Coming home on the metro on weekdays, I’m often trying to recall what’s in the fridge and what dinner could be coaxed out of it. “Ginger, beef, broccoli, eggs?” I type hopefully into the search bar, testing Google’s ingenuity. “Oranges, garlic?” Something generally turns up, and there hasn’t been a disaster yet. On weekends, I bounce between food blogs and their comments, bookmarking things that I only sometimes get round to making.
My collection of food and recipe books remained unchanged, though. There’s something rather more self-assured about cookbooks, which do not pander to panicked search terms, but instead demand that you trust them and let yourself be persuaded into trying what they teach.
For gifts, there’s no comparison, since you can’t present people a URL for Christmas. This year I wanted to give someone a good guide to Indian food, so I went to see what the Librairie Gourmande in the Marais had. The Librarie is a shop specialising in culinary and food books (confusingly, a bookshop in French is a ‘
Tucked between dry cleaners, hair salons and bakeries on rue Montmartre, the Librairie Gourmande is a small affair, with its window dressed up with tinsel, baubles and leaves for the season. The first few shelves, as you enter, are labelled ‘Salt’ and ‘Garlic’’, and further on, ‘Flowers’ and ‘Herbs’. I’d never seen so many books about such specific things: edible flowers, the uses of saffron, salt from the Ile de Ré, rock salt, salt-curing, salted doughs, salt-crusted meats, low salt, no salt, and salt substitutes. To the right were the organic, diet, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, fermented foods and “clean eating” sections.
A few mid-morning customers browsed the shop, which, although small, was packed to bursting with books on every subject, arranged in shelves marked ‘Entertaining’, ‘Carving’, ‘Fish’, ‘Game’, ‘Patisserie’, ‘Sausages’, ‘Biographies’, ‘Mushrooms’, ‘Slow Cooking’, ‘Molecular’, ‘Crumbles’, ‘Stuffing’, and so on, apart from the sections dedicated to regions of France and the world. The cheese section was enormous, of course, and wine and spirits had a whole corner to themselves.
There were magazines, graphic novels, children’s play sets, aprons and stationery. In anticipation of Christmas, there were also gift boxes of miniature liqueurs, gin-tasting kits and whisky-degustation sets — not quite the snacks for 11am.
Of course, though it had every kind of book you could possibly want, the Librarie reflects France’s unfamiliarity with Indian cuisine. Bypassing the stacks dealing with Japanese food (tomes on sushi rice, sake, soba, udon, teriyaki, knife skills, and the current food crazes of Tokyo), I bent down to the shelf labelled ‘Inde’. A few motley volumes with lurid rani-pink, gold-patterned jackets met my eye.
Bollyfood by Jean-François Mallet, annoyed me instantly, as did Bollycook , which is an even worse name. There were no chefs or authors I recognised, except Camilla Panjabi, but this was a tackily produced compilation of mostly photos. “I had a nice book about Indian basics, but it’s not in stock,” said the shop owner helpfully. “We have some Pushpesh Pant and Madhur Jaffrey ones, but they are in English.”
Since English was useless to the intended recipient, I shook my head. “Isn’t there anything else?” I picked up a book called Inde, toutes les bases de la cuisine Indienne by Sandra Salmandjee, who appeared to have a blog called Bollywood Kitchen, and winced to find she’d misspelled gosht.
“Not in the recipes, but perhaps upstairs?” said the woman, not sounding too optimistic.
Still, I trudged up the little staircase. The top floor was quiet, with a little sofa against one end. Here, the shelves were even more fascinating: history, sociology, literature, biography and photography, tangential topics like entertaining, and etymology, and books in foreign languages. The range was bewildering — from hipster magazine Lucky Peach and a paperback on toxic cat food, to Julia Csergo’s treatise on Unesco’s recent thumbs-up to French cuisine as a world treasure and Le Club des péteurs, a book about farting, which to me seems only incidentally related to food.
In the literature shelves, India was better- represented, with Anita Desai, Bulbul Sharma, and Radhika Jha. Lower down loomed the ubiquitous Mistress of Spices , by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, but I couldn’t bear to give anyone I liked that Orientalist turmeric-tinted tale of talking spices and half-baked women. I went over to the sofa and lost myself in Abdelkader Djemaï’s Histoires des Cochons , a collection of pig-related anecdotes, Déborah Holtz and Juan Carlos Mena’s Tacopedia , and a book about medieval hallucinations caused by food.
About an hour later, I took my pile downstairs. To the side, an Australian woman was recommending her friend buy a book called Zumbarons by Masterchef Australia guest Adriano Zumbo. In the kids’ section, the owner was helping a customer choose between Why Does Asparagus Smell Like Pee? and a collection of pizza recipes. “I’ll take both,” he said. “Perhaps she’ll start to eat asparagus and then I can have the pizzas.”
“Did you find anything?” she asked me.
“Not for my friend, but I’ll take these,” I said, choosing two from my pile. “And the rest are for next time.” Who could resist returning to this goldmine? Even if I did have to order my Indian cookbooks online.