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Summary
Summary
Patricia Wells, long recognized as the leading American authority on French food, and her husband, Walter, live the life in France that many of us have often fantasized about. After more than a quarter century, they are as close to being accepted as "French" as any non-natives can be. In this delightful memoir they share in two voices their experiences--the good, the bad, and the funny--offering a charming and evocative account of their beloved home and some of the wonderful people they have met along the way. Full of the flavor and color of the couple's adopted country, this tandem memoir reflects on the life that France has made possible for them and explores how living abroad has shaped their relationship.
Written in lyrical, sensuous prose and filled with anecdotes, insights, and endearing snapshots of Walter and Patricia over the years, We've Always Had Paris . . . and Provence beautifully conveys the nuances of the French and their culture as only a practiced observer can. Literally a moveable feast to be savored and shared, including more than thirty recipes that will delight readers and cooks alike, the couple's valentine to France and to each other is delicious in every way.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With charm and insightful anecdotes about the Parisian and Provencal food-driven life, cookbook author Wells and her husband, Walter, artfully recreate their quarter-century-long courtship with flavorful France. Their two distinct voices--complemented by black-and-white photos and more than 30 simple recipes for couscous salad, salmon tartare, and scrambled eggs with truffles--detail the couple's forays into "going native." As they endeavor to adapt to the fashions and lifestyle of the French capital, Patricia takes on the task of researching a city's worth of tastes, textures and smells, visiting tea salons, pastry shops, boulangeries and chocolate makers for her Food Lover's Guide to Paris, while Walter settles into a new position as editor at the International Herald Tribune. Their Parisian interlude soon turns into a permanent French sojourn when they are seduced by the parasol pines and terraced vineyard belonging to an 18th-century farmhouse called Chanteduc. With their purchase of this northern Provencal abode, the remains of urban life fall to the wayside. This thoroughly enjoyable narrative describes the lavish, flavorful rewards of a life spent abroad. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Linking up with one another at the New York Times, Patricia and Walter Wells established their credentials in the vanguard of the 1970s' foodie movement. Fans of her many books will eagerly devour these personal reminiscences, where each partner in this marriage recalls in vignettes the most memorable and remarkable scenes from their lives in France. Abandoning Manhattan for new assignments in Paris, the couple fell in love with all things Gallic. Despite initial publisher resistance, Patricia embarked on a guide to France for gastronomes, and it became a best-seller. Other books and periodical articles began to pour forth. Some revelations here include Patricia's brief fling with vegetarianism before a food-writing career rendered that regimen moot. Recipes featuring in various stages of the Wells' careers conclude chapters, and most are easily reproduced save perhaps the truffle omelet.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MANY culturally hungry Americans dream about moving to France. "We've Always Had Paris ... and Provence" is the story of two who did so and have lived happily ever after. Patricia Wells, known best for her seminal "Food Lover's Guide to Paris," and Walter Wells, a high-ranking editor of The International Herald Tribune from 1980 to 2005, have written a he-said, she-said memoir, volleying back and forth to tell how a girl from Wisconsin and a boy from South Carolina met while working at The New York Times and went to France in 1980 on what they assumed would be temporary journalistic assignments. They found their lives' calling as expatriates, transcending prejudice to be accepted and even revered by the foreign culture they embraced. Walter was awarded the French Legion of Honor. Patricia recounts with no small measure of self-amazement the time she showed the Frenchman Joël Robuchon, "the greatest chef in the world," how to make her special bouillabaisse. The couple describe France's allure with converts' enthusiasm. Of her early research for the guide book, Patricia writes: "Everything was new, bright, exciting. There were so many first-time experiences, so many thrilling new tastes. ... Many a night, as Walter walked in the door from work I would shout with joy, 'I just had one of the best days of my life!' Walter would respond, 'You say that three times a week.'" Regarding their decision to stay abroad, he writes: "Why Paris? What was it about the city that pulled us there and kept us? Well, how high is the sky?" Patricia's accounts of Provence are full of storybook moments. Of their house, Chanteduc, she rhapsodizes: "We did plant a butterfly bush, a buddleia, that we cut back in winter. From spring until late autumn its brilliant purple flowers attract white and yellow butterflies that dance around over the terrace. One day the Three Tenors were singing loud and clear from the speakers in the corners of my kitchen, and I would swear that the butterflies were dancing to the music. It made me cry with happiness." Of Provence itself, "It symbolized all the essential elements of the happiness we sought in life: friends, family, food and feasts." Walter's description of Chanteduc as it was when they bought it is less starry-eyed: "The bathrooms were inadequate, the windows didn't shut out the wind, and those tangles of wire in the basement meant that the electricity needed attention, too." Although he notes that "even a fantasy life has its share of uphill struggle," Walter is smitten in his own way, rhapsodizing about all the merchants of which they become clients fidèles, creating for him and his wife a sense of community. The authors at their home in Provence, 1984. A memoir is intrinsically self-centered, at best offering a fresh vision of the world through other eyes, at worst reading like an overlong Christmas letter. Patricia Wells's recipes, which follow every chapter, are indeed delicious and unusual, some so evocative that you can practically smell the lavender fields outside the kitchen window and feel the chill of the mistral. Appearances of Robuchon, Julia Child and a Provençal truffle hunter are frothy peaks in the story. But when the Wellses focus on themselves the cream curdles. The book is overloaded with pictures of them separately and together, beaming out at us with politicians' pasted-on smiles, perfectly outfitted for a night on the town or a morning in the garden, always looking just right and manically happy. It is not just the canned pictures that make it difficult to relate to our omnipresent bibliohosts the way it is so easy to do in such disarming memoirs as Peter Mayle's "Year in Provence" and Adam Gopnik's "From Paris to the Moon." They write like ad men trying to sell readers on the excellence of their self-proclaimed fantasy lives, from the distinctive wines they make to Patricia's triumphs as a long-distance runner. Without irony, Walter quotes the cookbook editor Maria Guarnaschelli observing their shopping habits in France: "You originated the Dean & DeLuca lifestyle." He then sincerely boasts that their lifestyle is even better than that, because the excellent butcher delivers their leg of lamb to Patricia's car, "parked far away." What might have been a delicious invitation to a banquet winds up reading like a brochure for an expensive gated community. Do we need to know that Patricia's personal maintenance routine consists of "weekly visits to the hairdresser for upkeep and a manicure, twice a week to the massage therapist, a weekly facial, a monthly pedicure"? She reveals, "I even multitask when I have a facial, having facial hair removed and putting my eyelashes up on rollers so they have an even curl." The payoff for her beauty routine comes "when Walter and I passed a woman who clearly did not subscribe to the maintenance theory. Her hair was a mess, and dirty as well. She walked with difficulty, overburdened by excess weight. Her clothes were rumpled and too tight. She wore no make-up and the deep wrinkles on her face suggested she was a lifelong smoker. Walter turned to me and said quietly, 'Thank you for taking care of yourself.'" L'addition, s'il vous plaît! Jane and Michael Stern are the authors of "Roadfood."
Library Journal Review
Just how did famed food critic Patricia Wells and her husband end up in France? With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
We've Always Had Paris...and Provence A Scrapbook of Our Life in France Chapter One Ah, Paris! Walter: Like any fantasy, it was supposed to be ephemeral. It was also supposed to be transcendent. But here I was, stuck in airport traffic and the only question in my head on that dismal January morning was "What have I gotten Patricia and me into?" The taxi was nudging its way into the bumper-locked queue of cars snaking toward Paris, snuffed or so it seemed by the smoky pea soup that often passes as wintertime air, and my abs and glutes knotted in involuntary acknowledgment that our gamble of moving to Paris could be a really bad bet. A colleague who had also recently left the Times had spent months making his decision, with neat lists of pros and cons and extensive conversations with various newsroom counselors. Far less methodical than he--also younger, with no children and more blitheness of spirit--I had done none of that. My lists were all in my head and consisted mostly of people in New York I would miss and things in Paris I wouldn't have to miss anymore. My colleague was looking for a career opportunity and my interest was mostly in a little adventure--a couple of years at the International Herald Tribune . My friend ended up staying away from the Times for about two years, then he went back. I never did. Slumped in a battered taxi that was barely moving and blind in the fog, I had just begun learning Paris's best kept secret: its gray, damp weather. January's short, sunless days are especially depressing. All Frenchmen who can afford it (and they save up so they can) seek a sunny antidote to winter's depths either on an Alpine ski slope or on some Club Med beach. Not me. I was headed in the other direction, swept along by what I counted on being adventure and what I now feared might just be naïveté. Ironically, the fog reinforced one bit of clarity. I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant. My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel-good time at sidewalk cafés or strolls in the long summer twilight. Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive. You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the contented, stress-free person you really are. There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris. And now fog or not, traffic jam or not, I was about to become a Parisian. And in two weeks, when Patricia had closed up the New York apartment, she would join me. The magic of that idea was powerful. Paris was the ultimate destination in my map of the universe. Even more than New York, Paris offered glamour and excitement as a place to be. And it was exotic. After eight years in New York--and still considering it my true home--I wanted an overseas adventure. Exoticism aside, the immediate requirement, shelter, had been temporarily solved by Lydie and Wayne Marshall, New York friends who were generously lending us their apartment for several weeks in exchange for fitting some of their furniture into the small shipping container that Patricia had stayed behind to fill with clothes and other basic needs. We left everything else behind to be there when we returned. The Marshalls' little apartment, on the Rue des Entrepreneurs in the 15th arrondissement, provided a place to sleep plus the experience of a quiet working-class neighborhood. When I had described the neighborhood to a colleague at the Times, I had called it "not very interesting." "There is no such thing as an uninteresting quartier in Paris," he corrected me. Maybe not, but it did seem remote from Paris's chic, mythic center. And so did my next stop, the Herald Tribune offices. After the taxi finally crawled to the 15th and I dropped off my bags, I got onto the Métro and headed for Neuilly. The paper had moved several years earlier from Rue de Berry off the Champs-Elysées. Its new offices, in a plush suburb on the western edge of Paris, are only four Métro stops beyond the Arc de Triomphe, so it wasn't geography that made it feel remote. I had visited the Trib for the first time four months earlier and had left the job interview feeling very dubious about giving up my staff job at the New York Times for this. Patricia and I were also in love with the idea of being New Yorkers. When I was growing up in the Carolina Piedmont, television had just begun the great cultural leveling that over time washed away a lot of America's regionalism. The excitement and sophistication flowing down the coaxial cable all emanated from New York. I had wanted to be at the wellspring for a long time before I got there. Another Southerner, Willie Morris, wrote a book in those years called North Toward Home , and the title described a path that had beaconed to me since third grade. Miss Frances Love, our teacher at the little school in McConnells, South Carolina, talked to her unwashed, barefoot charges about her trips to Manhattan. One day she got so excited as she talked of that place far, far from our Faulknerian hamlet that she turned to her blackboard and sketched the three most noteworthy skyscrapers of our day. Her chalk drawings did little credit to the Old World angles of the Flatiron Building, or the elegant symmetry of the Empire State Building, or the Chrysler Building's Art Deco frou-frou. But the crude chalkboard images stuck in at least one young mind eager for impressions from the outside, and I recalled my early teacher's drawings when I moved to New York and began directly sharing her enthusiasm for the city. We've Always Had Paris...and Provence A Scrapbook of Our Life in France . Copyright © by Patricia Wells. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from We've Always Had Paris... and Provence: A Scrapbook of Our Life in France by Patricia Wells, Walter Wells All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
List of Recipes | p. xiii |
Preface: Go for It! | p. 1 |
Part I Setting Out to Live a Fantasy | |
1 Ah, Paris! | p. 15 |
2 Learning More Than French | p. 23 |
3 Seeing Things | p. 35 |
4 Rules, Rules, and More Rules | p. 39 |
5 Reality Strikes | p. 49 |
6 Making Yourself Up | p. 57 |
7 Put Yourself on Vacation | p. 65 |
8 LaVie en Rose | p. 77 |
Part II Going Native | |
9 Almost Parisian ("Have You Ever Thought of Wearing Makeup?") | p. 87 |
10 Dangerous De-Liaisons | p. 95 |
11 A Small Inn Near Avignon | p. 101 |
12 Nouvelle Cuisine, Critique Nouvelle | p. 109 |
13 You Paid to Learn to Drive Like That? | p. 121 |
14 Two for the Road | p. 129 |
15 The L'Express Years | p. 135 |
16 Mr. Patricia Wells | p. 147 |
17 Weighty Matters | p. 157 |
Part III Our Private Universe | |
18 A Farmhouse in Provence | p. 169 |
19 Making a House a Home | p. 181 |
20 Chantier-Duc | p. 191 |
21 Grow, Garden, Grow | p. 201 |
22 All About Yves | p. 215 |
23 Vineyard Tales | p. 225 |
Part IV World Enough | |
24 Right Bank, Left Bank | p. 237 |
25 Fame but Not Fortune | p. 251 |
26 Clients Fideles | p. 261 |
27 Life Lessons from Julia and Joel | p. 269 |
28 Another Kind of Interlude | p. 283 |
29 Mrs. Walter Wells | p. 289 |
30 It's Not About the Marathon | p. 295 |
31 You and Me, Babe | p. 307 |
Captions for Endpapers | p. 315 |