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Vie de France

By James Haller

Reviewed by David Currier

What is life anyway? A journey comprised of exciting, caring friends, shared experiences and fantastic food!

For many globetrotters, the most important thrills of exotic travels are provided by meals in unheard-of, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and cafes as well as dining at classics like Brasserie Lipp in Paris or Nana in Dallas. And it's that way with the new friends that you are about to meet. Together you will experience a month of la vie de France (the life of France).

When we read a cookbook, sumptuous but simple recipes make us ponder the inspiration for the creation. Chef James Haller's Vie de France is a cookbook that takes you on a journey and brings food to life. You won't find page after page of dull template recipes. What you will find is a culinary story of deep friendships and love, spiced up with creative on-the-fly meal concepts, each grabbing at your heartstrings as well as your appetite.

Sitting around at his 60th birthday party, enjoying each other's company and good food, Haller and his friends decide to spend a month together in a European house. Much like many of us, they have doubts that they can make this dream come true – logistically and financially.

Haller is suffering from chef-burnout after a successful 30-year career which included opening the nationally recognized Blue Strawbery restaurant  in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He jumps at the opportunity to experience life in a foreign country. He envisions repasts of regional cuisine at simple restaurants while quaffing limited production local wines. Above all, he vows not to lift a cuillier (spoon). His goal is to avoid being group chef, to avoid entanglement with his estranged lover, the kitchen, for which he has lost all affection; and to reassure himself (and his friends) that his career was not a life wasted.

Excitement reigns during the birthday party. Optional countries are discussed. Their plans gel. Using the internet and struggling with basic French during telephone calls to France, they lease a country house of adequate size but unknown quality in Savonnieres (Loire Valley, about 150 miles from Paris) for July 15 - August 15, 1997. Personal schedules are locked. Of the nine who commit to the adventure, not everyone can be there at the same time. A reservation for a large car to handle the group is confirmed for their arrival at the train station nearest to Savonnieres.

It's hard to imagine a month in a country whose language you do not speak would not present tensions within a group of even very close friends who have not traveled together before. Yet, for Haller and his comrades, difficult experiences are transformed into comic frustration. Whether it's a polite comment to a passer-by in the street in which an incorrect French word is used making the gesture of friendship incomprehensibly absurd, or one of life's embarrassing experiences which might be quickly forgotten at home, but when your actions stand out like those of a learning child, your blush becomes embarrassingly radiant. Alas, the story lasts a lifetime!

Whether they are visiting ancient chateaux, churches, and fields of sunflowers, avoiding arrest for traffic violations, food shopping in stores where there are four aisles of delicious cheeses, meandering through open air markets where morning-fresh vegetables like onions, carrots, turnips and green beans, and piles of various types of basil and other fresh herbs are displayed as elegantly as Catherine de Medici’s crown jewels and sold with regal pride, you are there.

Haller escorts you through the entire journey. You'll laugh out loud. You'll smell the lavender. You'll cry. You'll call your friends and thank them just for being friends. Then you'll go to the kitchen for a glass of French wine and some cheese, and, returning to your overstuffed chair, you'll grab Vie de France and immerse yourself again in recounting another day of your month long vacation.

After you've "returned home", you'll race back to page one and extract Haller’s creative recipes from the text of the story. And you will type them into the mundane reality of your pre-formatted MS Word document. Soon Haller's impromptu meals that have excited you for hours will provide genius to menus for your dearest friends.

And you’ll ask yourselves, “Why can’t we do that?”

You can.

Published by Berkley Books, New York

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