Anka Muhlstein’s Balzac’s Omelette is a tome for literary-minded and foodie alike. Muhlstein traces the history of French restaurant culture and food, using Balzac’s life and works as a backdrop. Passing mention goes to Proust, Zola, and Flaubert, whom Balzac influenced. In the nineteenth century, she tells us, France became the gastronomic mecca we know it as today; but in Balzac’s lifetime, the first half of the eighteenth, restaurants were just beginning to blossom.
The squatty pages of Balzac’s Omelette are numbered in yellow, a in whimsical font, and its endpaper illustrated with a kitschy hodgepodge of decadent drawings: a woman’s hand, champagne bottles, fruits, baguettes, and women’s undergarments. These details evoke the pleasures of hedonism that Balzac indulged in after finishing a manuscript. And of course, the book’s content is similarly indulgent. Muhlstein does not neglect the guilty pleasure of a topic so many professors and students of literature are so fond of – food and sex in literature.
An analysis of food in literature is not all frivolity and fun – it can also clue readers in to the complex socioeconomic structures and strictures of a time period. As Muhlstein notes, for Balzac, “how well you ate was one way of establishing a rise in status”. She delineates the offerings of many of Balzac’s fictional households, from loving mothers to misers. And for each character, artfully and realistically rendered, the contents of a meal remained “the surest thermometer for gauging the income of a Parisian family”.
Balzac’s Omelette is a quick read at around 200 small pages, but its pleasures are toothsome and savory.
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