarding toilet paper and beans."
Nevertheless, I adored this book. After all, beautiful stories about our shared humanity can come from many different voices. And this is not only a beautiful story, but a meaningful — I might even say essential — read.
After a bureaucratic labyrinth and all kinds of string-pulling, Buford and family land in Lyon, where he eventually becomes an unpaid stagiaire in a renown Lyonnais kitchen. The bully in chief quickly lets Buford know where he stands:
“You think you are funny. You are not funny. You are not a fancy writer. You are here to suck my [expletive].”
Throughout his stage, Buford recounts humiliations (which he's refreshingly willing to reveal) along with a few triumphs and some great kitchen wisdom along the way.
While all that makes for a vastly entertaining read, the book quite often and more importantly strikes the emotional chord I seek in food memoir. The most powerful comes when he tells of a hand-made, handwritten recipe book he found that was written a French soldier imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II.
According to Buford’s research, hundreds of such cookbooks were written by French prisoners of war. As Buford turns the book, simply titled “Recettes,” over again and again in his mind and his writing, he comes to realize what food was for the authors of those war-camp cookbooks – and for the rest of us:
“Food – la cuisine – is no longer the obsession of an aristocratic butterfly, but everyone, peasant and gourmand. It needs to be preserved, like civility, like dignity, like the table, like a shelter that protects us from the ugliness just outside our front door – the crudeness, cruelty, selfishness, the incomprehensible injustice. Cuisine, the author of Recettes recognizes, protects us in our humanity.”
The best food memoirs tell us, each in its own compelling and original way, why food matters. This one does so with a great combination of wit and heart, through and through.
