Vie de France: Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley [Mass Market Paperback]

James Haller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2003

When award-winning chef James Haller and his closest friends toasted his sixtieth birthday, he thought that their dream of spending time together in a beautiful house in Europe would remain just a dream. But a year and a half later, they arrived at a charming 17th-century chateau in the Loire Valley that would be their home for the next month.

Haller swore not to cook, but the local abundance of fresh foods, herbs, and wines soon had him preparing all the group's meals-and loving it. They breakfasted on oven-fresh croissants slathered with French butter, strolled endless fields of glorious sunflowers, feasted at delightful cafes, made day trips to Tours for antiques-and relished the spectacular dishes that Haller created from the simplest ingredients. Best of all, they made many new friends-while sharing priceless moments with old ones...

Featuring dozens of delicious recipes, Vie de France is a delightful testament to the joy of good friends, good food, and reaching for your wildest, most wonderful dreams.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"To see and taste and smell all this wonderful food was so heartening to me, I felt I had arrived in heaven," says James Haller in Vie de France. He's referring to the marketplace in the Loire Valley town of Savennieres, but his response encapsulates his "food encounter" during a month-long vacation he and friends took to the small community, where they rented a charming 17th-century house. The diarylike book details the trip and, in daily menus, the food Haller cooked--delightful country dishes like Sausage and Red Wine Ragout, Sorrel and Spinach Salad, and Green Plum Custard Tart. Though not presented in recipe form, the meals nonetheless receive sufficient description to whet appetites and encourage cooking.

An ex-chef/restaurateur, Haller, in his early 60s, was looking for the next thing to do, and the house and his diary-keeping provided a necessary break that eventually led to a full-time writing commitment, of which this book is a result. His journey from fearfulness about the outcome of a spur-of-the-moment plan to relaxation and revelation in the French countryside is gratifying. Readers follow the process, joining Haller and company as they discover town butchers where meat is cut to order, supermarkets with multiple cheese aisles, local chateaux, and more while experiencing some of the predictable crosscultural contretemps. Though narratively thin, and lacking the exploration of self and others necessary to paint a penetrating picture, the book manages nonetheless to convey the culinary life and spirit of flower-saturated Savennieres. --Arthur Boehm --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

James Haller is an international award-winning master chef, author and lecturer. He was the chef, founder, and owner of the Blue Strawberry restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the Lee Fontain Carriage House in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the owner/operator of James Haller's Kitchen, where he acts as a food consultant and gives classes. Haller is the author of three cookbooks, a food/fitness book, and What to Eat When You Don't Feel Like Eating, a book for feeding terminally ill people, which has sold over 500,000 copies.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (June 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425190110
• ISBN-13: 978-0425190111
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,020,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #51 in Books > Travel > Europe > France > Loire

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars uplifting biographical story, July 6, 2002

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vie De France: Sharing Food, Friendship and a Kitchen in the Lorie Valle (Hardcover)

In 1996 having celebrated his sixtieth birthday in Maine, renowned chef James Haller, wary of the kitchen, decides to R & R in the French Loire Valley. He and friends rent a seventeenth century home in Savonnieres. Six people including James would stay the entire month that they have leased the property for while other friends will come by for shorter duration.

The house combined the best of history with much of modern day convenience. The company was companionable both those staying in the house and the locals whose fresh foods at the markets provided James an invigorating regeneration and though he planned not to cook one meal the motivated chef was soon doing all the cooking.

Though the recipes are what readers might expect from the author-chef, the key to this uplifting biographical month is how important friendship is to the human condition. France furbishes the atmosphere that rejuvenated a tired James. VIE DE FRANCE: SHARING FOOD, FRIENDSHIP, AND A KITCHEN IN THE LOIRE VALLEY is an inspirational toast to the stimulation of camaraderie that is a human need in order to live precious life to the fullest.

Harriet Klausner

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars vie de france, February 6, 2010

By 

Joel B. Heltom "Joel B Helton" (North Caroliina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Vie de France: Sharing Food, Friendship, and a Kitchen in the Loire Valley (Mass Market Paperback)

If you feel the need to experience France, but cannot afford it, just pick up this book, read it, and you will instantly be transported there. I read it quite often.

16 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Worst Book I've Read in Ages, November 30, 2003

By 

"grammarians" (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vie De France: Sharing Food, Friendship and a Kitchen in the Lorie Valle (Hardcover)

It's hard to know where to begin critiquing this dreadful book, but suffice it to say if my middle schooler had turned this in as a "What I Did On My Vacation" essay, I'd have failed him.
From the completely uninspired writing style to the astonishing errors in French spelling and terminology to the unsavory and repetitive recipes, it's just one big, sophomoric exercise.
Readers, I dare you to count how many times "Chef" Haller writes "I sautéed [sometimes with the accent mark, and sometimes without] some green beans in olive oil and a bit of garlic." How about that recipe for "French toast" that he repeats verbatim twice? Does a real chef actually use "cheap red wine that we bought just for cooking"?
I don't know whether to blame him or his editor, or both, for the remarkable number of spelling errors (framboisse, fois gras, marguez) or the factual mistakes ("We drank a bottle of Badouit, a local mineral water"; "cassoulet actually comes from the Provence region"), but someone should take the rap.
Take all this phony "knowledge" gleaned by an absolute amateur on a one-time, one-month trip to France and pair it with a penchant for walking readers through recipes as though they were in Montessori school ("First I chopped last night's turkey into bite-sized pieces and put those pieces into a large cast iron pot I found on the second shelf of the pantry" - OK, I fabricated that, but that's what it's like reading this guy), and you have one big snore of a book.