Chacun a son gout - Provence - 1970

In an unusual departure of my obsession and compulsion to read fiction - I'm actually acknowledging that there is a whole world out there of nonfiction, too - books based on observation and experience and research, rather than on imagination and emotions and memories - who knew? Am reading Luke Barr's Provence - 1970, one of the books that makes a case for a particular meeting, game, year, date as the seminal moment or the crux or turning point at which our entire perceptions about - race, sports, politics, culture - shifted gears or planes - in other words, nonfiction that identifies a single moment as the ground zero of a paradigm shift. In this case, the shift has to do with - food. Barr argues that in that year, from late summer to the end of the year, a # of great American (mostly) food writers spent several months in Provence during which they ate and drank together, a lot, and communicated - often via letters, which have been well preserved in various university archives. Barr himself is the grand-nephew of one of the food writer, MFK Fisher, so he has access to not only his memories of her but to various family archival documents as well. What he perceives, in his recounting of the many meetings and dinners and conversations, is the beginning of a shift in attitude that the writers supported in greater or lesser degrees - from the viewpoint that the pinnacle of great cooking was (and always would be) French cuisine - as set forth for mid-20th century cooks, post WWII, by the "Bible," Mastering the Art of French Cooking. By 1970, two of the authors, Child and Beck, were completing volume II, and there was a great rift, ideological and personal, between the two: Beck unwavering in her belief in traditional French cooking (by which none of the writers means hotel or restaurant cooking, but home cooking - though some argued that the Michelin restaurants had raised cooking to its pinnacle and others disdained the formalities of restaurants, cruise ships, et al.); Child obviously was the popularizer, making French accessible to American cooks, and now in 1970 starting to think about branching out, getting more interested in regional American cooking, accepting that with some effort you could find great ingredients, and great restaurants, in the U.S. James Beard was ahead of her on this. Those are the dynamics, and Barr traces the arguments back and forth, with some good bitchy gossip as well, largely seen through Fisher's notes and diaries (and published writing), but also a lot about the Childses, Beck and spouse, a writer I'd never heard of named Richard Olney, Eliz. Davis (an English snob), and some assorted others. The descriptions of the dinners are amazingly well re-created and astonishing; the idea of so many great chefs sharing kitchen space, ideas, skills, and stories is incredible - couldn't really happen today. Book feels a little drawn out, though, as do so many books based on a magazine article, that maybe ought to have been left at that - this one seems maybe based on several mag articles, which leads to a little repetition; still a good read, which I'll stay with - and then return to fiction no doubt.