Book Review: DIRT by Bill Buford, in audio on LibroFM
For the past four months, when I found myself in the car for stretches longer than ten minutes, I’ve been listening to the 26 hour long audiobook of Bill Buford’s Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Even the title is long! I don’t think anyone could accuse Bill Buford of being short winded. Part memoir, part travelogue, part history book, Dirt covers the expansive history of not only cooking in Lyon, but French cooking in its entirety! It’s a culinary delight if you’re as obsessed with food as I am.
Honestly, the book started off a little slow for me - the first few chapters were all about Buford getting the idea to go to France and setting up his family to move there, and how he didn’t yet speak French. It was a little too Eat Pray Love for me at that moment. I wanted to hear about the food, so once the book finally started describing meal prep, Michelin starred kitchen gossip, the particularities of each French sauce, and food history, I was completely hooked and immersed myself in the expansive world of food.
Bill Buford is a journalist by training, so we get an insider view into areas of French food life that might not otherwise be seen. Buford learns to slaughter and gut a pig to make blood sausage, he stages at Michelin Star restaurants, he brushes shoulders with the top French chefs, makes bread with an authentic boulanger, and gets behind the scenes information about the process of making the best flour, how voting actually happens at the Meilleur Ouvrier de France competition, and how poorly staff is treated on their way to becoming chefs.
The real gem for me was the food history, a subject I did not realize I was interested in until reading Dirt. Buford dons his hat as an investigative journalist to find the true origins of French cuisine. He traces ingredients and recipes through historical records, even visiting palaces to try to dig up unpublished records of the meals eaten there throughout the years. No real answer was found, but there are quite a few suggestions that part of French cuisine did, in fact, follow Catherine de Medici and her court across the border from Italy. Regardless, there are moments in time where French food becomes undeniably French, and this foodie nationalism has lasted to this very day.
The biggest takeaway of the book is how important dirt is for real food. Buford doesn’t repeat the word “terroir” too often, but the sense is that the best and most authentic food needs to have come from the dirt- the flour should be fresh and taste like wheat, you should be able to taste the volcanic soils of the Auvergne, and the Poulet de Bresse should be inherently recognizable as such, and not just because of their blue feet. It’s a gentle advocacy for farming and cooking in the authentic way to preserve not only history, the environment, and culture itself, but also the delights of “gôut” or taste.
If you love food, travel, or cooking, I would highly recommend taking a vacation through Dirt and then trying your hand at some of the classic French recipes - I’m starting with the sauce.
THE BOOK
Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking
Paperback - $17
Hardcover - was $28.95, now $21.71 on sale (25% off)
IF YOU LIKE THIS, YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany; $17 Paperback
DRINK THIS WHILE YOU’RE READING DIRT
Beaujolais - a classic, inexpensive quaffer for most meals in that part of the world, the author drank a lot of this throughout the book. We’ve got one on tap, and a few more on the racks.
Famille De Boel France 'Assieges' Cotes-du-Rhone Rouge 2019 - $24 Retail - Lyon is in the heart of the Rhone Valley, and this is a classic example of the red wine that comes out of this region.
If you’re a busy person or keen to experiment with different types of “reading,” let me recommend LibroFM to you. Like Audible, you can listen to most of your favorite books on audio - many, like Dirt, are even read by the author themself! The pricing is the same as Audible, but the proceeds go towards independent bookstores like Book + Bottle rather than to a behemoth like Amazon. I think the user experience is better on LibroFM, their customer service is exquisite, and you can even purchase/check out books through the mobile app now - something that Audible doesn’t have yet!
