The Sunday Salon: cooking at Le Cordon Bleu and re-visiting some old friends

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Having succumbed to gluttony Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, I was appropriately enough reading The sharper your knife, the less you cry: love, laughter and tears at the world’s most famous cooking school by Kathleen Flinn, a thirty-six year old American with a passion for cooking. When Flinn lost her corporate job in London, she made the impulsive decision to enrol at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and try to earn her diploma. Her book charts the ups and downs of living in Paris and learning French cuisine. It’s full of wonderful recipes I look forward to trying, and was a perfect holiday read. If you enjoyed Julie and Julia, I’d recommend it.

Reading wise, I’m planning to ease into the New Year by re-reading the six novels of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series, starting with The Warden. It’s always comforting to immerse myself in Trollope’s extensive and ordered world. As Clifton Fadiman put it in his wonderful essay Pillow Books (re the search for appropriate bedtime reading):

“As for novels, give me no profound Russians, no overlucid Frenchmen, no opaque Germans. Give me solid Englishmen of the nineteenth century or early twentieth…Above all give me Trollope, from whom I have received so much pleasure that I would willingly call him another St. Anthony; Trollope, who breaks instantly through the time barrier and teleports the horizontal reader instantly to a divinely settled, comfortable, income-taxless vanished world. His half a hundred novels are good for five years of bedside reading. Of those who minister to the tired, night-welcoming mind, Trollope is king. He never fails to interest, but not too much; to soothe, but not too much. Trollope is the perfect novelist for the bedside.”

I’d only add, for the holidays!

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Filed under Flinn, Kathleen, The Sunday Salon, Trollope, Anthony