100 books like Babette's Feast and Other Stories

This book combines the best in travel writing with history, art, and food. Attlee takes the readers through Italy, from Lake Garda’s lemon houses and the gardens of Tuscan villas to the scented bergamot groves in Calabria to a marmalade kitchen in Sicily. Along the way, we learn about the “garden poem,” a genre of poetry practiced in the 10th and 11th centuries by Islamic poets living in Sicily. The book also includes recipes for a chocolate tart from Capri, a lamb stew from a 13th-century Arabic cookbook, candied peels, and drinks using the abundant variety of citrus available in Italy. It’s a book for all the senses, a great read for gardeners during the winter months.

If you like wine, you need to read this book. Winemaking goes back at least 8,000 years, but only in recent times has so much of its production been determined by the application of science, and the taste of the wines we drink dictated by wine critics, appellation tasting committees, and global markets. This book celebrates the innovators who are trying to make wines that are more natural, fuller in character, and more exciting. Their approach also has potential benefits for human health and our environment, and reading this book has sent me off on wonderful journeys through the south of France trying to find such oddities as orange wine (no, orange wine is not made from oranges!)

First published in 1820, this book reminds us that nefarious practices have always been used by food producers, and that these practices are generally intended to boost profits with little concern for human health. ‘There is death in the pot!’ the author tells us in his preface, and he goes on to catalogue how products such as beer and bread, cheese and cognac, olive oil and vinegar were all being adulterated or counterfeited. More unusually, he goes on to explain case by case how the layperson can unmask the fraudsters with a little knowledge of home chemistry. Unfortunately for his readers past and present, technological developments since 1820 have allowed unscrupulous purveyors of human sustenance to develop countless new ways of disguising poor-quality or badly-deteriorated food.

This book is only available in French, but I include it because it provides such an impressive overview of a period when French cooking began to establish itself as Europe’s pre-eminent cuisine. I referred to it frequently during my own research into French gastronomy. In a few short pages we learn about the emergence of the first celebrity chefs and food critics, the evolution of how food was served in polite society in France and other parts of Europe, and the way in which new ingredients such as maize and potatoes became staples of the peasant diet. There is also a section on Napoleon’s own culinary preferences, which reveals more about the tastes of the common soldier than the general.

You may know this book as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but you probably don’t really know it. Films, most notably the Disney cartoon, have grossly distorted this novel, often having Esmeralda ride off into the sunset with Phoebus. But the novel is really a very dark, Gothic story of love and lust, and one of the first existential novels. Frollo and Quasimodo both love Esmeralda, but she loves Phoebus, and he only loves himself. In the end, everyone dies, allowing their lust to destroy their common sense. Hugo wrote it to help popularize and save Notre-Dame Cathedral from falling into further disrepair. It influenced British author William Harrison Ainsworth to write The Tower of London, thus revitalizing British Gothic in a new way just as it did French Gothic.

The description above segues nicely into The New Paris by Lindsey Traumata, published in 2017. Traumata now has a second book published, and hosts a podcast, and is popular on social media. I have spent at least a month (and sometimes three) in Paris annually over the past six years and think of Traumata’s first book as a good friend. She writes wonderful profiles of people, and she keeps readers updated about bistros, winemakers, new cuisine. Her writing is elegant, and I read her descriptions as avidly as I do a novel, constantly making notes. So different from the usual guidebooks.

What’s not to love about a book set in Paris about a journalist who falls in love with a Frenchman? This book is a delight. Turnbull writes beautifully, and with modesty and humour about making every faux pas imaginable in Paris. It’s light and insightful at the time. The pages practically turned themselves.

This is an intimate, first-person account of 1920’s Paris, and the life of one of the most central characters of the period—the model, singer, and artist, Kiki of Montparnasse as she was known by all. Born in Burgundy in 1901, christened Alice Prin, and raised by her grandmother in abject poverty, at age twelve she was shipped off to Paris to live with the mother she had never known.

The young Alice’s fierce survival instincts immediately translated into a precocious thirst for experience. At fourteen she had her “first contact with art” when she began posing nude for a sculptor. Thereafter, she assumed the name and embraced life as the irrepressible Kiki. Lover of Man Ray, beloved friend of Soutine, Jean Cocteau, and many other artists of the period, she became the toast of Montparnasse, one of the century’s first truly independent women. Man Ray, Foujita, Kisling, and others immortalized… show more.

I love weaving history into my mysteries so I was drawn to this dark tale of Paris in the Belle Époque. An English girl goes to Paris to study art but, desperately poor, throws her fate into the hands of some shady characters. The atmosphere and scene-setting of Paris during a terrible rainy winter are unforgettable. 

This splendid biography traces the life and times of the Marquise Du Châtelet, born in Paris in December 1706, who became one of the most erudite women of her époque. For fifteen years she was the companion to Voltaire, the best-known of the French philosophes. She mastered calculus and translated Newton’s Principia, in addition to carrying on an active social life and raising several children. She died at the age of 42, following the birth of a daughter conceived with another lover. The author explains her subject’s life course as “from a life of frivolity to a life of the mind.” It’s a great read.