Paris - History, Holidays, Religious, Holidays, Christian, European Studies - France, Cooking Essays, Paris - Travel, France - Travel Essays & Descriptions, Holiday Cooking - Christmas, Australian & New Zealand Literary Biography, French Cooking

Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

Name: Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas
Author: John Baxter
ISBN: 9780061562334

by John Baxter

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Overview

A witty cultural and culinary education, Immoveable Feast is the charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread—and didn't speak a word of French—unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family.

Ernest Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast"—a city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles–based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved to Paris to marry her. As a test of his love, his skeptical in-laws charged him with cooking the next Christmas banquet—for eighteen people in their ancestral country home. Baxter's memoir of his yearlong quest takes readers along his misadventures and delicious triumphs as he visits the farthest corners of France in search of the country's best recipes and ingredients. Irresistible and fascinating, Immoveable Feast is a warmhearted tale of good food, romance, family, and the Christmas spirit, Parisian style.

Synopsis

A witty cultural and culinary education, Immoveable Feast is the charming, funny, and improbable tale of how a man who was raised on white bread and didn't speak a word of French unexpectedly ended up with the sacred duty of preparing the annual Christmas dinner for a venerable Parisian family.

Ernest Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast" a city ready to embrace you at any time in life. For Los Angeles based film critic John Baxter, that moment came when he fell in love with a French woman and impulsively moved to Paris to marry her. As a test of his love, his skeptical in-laws charged him with cooking the next Christmas banquet for eighteen people in their ancestral country home. Baxter's memoir of his yearlong quest takes readers along his misadventures and delicious triumphs as he visits the farthest corners of France in search of the country's best recipes and ingredients. Irresistible and fascinating, Immoveable Feast is a warmhearted tale of good food, romance, family, and the Christmas spirit, Parisian style.

The New York Times - Dawn Drzal

Immoveable Feast is entertaining, often very funny and surprisingly full of (mostly reliable) information—Baxter, after all, is not a professional cook; he generally writes about the cinema. Hemingway called Paris "a moveable feast," but it's the very solidity of the family to which Baxter now belongs, the unchanging nature of the ritual meal he prepares each year, that touches his vagabond soul.

About the Author, John Baxter

John Baxter is an acclaimed film critic and biographer. His subjects have included Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert De Niro. The co-director of the Paris Writers' Workshop, he is the translator of Harper Perennial's Naughty French Novels series, and is the author of Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas, We'll Always Have Paris, and A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict. He lives in Paris.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

John Baxter, the author of We'll Always Have Paris, returns with the third volume of his memoirs. Civilized, supple writing in the City of Light.

Dawn Drzal

Publishers Weekly

In this witty essay collection, Baxter (We'll Always Have Paris) chronicles his years of learning to prepare elaborate Christmas dinners for his French in-laws. After leaving his Los Angeles home to follow a woman (who would later become his wife) to Paris, Baxter was charged with the serious task of cooking the holiday meal for his relatives. Calling to mind other expatriate writers such as Diane Johnson and David Sedaris, Baxter gives readers insights into both French culture and his own expanding culinary range. In "Ninety Degrees of Christmas," he muses on Christmases in his native Australia versus France, and details his mother's preparation of her holiday pudding. Never condescending or obsequious toward his adopted home, Baxter shares insights with the wry perspective of an outsider permitted into a secret world and eager to share the rules with other visitors. Achieving a particularly sensitive balance of allowing readers glimpses into the intimacies of family life while retaining a degree of journalistic distance, Baxter is autobiographical but never intrusive. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews

Australian by birth, Parisian by marriage, film critic and biographer Baxter (We'll Always Have Paris, 2005, etc.) makes an amiable, jocular companion in this account of preparing a large Christmas dinner for a house full of French in-laws. The final two-thirds of his frisky text deals with the peripatetic preparation of a specific meal, though in these same chapters, as earlier, the author digresses often and smoothly into reflections on Christmases past, in Australia and elsewhere. Baxter indulges in some occasional, informal cultural anthropology, for example, comparing the Gallic notion of sin with that of the American. "Providing it is conceived with imagination and carried off with flair," he writes, the French regard sin as "evidence of endurance, of survival, of life." He comments on the Gallic passion for the Christmas holiday (everything is closed; everyone is with family) and observes that, contrary to what readers of Julia Child may think, French cooking is essentially simple. Baxter rehearses his own evolution as a cook-in early manhood, he'd cooked for his girlfriends for reasons of economy but discovered its powerful aphrodisiac qualities-and confesses that he'd never much cared for Christmas as a lad (he preferred reading). He chronicles his courtship of his second wife and offers anecdotes about his writing career. But the meat in this pie is Baxter's account of the Christmas when he cooked a piglet with its skin still in place, accompanied by oysters and fresh fruit. He prepared it Cajun-style, which made finding the right wine a challenge. His in-laws, not spice-lovers, had to be told about the French connection between Cajuns and Acadians before they licked theirplatters clean. Scrooges may complain about the ebullient excess celebrated in these rollicking pages, but most readers will greedily consume the succulent narrative.