Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
written by A. J. Liebling, illustrated by James Salter

Old friends, notes A.J. Liebling, are best re-met in fine restaurants, for there "you have the opportunity to greet them cordially and to size them up." The many present and future friends of A.J. Liebling will find no better place for passing an evening with the grand man than Between Meals, his eulogy of the great restaurants of the golden age of Paris dining. Here Liebling looks back at the year of study in Paris that formed his joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating. It was a subject to which he returned often. "There would come a time," he wrote, "when, if I had compared my life to a cake, the sojourns in Paris would have represented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge."

In his nostalgic review of his Rabelaisian initiation into life's finer pleasures, Liebling celebrates the richness and variety of French food, fondly recalling great meals and memorable wines. He writes with awe and a touch of envy of his friend and mentor Yves Mirande, "one of the last gastronomes of France," who would dispatch a lunch of "raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of Champagne" - all before beginning to contemplate dinner. We are indeed fortunate that in A.J. Liebling a great writer and a great eater became one, for he has offered us a rare and bountiful feast in Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris.

ZC2369    Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris                  $13.00

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