"Lyon is a city that creates chefs, says Buford, and he thinks he knows why: Everything the Lyonnais eat is grown right around them. 'Lyon finds itself among vineyards and rivers and mountain lakes, among birds and pigs and fish,' he writes."
~ Eleanor Beardsley
"Buford obsesses over the intersecting currents of French and Italian culinary history. He pours over cookbooks: La Varenne's 1651 Le Cuisinier François, but also worn, family recipe books picked up at flea markets. 'I coveted stained, used, filthy ones,' he says, 'and found an almost addictive pleasure in flipping through pages that had been studied, in some cases, more than a century before.'
Buford describes one recipe book as 'a seventy year conversation between a grandmother, a mother and a daughter, until finally it was swept out in an estate-clearing auction of whatnots and ended up on eBay.'
He called another collection of recipes 'radiant and sad and beautiful.' It was put together on 'sheets of another era's thin paper,' by a French soldier captured by the Nazis when they invaded France in 1940. The prisoner of war painstakingly details the recipes for his nation's most beloved dishes — a cassoulet from the southwest; a cervelas de Strasbourg from Alsace. Buford senses his urgency in case these should be lost. 'It needs to be preserved, like civility, like dignity, like the table, like a shelter that protects us from the ugliness just outside our front door — the crudeness, cruelty, selfishness, the incomprehensible injustice.'
That soldier, says Buford, recognized that cuisine 'protects us in our humanity.'"
~ Eleanor Beardsley
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