Let's Eat France!
SynopsisPlot
1,250 specialty foods, 375 iconic recipes, 350 topics, 260 personalities, plus hundreds of maps, charts, tricks, tips, and anecdotes and everything else you want to know about the food of France. A book that feels literally larger than life, it is a feast for food lovers and Francophiles, combining the completist virtues of an encyclopedia and the obsessive visual pleasures of infographics with an enthusiast’s unbridled joy.
Story
About this book
Let's Eat France! is a large-format reference by François-Régis Gaudry that attempts to catalog French food culture through roughly 1,250 specialty foods, 375 recipes, and 260 profiles of notable figures. The book covers classic preparations such as pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau, choucroute, pâté en croûte, and ratatouille, alongside profiles of food-world personalities from Brillat-Savarin to Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros family.
Much of the book's character comes from its visual format. Poster-sized infographics map the breads, wines, oysters, and even the frites found across different French regions. A region-by-region index organizes cheeses, charcuterie, and local dishes. Charts track details like the full range of wine bottle sizes, from the small split up to the Nebuchadnezzar, which holds the equivalent of twenty standard bottles. A family tree of French sauces traces how one base leads to dozens of variations.
The contents are arranged in a deliberately non-linear order. A tutorial on mayonnaise might sit beside a list of restaurants where Balzac once ate. This scattered layout means the book functions less like a traditional encyclopedia read front to back and more like a collection of individual panels, each covering a self-contained topic in food, history, or geography.
