PositiveNewsdaySpring has a grand theory — interesting in some of its particulars but not altogether compelling — that these six discovered the essential genius of traditional French cooking (one thinks of astronauts exploring a vast and unknown domain) and brought the good news home to their readers, changing the American palate forever. Well, maybe. The theory doesn’t matter as much as the stories, and Spring’s versions are exhaustive, engaging, at times hilarious ... For the serious student of gastronomy, this book is part academic tome, part gossipy treatise, part anthropological monograph of a rarefied little world that no longer exists. Spring does a masterful job of getting all the details straight, but we sometimes stagger beneath their weight.
Adam Begley
RaveNewsdayBegley does a masterful job of evoking this milieu, whose members were sympathetic to the ideal of a republic, as the reign of King Louis-Philippe slowly lost its grip on the public imagination ... We can be grateful to Begley for capturing some of that quicksilver spirit, that quintessentially Parisian sensibility, which left us with images that are, in their bewitching way, timeless.
