I'm in the middle of reading Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik and it's better than I thought it'd be. Here are a few snippets...

• It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones. The French freezer is, in a French refrigerator, always on the bottom rather than the top and is composed of drawers and secret compartments, like an old writing desk; you are supposed to fill it with culinary billets-doux, little extras, like petits pois, instead of with next week's dinner, as you do in an American freezer. - p.55-6

• Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. We were on the cutrate American academic version of the grand tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten steamed hamburgers and fish and chips in which the batter seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris we arrived late on the train, checked into a cheap hotel, and went to eat, without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a salad Nicoise, trout baking in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. - p. 147-8

• Waverley Root once divided all Gaul into three fats - lard, olive oil, and butter - and said that they determined the shape of French cooking. That you might be able to cook without putting any fat in the pan at all was an unthinkable notion. The charcoal grill, the brick oven, and all the other nonfat ways of cooking now seem normal everywhere except in France. People who look at cooking more practically than philosophically think that that technical lag is the heart of the problem. - p. 159-60