Guest Post by Sheila Campbell, True Compass
Two new books about Paris will whet your appetite for another trip to France in different ways.
Paris Patisseries: History, Shops, Recipes is not, despite its name, a cookbook. Instead, it’s a luscious picture book of the work of twenty of Paris’s most celebrated pastry chefs. Yes, there’s a recipe here and there (a total of about 25 or so), but what you’ll really drool over are the photographs: page after page of macarons, baba au rum, éclairs, meringues, gateaux and many other sweets, plus croissants and brioches. The book tells you what to order at each of the many famous patisseries and tea rooms featured.
The photographs by Christian Sarramon will make you want to book a flight today. Chef Pierre Hermé, reputed to make the best macarons in Paris, wrote the forward, and throughout the book you get a history of sweet shops in the city, with emphasis on the most recent and well-known pastry chefs and chocolatiers. At the back is an address book of all the shops featured, so you can plan your next trip around them (or have Donna plan you an itinerary around them!).
Paris Pastry Shop/Xiaozhuli
Photo by Anonymous, Canada
Another recent book, Paris and Her Remarkable Women by Lorraine Liscio, presents sixteen mini-biographies of women whose lives influenced Paris. They begin with Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, and end with Simone de Beauvoir. Along the way you get new insights into the lives of women you probably already know about, like Sarah Bernhardt and Coco Chanel, as well as some women perhaps not so familiar, like 18th century Madame du Chatelet, an early physicist; Madame de Maintenon who was married to Louis XIV at Versailles; Camille Claudel, mistress of Auguste Rodin and often thought to be as great a sculptor as he was; and Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, whose paintings of women and children hang in the Louvre.
What makes this book particularly useful is that the author links the biographies to specific places in Paris associated with each woman. You can pick the woman and her time period and walk (well, almost) in her footsteps (or have Donna create an itinerary for you to walk!).
Sarah Barnhardt