Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas

Although author John Baxter was born in Australia, it's France that he calls home. He moved to France in the late 1980s to live with the woman who is now his wife. Cooking is his avocation, and somehow he ended up as the official cook for his wife's family's Christmas dinners. This short memoir intersperses his plans for the current year's Christmas menu with reminiscences about earlier events in his life, including his first Christmas dinner with his wife's family. He's a good storyteller and finds humor in many of his experiences. The main downside of the book for me is that he sometimes shares more than I care to know about the very personal details of his life. Recommended with reservations for readers who enjoy literary travel or food.

John Baxter has written a gem of a book about his love for French culture and French food in his A Paris Christmas-Immoveable Feast . But don't believe the Amazon hype on this book. Rather than being some "multi-year journey" to find the "best possible Christmas dinner" for his "French wife's family", Baxter's engaging book focuses on how he ( a transplanted Australian with minimal cooking experience) managed to finally "fit" into French family traditions (mostly unstated and learned via painful mistakes!) over 15 years, including taking over cooking Christmas dinner for an extended (20 people or more) French family. And it is not a Paris Christmas, rather one in Richebourg--quite a distance from Paris, but reflective of how French show more families actually do celebrate Christmas.

You can read it in a few hours. It is a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon, especially if you are a fan of the French and their cuisine. show less

John Baxter, and American, finds himself falling in love with a French woman and moving to France.

In an effort to prove his love for her, he takes on the family’s challenge of preparing the Christmas Dinner — not a simple feat.

France’s Christmas is family oriented, not commercial as in the U.S. The focus is on family and food. The meal is the star of the day and usually takes a long time to plan and execute.

This book is the years long planning, told in an entertaining style. The deciding of recipes and the travels to various areas to acquire the necessary ingredients are highlighted by the scenes and people of the locations and some of the misadventures during the searches.

There are culinary illustrations, throughout the book, show more from the author’s personal collection. These add to the ambiance of the writing.

I read this in a leisurely pace and felt as if I were there. show less

My wife bought this book at the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris a year ago and I decided to give it a read hoping that it would put me in the holiday spirit. Essentially, the book recounts all of the emotional, cultural, and logistical maneuvering that occurs in preparing the Christmas feast for one's extended French family. In the author's case this was made more challenging by the fact that he is French (only by marriage) by way of Australia - not exactly known as a culinary hotbed. The author figured what better way to be accepted then to prepare the feast. While Baxter was successful in his task, as for my initial purpose, the book failed. I was in no more a holiday spirit than before the reading - bah humbug. As for the show more evocation of things Parisian, it succeeds immensely. I was immediately taken back, for example, to our first meal in Paris last year, when bistro La Palette leapt from the page. Ah, the memories. Baxter's broad strokes is just as successful as Adam Gopnik's detailed layers in Paris to the Moon in describing the Parisian gestalt from an outsider's perspective. show less

This is a delightful book of an Australian bon vivant and his ecounter with his French wife and family over a number of Christmases in France. John Bazter is something of a chef himself and enjoys entertaining. He takes you through how Christmas is celebrated differently than in English-speaking countries, and features a large Christmas Day festive meal. The latter half of the book takes up Baxter's planning, finding retailers who might do his plan fro a roated piglet, other stores for all the other dinner items, and his encounters, some rather charming, with French shopkeepers. Baxter's roasted piglet comes from more Southern U.S. traditions, and definitely not a French idea for Christmas. He accomplishes the dinner with considerable show more aplomb. He writes so well that you are carried along through what otherwise might be pedestrian situations. This is a book that I might want to give. show less

Immoveable Feast: A Paris Christmas manages to reinforce the mystique of French cooking while making me believe that I, too, if blessed with the perfect ingredients, could cook a perfect French Christmas dinner. John Baxter endears himself to his wife's ancient French family through the wonderful stories he tells and somehow ends up responsible for procuring the ingredients and cooking the family's holiday meal. His joy in tracking down the perfect wine, cheese, oysters and pig make for a memorable feast. A seasonal read suitable for a long winter's evening or a series of tasty bites.

Started off reasonably well, despite some small typos and the like, but by the time I got to page 144 where the author states that the grapes of Médoc are Cabermet Franc and Syrah, I lost all faith in either his knowledge of wine or the editor's proofreading skills. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the actual grapes of the Médoc, which is Bordeaux, by the way, are, in order of planting: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Carmenère. When he says that the Cab Franc and Syrah make the finest wines in that region, I could not believe what I was reading. Wish there was a way to get this message to him, not that anyone will correct this and other factual mistakes, but increasingly, I am seeing show more sloppiness in fact-checking, knowledge and editing. Full disclosure, I am French and a sommelier. show less