A Season for That

May 20, 2024
Food writer Hoffman debuts with a finely detailed memoir about learning to live, cook, and eat like a local. When the author, a longtime Francophone, and his wife traded their Minnesota suburb for a small village in southern France in hopes of helping their kids master the language, Autignac turned out to be less than the quaint immersion site they’d expected (“Nowhere in France isn’t pretty... except for the place we picked to live for the next six months”). Hoffman felt excluded from the “harmonious bubble” of village life until trips to the grocer, nights spent cooking unfamiliar dishes, and long days of harvesting grapes with a neighbor yielded insights into a culture that tightly linked food, wine, land, family, and community. Hoffman’s musings on his adopted home sometimes lapse into sentimentality (“, figs were those rare and precious things” on charcuterie boards, while “Here, ubiquitous and free, they were the blue collar refreshment that Yvan the carpenter grabbed from the tree in the alley”). Still, the author’s perceptive dissections of such small moments as watching his son try an oyster for the first time, and, he imagines, experiencing “a feeling of joining the adult world in some way he couldn’t make happen in other realms,” speak lucidly to the challenges and rewards of connection at home and abroad. Francophones and foodies will be charmed.

June 1, 2024
The transformation of a Minnesotan family in rural France. In his tender debut memoir, tax preparer and food journalist Hoffman recounts his family's adventure of living for six months in Autignac, a village of 800 people in rural Languedoc that, at first, seemed decidedly not as magical as he had hoped. It was not picturesque, like Provence; above all, it wasn't Paris, where he had spent nine months during college. "I don't know what I'm doing here," he told his wife. "This isn't the trip I expected. It isn't the trip I wanted it to be. It's not the village I wanted it to be. It's not the climate I wanted it to be. It's not even the French food I wanted it to be. We're just here." But as time passed and he, his wife, and their two children--14-year-old Eva and 9-year-old Joseph--got to know their "new, unfamiliar neighbors," they settled into the rhythms of the place, from the fishmonger's weekly visits to the seasonal changes that presented them with succulent ripe apricots in summer and sweet wine grapes in the fall. Hoffman describes in sensuous prose his delighted discovery of new aromas and tastes, including aromatic herbs, briny oysters, and pungent cheeses. Even a homemade vinegar, "filling my sinuses and wringing my salivary glands, changed the definition of whatever I had previously understood 'vinegar' to mean." With the help of neighbors and shopkeepers, he learned to cook coq au vin, rabbit, beef daube, mackerel, and anchovies. "The kitchen," he writes, "had begun to feel like the center that held this all together, and I craved my nightly aproned shift." If food is central to Hoffman's memories, so are the warm, embracing friendships that enriched each member of the family. A collection of engaging recollections.

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June 6, 2024
Food writer Hoffman possessed a real affinity for languages from childhood and spent a college term in Paris. Years later, after marriage, kids, and a stretch of unfulfilling but remunerative jobs, Hoffman uprooted his wife and two children from his native Minnesota to live in southern France. They settled in Autignac, a sleepy town in Languedoc barely visited by tourists and situated across the Rh�ne from storied Provence. Their renovated house had formerly been a winery, and neighbors still produced wines from their vineyards. After enrolling his children in local schools, Hoffman learned the town's daily rhythms, including its public address loudspeakers that alert residents not just to emergencies but also to the arrival in the main square of fishmongers or other merchants. Hoffman's facility in French quickly earned him the respect of locals, and he ended up working with his neighbor to harvest grapes and produce wine. Hoffman's tale is full of the travails of expatriate life, but he has genuine affection for the townsfolk and an insatiable curiosity about their foodways.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.