Some Thoughts on La Buvette (2020)
The Book not the Bar....And Maybe a Bit About the Bar.
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“La Buvette” by Camille Fourmont and Kate Leahy has a lovely twee, Americans fitting in to but living apart from life in Europe…vibe. Fourmont and Leahy’s sparse pages brim with details of life in Paris that fill in gaps left by other writers on the subject. The book, “La Buvette” distills the excitement of the place La Buvette into a tangible form. Sadly it does so directly through the perspective of Camille Fourmont thinking about herself in relation to the bar. It’s best used as a cookbook for quick snacks, elevated bar food and also a glimpse into what Camille Fourmont thinks about wine.
La Buvette reads like a collection of guest blog recipe posts rather than a book. Each section stands alone, as if someone asked Fourmont to contribute to to their website and Fourmont has made a star appearance. Which is fine, but comes across as self aggrandizing. The Book is called “La Buvette,” not “Bar Snacks and Wine with Camille Fourmont.”
It feels like the intention of “La Buvette” (the book) was for the reader to learn what makes La Buvette (the place) special1 through tales, techniques and recipes. Instead the book reads more like a show and tell about the things in La Buvette. You expect to delve into a story about a plucky wine bar2 with outsider credentials, instead you’re delivered a book a shade more humble than “Lessons in Wine Service from Charlie Trotter.”
There are ways to deliver personal stories and talk about the things that are special to you without using at a chance to show off. For example in the introduction of, “Taste and Technique,” Naomi Pomeroy offers an insightful anecdote about her mother and the cooking of souffle. We understand very quickly that we should relax when it comes to learning about cooking. We’re able to interpret that Pomeroy had a very full and vibrant childhood that lead her to pursue professional cooking and shaped the chef she was to become.
Maybe I am spoiled by books on cookery like “Taste and Technique,” “The French Menu Cookbook” by Richard Olney, or “Zuni Cafe” by Judy Rogers. Yes, they are reference books but ones I want to pick up again and again. Books like these are the reason I no longer go online to look up a recipe. Meal ideas start in these books and end thinking about the next recipe that looked interesting.
Good cook books are in direct contrast to the recipe blogs and food websites that populate the web. Each one a carbon copy of the next. Five hundred words of pablum followed by a link to the recipe that takes you an indecipherable page of banner ads and pop ups. It shouldn’t take twenty minutes to find a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I found myself flipping through and skipping major sections of “La Buvette” to find the heart of it. Not every cookbook needs to have a soul, but it shouldn’t invoke the frustration of trying to find a recipe on the internet. 3 4
And by extension, Fourmont.
Oh and those “Giant White Beans with Lemon Zest and Olive Oil” come from a 2kg can ( admitted) that costs $26 in the US. I can imagine they are cheaper in France, but a pound of dry beans still costs $13. I use cannellini beans, microplane some parmesan, add white pepper and it’s still a good snack.
As an exercise and to prove that I wasn’t being a curmudgeon about “La Buvette,” I did some very informal science to see how many times the author referred to herself using a personal pronoun. Using a random number generator I came up with 30 pages from 20-200, if a page didn’t have any writing on it I went to the next page that did. The introduction was skipped to give the author a head start. In 26 pages (the task was too tedious and was making my brain cleave in twain so I only got that far) I found that, “I,” “Me,” and “myself” were used 256 times with a mean of 10 times per page. The most number of times was on page 42 with 35 uses, the least were on, 71, 81, and 140 with one use each.
La Buvette (the place) may be where the “push” to stop calling natural wine ‘funky’ originated. The justification is that Funk is a music style not a smell. Even if Fourmont is citing her own experience, that doesn’t give her license to tell other people to stop using the word to describe what they smell as funky. The word ‘funk’ has been used to describe off odor’s since the 17th century. It comes from the French ‘Funkier', to blow smoke and means, “A strong musty smell of sweat or tobacco.” Anyway it seems to be a moot point for me to bring it up but I just wanted to say it.