Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac

by Anka Muhlstein

"Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are."

This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac's The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings.

Full of surprises and insights, Balzac's Omelet invites you to taste anew Balzac's genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

Genres: Food, France, History, Nonfiction, Food and Drink, Cooking, Literature

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Anka Muhlstein was born in Paris in 1935. She has published biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, Cavelier de La Salle, and Astolphe de Custine, a study on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria, and a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart. She is currently writing a volume on Proust as a reader. She has won two prizes from the Académie Française, and the Goncourt Prize for Biography. She and her husband, Louis Begley, have written a book on Venice, Venice for Lovers. They live in New York.

Reviews

[Monica Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leon Gozlan, a friend, had fun describing him at mealtimes: "[His] lips quivered, his eyes lit up with delight, his hands shook with pleasure on seeing a pyramid of pears or beautiful peaches. There would not be a single one left to go and describe the defeat to the rest.He devoured the lot. He was a magnificent example of vegetal Pantagruelism, tie whipped off, shirt open, knife in hand...[he] laughed explosively, like a bomb...then his chest would swell and his shoulders would dance beneath his jubilant chin...We thought we were seeing Rabelais at the Manse of Theleme Abbey. He melted for joy."

Once you pick up Balzac's Omelette, it is very likely that you won't want to put it down, you will be impelled to read Balzac's full canon and you will want to travel to France to begin eating. Any person interested in cooking, food, eating, French cooking, French culture, food history, French literature, and dining etiquette will be well sated by Anka Muhlstein's exhaustively researched and witty journey through the stomach of Honore de Balzac. Muhlstein is a studied hand at biography and this will prove to be her most accessible and entertaining undertaking.

Balzac himself was a literary and gustatory binger. During his writing periods, he would survive on coffee, fruit, and "occasionally he took a boiled egg about nine o'clock in the morning or sardines mashed with butter if he was hungry; then a chicken wing or a slice of roast leg of lamb in the evening, and he ended his meal with a cup or two of excellent black coffee without sugar." Working for 18 hour days, weeks at a stretch, he would deliver his manuscript to printer. Once this was done, the party began. He would then scour the city for the finest food and feast on game, vegetables, and wines of all sorts as if preparing for a period of fasting. His particular love for strong, excellent coffee leads Muhlstein to explore the methods of coffee making during that era, which introduces the first percolators and why he liked this system above any other method. Balzac was definitely a man of extremes, but very specific extremes.

All his likes and dislikes as a gourmand are laid out and referenced throughout the narrative which reads like part cultural food and dining history, part literary criticism and part biography. Citing a range of Balzac's works we learn about the origins of the dejeuner a la forchette (fork lunch), the decadent and formal indulgences and rigors of fine dining, a burgeoning restaurant culture in Paris, rural methods and means of Provencal cooking, the differences between French and Russian service and the attitudes towards food itself through Balzac's characters and settings. Also, the history of Parisian cafes is utterly compelling from the first few to their ubiquity and the changing trends of what a fashionable cafe was.

By exploring the works of Balzac, Muhlstein unearths the intriguing, the sensual and the sometimes disgusting world of food preparation. Full of tales describing debauchery and frugality, Balzac's Omelette serves as an indispensable guide to modern etiquette, food culture, and the works of Balzac. Muhlstein more than enlightens with her dismantling of the French influence, traditions and habits in present food culture. Hopefully, she will gain the readership she deserves through this homage to Balzac along with revitalizing an interest in his canon and enjoying a French meal solely for the sake of culinary delight.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are two grand themes in Balzac's oeuvre, one is money -- and most particularly debt -- and the other is food. Of this second theme, Anka Muhlstein does full justice with her book Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honore'de Balzac. Even though I have read over 95% of Balzac's work in a Yahoo! Group dedicated to him, I am still amazed by Ms. Muhlstein's marshaling of a mass of information into a coherent, and I might even say tasty, whole.

There is, for example, this gen from Cousin Pons, one of my favorite novels by the master:

One of the keenest pleasures of Pons' old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table parasite, was the "surprise," the thrill produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festive air to a dinner. Pons' stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction.... Dinner proceeded without le plat couvert, as our grandsires called it.... Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored.

As M. de Mortsauf says in The Lily of the Valley, "all our emotions converge on the gastric centres."

Curiously, despite its highly focused subject, I think Balzac's Omelette is not only an excellent introduction to the work of Balzac in general, but also to Dumas, Zola, Flaubert, de Maupassant, and other French novelists of the 19th century.

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unexpected pleasure. Muhlstein has read as much Balzac as I have and she adores the books, the man, and her subject--food in his work. She points out that he is one of the first world authors to actually go out of his way to tell the reader what people were eating and drinking by way of giving his society a reality literature never possessed before. (We search Emma and Clarissa in vain for equal bills of fare; but after him Dickens gave us toast &cheese--and of course Christmas goose!) So it worked. In doing so, Balzac also told us precisely what food and how much food people ate. We've all seen those gargantuan menus from Victorian dinners, but B. himself kept dozens of pounds of fruit at hand, and appeared to be addicted to pears! French pears, are of course, the ambrosia of the gods, but even so. The author meanwhile uses B's use of food to explain how and what people actually did eat by class and social strata. How restaurants developed. How boarding houses became popular and how they differed. She then goes into some menus that are pretty staggering in their variety. French Cuisine developed alongside the French Novel in the 19th Century and B's heirs were no slouches either. Who can forget the role of food in Madame Bovary or Bel Ami? And Zola was equally brilliant -- giving an entire novel to the Marais Market Place titled The Belly of Paris. This is a most enjoyable book, and of course it led me back to Balzac instantly and I began a novella I'd never read before titled Gambara, which takes place, you guessed it, at a table d'hote in a poor tenement in Paris. Tiens!

[R.J. Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you for the book I won through the Goodreads giveaways. Fans of the 19th century's French novelist Honoré de Balzac will appreciate this book. The author presents a brief biography of Balzac pointing out the importance of food in his life. She also explains how Balzac's writings reflect the changes that were occurring in food across France at that time as well as how Balzac used food to help define his fictional characters. This is an interesting and insightful book.

[Cesar Palerm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must begin with the disclosure that I received my copy through the First Reads program. With that taken care off...

I enjoyed the book; at first it was a bit hard to keep track of what was a reference to some of Balzac's works, what to history and/or Balzac's life. But once I got into the flow and the rhythm of the writing it was hard to put down.

I particularly enjoyed the historical context and the evolution of cooking and gastronomy as described in Balzac's works.

The translation is well done, with appropriate additional explanations when the turn of words in the original French has no direct translation into English.

[Meghan Fidler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. While there were many delicious little facts in this book, I couldn't help but feel like it was written for people who want to sound smart at parties. The narrative never came together, and like a white sauce cooked too quickly, had lumpy sections which stuck my mind shut.

[Kristina Cowan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful prose. The story moves slowly at times, but the reader leaves with a richer appreciation of how brilliant Balzac was as a writer, and for who he was as a person. If you love food, you'll enjoy this book.

[Adrienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is more about the history of French restaurants than it is a book about food. And if you haven't read Balzac you tend to miss most of the main points of the book.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein großartiges literarisches "Sachbuch". Nicht ohne Grund wurde dieses Büchlein sogar zum historisches Buch des Jahres 2011 gewählt (Magazin Damals). Anka Muhlstein gelingt auf sehr lesbare, amüsante Weise das Paris des 19. Jahrhunderts mit biographischen Details aus Balzacs Leben u n d den Figuren aus Balzacs Romanen zu verknüpfen. Das ist ihr grandios gelungen und hat mir ganz großes Lesevergnügen geschenkt.

[Marsha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gustatory delight, a thorough and rollicking edible romp through the works of one of Europe’s most prolific authors. Touching mainly on Balzac’s sprawling oeuvre “The Human Comedy”, Ms. Muhlstein’s critical eye misses nothing that made Balzac great; she merely sheds a more interesting light on it.

Balzac adored writing about food, whipping up dizzying metaphors connecting food to aspects of everyday life. From comparing a young girl’s kiss to being like honey to seeing a cathedral in the shining scales of a fish, he managed to paint unforgettable pictures of all of his characters, their surroundings and their world. Oddly, he doesn’t dwell much on the taste of the food—evidently he felt that was unimportant—but he understood that the consumption or denial of food, wine and sex were intimately intertwined.

Ms. Muhlstein’s prose is accessible and deeply seductive. She does what the best literary essayists do—she makes you hungry to peruse the author’s works yourself. I now find myself yearning for Balzac. Even if you yourself don’t rush out to find Cousin Bette or Father Goriot, you might find yourself craving a heap of oysters.

[Mary Cecilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book captivated me by its exceptional review in the New York Times, and the first 100 pages were fascinating as I learned so much about Paris's beginnings as a city of delicious food and luxurious restaurants. I was expecting, however, to be much more enthralled by the author's analysis of food in Balzac's work. Perhaps I need to read more of Balzac's repertoir to appreciate some of her points, but I was looking for a clearer message—a thesis, if you will—and found it lacking. Regardless, it was an absolute pleasure and it is one of those books that had me longing to be a part of early/mid-18th century life—of course with the promise of being rich enough to dine at the best of the best restaurants!

[John Oehler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a foodie and had hoped for more than this small volume delivered. Balzac's eating habits were extreme and therefore interesting, although I can hardly believe the quantities he is said to have consumed upon finishing a story and delivering it to his publisher. There was much more than I wanted to know about Balzac's writing, but I hadn't been aware that he was the first author to "define" his characters by the food they ate and the dinners they served. Something else I didn't know and DID find interesting is that restaurants (the institution of restaurants) originated from the French Revolution when all the fine chefs who worked in the households of the wealthy suddenly found themselves without jobs as their patrons fled France or were guillotined.

[Amanda Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely love the French novelist Balzac (he is sadly not as well known in the English-speaking world as he should be: his work is totally incredible). He was a great observer and describer of realistic details, including food (in real life he was a great gourmand), and perhaps the first to use characters' meals and eating habits as a way to depict personality, class and economic status. This book uses Balzac's work as a way to illuminate 19th Century French food culture, when the modern restaurant (and all that goes along with that) was invented. Totally fascinating for anyone interested in Balzac, history, or food (in the intellectual sense). Grade: A.

[Denese · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the interest of full disclosure, I received an advanced copy of this book through GoodReads. What a fun read! Quite the lover of food, Balzac seems to go through life not looking forward to his next project (as a novelist) but rather looking forward only to his next meal.

Ms. Muhlstein does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of Balzac and providing insight as to the events of his life which may have contributed to his lifestyle. She paints such a vivid picture of the times and mentality of the era that it's easy to imagine yourself sitting across the table from Balzac himself.

[Jo Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to say thank you for the book this was my first win on goodreads.

This book will make you hungry. Honore de Balzac the French author describes through his books and fictional characters how food in the 19th century France played an important role in his life and social status.

Author Anka Muhlstein takes you on a walk though Paris visiting the cafe's and restaurants that Balzac frequented. Her book offers insights into the history of French food. Her style of writing is witty and very enjoyable.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book gave an interesting perspective to Balzacs writing about food.
Much was made about his pitiful childhood, with an uninvolved mother and his being sent to boarding school where he was nearly starved to death.
This was perhaps why he elegantly described many meals in his work,and was one of the first french authors to do so.
His feasts when each book was completed were amazing, and his searching for finest foodstuffs like the foodies of today was very entertaining.
Not a great book but a good read.

[Jo-Ann Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. I have never read Balzac, but I am now looking forward to it.

This is a fascinating history of food consumption and the developmet of restaurants in France. As well as the way Balzac uses food in his novels.

Thecquantity of wine consumed at a meal is staggering. There are some very interesting facts. I found it very fun to read.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a wonderful in-depth exploration of Parisian culinary culture. Muhlstein explores Balzac's talent at describing characters and their social environment through gastronomic language and this book was still fascinating for me even though I have a limited knowledge of Balzac's body of work.

[Sara DeGonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began with a handicap, having not read any Balzac myself. However, that didn't stop me from becoming completely hungry and enthralled while reading this book. Certainly some references I couldn't appreciate, but overall such an interesting read.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Received as a GoodReads giveaway. My high school French teacher, Madame Rohrer, would have loved this book. An interesting mix of French history, cuisine and literature. I can't decide whether to reread Balzac or pull out a Julia Child cookbook first.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Monsieur Honore Balzac was an iconic in French Literature. Setting the trend of introducing text involving food into the novel was a sure fire way to set characters into motion and class. Ms. Muhlstein use of the multiple books by M. Balzac was intriguing and worth a second look.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is interesting, I enjoyed reading about French culture in the 19th century, but since I have never read Balzac I didn't understand the comparisons.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little more information than I needed, but a good "tour" of Balzac's Paris and the food at the time. Made me want to read more of him.

[Susan Springer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't see how this would be interesting to anyone who isn't a francophile AND familiar
with the works of Balzac, but I liked it.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was interesting to read about the French through their food choices, attitudes and habits after the revolution. A certain lens that could be applied to any culture.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Balzac and have read a number of his novels, but I never focused before on how he uses food, so much of the analysis in this book was new to me. Of course, people have feasted since the beginning of humanity, and food has played an important role in every kind of world literature from the earliest times, but it was only in Balzac's time at the beginning of the 19th century that gastronomic culture and restaurants as we know them today came into being. This was the era when French food came into its own as the leading cuisine of the world. So, naturally, food and eating were important in his books, though interestingly, Ms. Muhlstein argues that food and restaurants are used by Balzac more as tools to reveal character and drive his plots than as ends in themselves. For the later 19th century French writers like Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola and Proust, the food itself became more of a literary focus, an essential element of the worldbuilding and almost a character in its own right.

I have read many of the books referenced here - Lost Illusions, Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons and The Wild Ass's Skin, and that helped my enjoyment because I remembered the general context of characters and situations, even if I didn't remember the meals, but of all of them the one where I most remember the meals was Lost Illusions, in particular the meal that Lucien eats at an expensive restaurant shortly after being thrown over by his mistress/mentor, blowing a large part of his limited remaining capital in a single meal, and the poor restaurant in which he regularly eats after being reduced to poverty where he meets the comrades who will be his stepping stones for improving his fortunes and who show him the pathway of honor which he rejects in favor of the temptations of infamy. Ms. Muhlstein gives interesting color to both of these restaurants, which turn out to have been actual places. It's a measure of the greatness of Lost Illusions that in this very long book even details as small as the restaurants where the characters ate have stuck with me, so that for this book alone I remember the specific contexts that she discusses.

[Leonardo Etcheto · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic little book(205 pages - well done on cutting the blather!). Does a great job of illustrating how food culture grew in France after the revolution using the lens of Balzac's novels. He was the first to have food be an emphasis in his writing and it was an emphasis in his life. Ever wonder how restaurants started? Well if you are an aristocrat's chef, newly unemployed by the revolution and no-one can hire you without the risk of losing their head then you have to improvise to keep doing what you were trained to do - you cook start cooking for everyone. The revolution also removed the previous guild restrictions on who can cook what and the times you can serve, so now you can have a place that can serve any food at any time.
Sounds completely obvious to us since we live in a world peppered with restaurants, but it was revolutionary then and proved extremely popular. With new freedom in ingredients procurement as well, gastronomy as a focus of a life well lived in France began.
This book did remind me how little I remember of the French novelists. I have not read one of their books in 0ver 30 years, but now I want to.

[Helena Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

Woman enough to admit I didn’t finish this. Beautiful writing/translation but a very niche subject and a little dry.

[Dave Pier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gem. You will learn about 19th c. French food culture. You will learn about Balzac. You will be constantly entertained and be done in no time! My favorite kind of book.

[NyiNya · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Dickens' novels, we can usually guess a character's temperament by the name he is given. Scrooge--choked and sparing of even an extra syllable; Uriah Heap, a pissy little cur waiting to bite the feeding hand; evil Murdstone with a stony and murderous heart. In the stories of Honore Balzac, what the characters chose for dinner spoke volumes. They were, indeed, what they ate. Balzac also used food as a metaphor and a description. A young girl, all ripe and pink and fleshy in her youthful embonpoint is likened to a juicy piece of ham, while a withered old crone's quilty carapace reminds the author of a sweetbread.

Anka Muhlstein captures very little Balzac's playful use of food. She doesn't give us the importance of food and eating. We get brief slices of this, a teaspoon of that and a gobbet of something else...but not nearly enough of anything. Balzac's use of food told us so much about his people, it becomes more than mere metaphor. In Pere Goriot, the dining room table is as much a character as the boarders who surround it. Food is not just for eating. When Goriot's landlady feels thwarted in love, she revokes her boarders' anchovy and gherkin privileges in spite. Whenever anyone dips a crust of toast into a cup of coffee, we know they are settling in for a good gossip.

Balzac's Omelette merely skims the obvious, tells us what we already knew and gives us no new bits to crunch on. Muhlstein tells us Balzac was obsessed with food. Whoa the horses! The man was spherical in shape and known to down a gross of oysters (that's a dozen dozen if you're counting) to whet his appetite before a dinner that would feed a platoon of marines after a 20 mile hike.

This is Balzac, the most food-centric of all the French writers. Just by choosing dinner or by how they behave at the table, Balzac's characters may reveal themselves to be honorable or charlatans, trustworthy or not. A woman is a lady if she eats ladylike foods. If she savors the wrong dainty, we understand that she is vulgar, a poseur, or that her past is about to catch up with her. Even Zola didn't give food the importance Zola did despite his voluptuous menus. Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's wedding breakfast is a skimpy snack by comparison, and Maupassant's tale of the beautiful and badly used Boule de Suif is a story written for Weightwatchers. .

If you enjoyed Balzac's stories and want to tiptoe down memory lane, Balzac's Omelette is fine. If you don't know much about him and want a little background, it's a good start. But if you adore the old glutton, if you wanted to add another crumb to your knowledge of him, his era or his characters, get some great insights into Pere Goriot, maybe, or something you missed about Le Cousine Bette, you won't get that here. This is veneer of a book. Light and fluffy and a little mingy. An amuse bouche if you will. No one enjoys a good omelette more than I, but this one is a little flat and underdone.