It doesn’t take a refined palate to savor Ripert’s culinary adventures.
The acclaimed French chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin delivers a breezy account of his life in France and Andorra before he moved to the United States in his early 20s.
Ripert (Avec Eric: A Culinary Journey with Eric Ripert, 2010, etc.) makes it clear that food was always the warm center of his life, and his descriptions of the meals he prepared or devoured will make even the most ascetic reader hungry. As a boy, the author took refuge in a restaurant in his little town, where the chef indulged him with bowls of chocolate mousse or spoonfuls of caviar while his glamorous mother was off running the boutique she owned. Bored with academics, he left high school to go to a no-frills vocational boarding school, where he learned knife skills and “took naturally to the non-negotiable, army-like rules of the brigade system” in a restaurant. After an apprenticeship where he boned pounds of anchovies and peeled dozens of potatoes every day, working from 8:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night, the 17-year-old moved to Paris, where he learned to transform the “32 yolks” of the title into a proper hollandaise sauce and lived in fear of daunting chefs. Ripert worked first for Dominique Bouchet and then for Joel Robuchon, neither of whom cut their underlings any slack. The author keeps his tone light, even as he describes forbidding work environments, constant anxiety, escalating anger, and the pressures of being low on an aggressively male pecking order. His pleasure in good food—whether he’s following his grandmother to a town market, where he “swooned at the fragrance of anise, clove, and mint,” or preparing lavish restaurant dishes plated with 90 equally spaced dots of sauce—makes for some vicarious gastronomic thrills.
It doesn’t take a refined palate to savor Ripert’s culinary adventures.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9298-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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