Vie De France : Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley

Vie de France is James Haller's 2008 memoir-with-recipes, set during a single summer in the Loire Valley with the cooking-school students of a small-town New Hampshire chef. Haller (the founder of the Blue Strawbery restaurant in Portsmouth, NH) takes a small cohort of cooks to a rented Loire Valley farmhouse to relearn cooking the way the French village around him cooks: at the pace of the local market, with the people who live next door.

Haller writes the way the best food memoirs work: through specific small moments rather than through grand culinary arguments. The summer chapters (the asparagus harvest, the wine-and-cheese pairing arguments with the neighbors, the village funeral and the meal that followed) are sensory-precise. The recipes (about twenty are scattered throughout) are sourced rather than invented and have the kind of ten-line simplicity that betrays a chef who knows what he is doing.

Recommended for readers of culinary memoir (Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun, M. F. K. Fisher's Long Ago in France), and for readers looking for books like Vie de France in the cook-relearns-cooking-abroad subgenre. Four solid stars.