G. Y. Dryansky - Coquilles, Calva, and Crème: Exploring Frances Culinary Heritage: A Love Affair with French Food

COQUILLES,
CALVA,
& CRME

Exploring Frances Culinary Heritage

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH REAL FRENCH FOOD

G. Y. DRYANSKY

WITH JOANNE DRYANSKY

PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK

For my grandmother Tamara

Advance Praise for Coquilles, Calva & Crme

French food and travel with a dash of historywhat a treat it is to sit at the table with this smart, engaging writer. A delicious read from start to finish.

Barbara Fairchild, bestselling food author,
longtime editor-in-chief of Bon Apptit,
winner of the James Beard Award.

Has France lost its culinary edge? After decades living and chronicling the good life in Paris and overseas, Gerry and Joanne Dryansky lead us to unsung chefs still championing the countrys gourmand heritage.

Gael Greene, bestselling author of Insatiable: Tales from
a Life of Delicious Excess and InsatiableCritic.com,
winner of the James Beard Award.

Gerry and Joanne Dryanskys book is a lovely ramble through a lifetime of experiences in Frances high spots and some low ones too. Reading it brings as many delights as a marvelous long meal.

Patricia Wells, celebrated food author,
winner of the James Beard Award.

I had the incredible good luck to have dozens and dozens of French meals with Gerry and Joanne Dryansky, and he was never wrong. I mean, never. We would travel down some little street, some little restaurant, and then, delight, pure pleasure. I was back years and years to a far more delicious France. And now, he tells all. Theres nobody I know, in Paris or in New York, who understands French food the way Gerry does. And surely nobody who writes about it as well as he does.

Alan Furst, bestselling author and
author of the forthcoming Mission to Paris.

Tuck this delicious tome in your hamper between Prousts madeleines and the champagnethen feast your soul. The Dryanskys remind us that in Franceat least sometimes and in some placesauthenticity still rhymes with simplicity, and great writing makes a fine relish.

David Downie, author of Paris, Paris: Journey
to the City of Lights and the Terroir food series.

GYD is the greatest gourmand in American letters today, the most gourmet of inquisitive journalists, the most French of foreign correspondents in Paris. When he recounts his exciting adventures in the Hexagon, were amused as much as we salivate. Delicious and savory!

Gilles Pudlowski, Frances foremost food critic,
founder of the Pudlo Guides.

Congratulations to Dryansky. It was a great pleasure to read his text, both so well documented and free of polemics.

Christian Millau, co-founder of Le Guide GaultMillau,
herald and godfather of La Nouvelle Cuisine in France.

Coquilles, Calva, and Crme vividly brings back my years of working in Paris in the 1950s. When I contemplate my cooking journey of the last half century, from classic to nouvelle, from fusion to modern American to molecular, the only reminiscences I have is of food that touches my soul or makes me salivate. Gerry Dryansky writes honestly and eloquently about these simple, honest, essential dishes in his engaging, compelling, and delicious memoir.

Jacques Ppin, celebrity TV chef,
James Beard Award winner.

Part memoir, part travelogue, Coquilles, Calva & Crme is a hymn to French food and wine and the joy of wining and dining in France with convivialit - which for the French is key. Dryansky has many a story to tell about the past (lunching with the likes of Coco and Yves) but in this present tour de France he greets each dining experience, each new chef, each new winemaker, and each new region, from Alsace to Le Massif Central, with genuine curiosity, an open mind, and a discerning first rate palate. This entertaining, erudite, and elegant book is a must for Francophiles and food lovers everywhere.

Harriet Welty Rochefort, bestselling author of
French Toast, French Fried and author of the
forthcoming Joie de Vivre.

Reading this book is like lunching with Gerry Dryansky: from coquilles to Calva, with crme in between, it is seasoned with wit and charm. Rich with food-lover wisdom, it captures what France does best.

Mort Rosenblum, Editor of Dispatches, author,
foreign correspondent, winner of the Overseas Press Club,
Mencken, Harry Chapin and James Beard awards.

A delicious and delightful read, especially for those who think they might know this country. When you sit down to a meal with Dryansky, you taste the very soul of France.

Eleanor Beardsley, France Correspondent,
National Public Radio.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Other People

The Heirs

Chant dAdieu

BY JOANNE AND GERRY DRYANSKY:

Fatimas Good Fortune

Fortunes Second Wink

Satan Lake

Butter, butter, butter, and more butter.
Fernand Point, godfather of la cuisine lite

COQUILLES,
CALVA,
& CRME

FOREWORD

I n what is left of old French etiquette, it is actually impolite to use the word manger, to eat. One lunches, one dines, one sups, and takes the little breakfast. If you were well reared, you eschewed making reference to a bodily function. In a larger sense, what seems so quaintly punctilious is very wise. Eating, with profound associations, is more than stimulating or titillating the taste buds and sating hunger. I like the expression soul food. Its textured meaning conveys all that I have to say in this book. A fully satisfying repast is one evanescent, evocative touchstone to a time and a place and to a civilization, of which France, all things told, is an admirable example.

Soul food: that expression that Americans of African descent gave us is of two words profoundly mated. Eating, among our most fundamental physical acts, is bound firmly into the warp and weave of our lives, which we call our culture. We are what we eat, yes, but more than that, our rituals of eating are ways of communing with the culture that defines who we are.

Hitler called us Americans mongrels. Ask most Americans where their families are from and you can get a roll call of geography. But it has been this mixture that has made us such a vibrant, open, and creative society. A mixture that is at the same time more of an emulsion of things that dont dissolve. So many of us are bound, indelibly, to the someplace else that brought a bounty of its presence here. And part of that bounty we sometimes identify as soul food.

I grew up without religion, which is not to say without being taught morals, and with no real ethnic allegiances. But my mother was a Litvak, an Ashkenazi whose mother came from Lithuania, a lovely country my grandmother left to meet the man she loved who was in America, and who never showed up at the New York pier to greet her. Marriage to a scoundrel afterward left her a single mother with three children. I can remember my mother telling me how poor they were, about their sharing a pear for dinner.

Somehow, though, my grandmother passed on a wonderful way with cooking that brought her back to the land of woods and fields covered with sun-bleached linen that was her true home. My mother inherited her hearty but fine way with food. I remember her kreplach, those Ashkenazi ravioli or wontons. I remember her hand with blintzes, twice fried, and rolled, not folded, the ends tucked in, remotely like