From 1926-1927, A.J. Liebling- then a 23-year-old newspaper reporter- spent a year in Paris learning how to eat. Several decades later, he wrote a memoir of the experience called Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris.
From March through July of this year, I will learn to eat in Buenos Aires. Rather than drown in butter and cognac in Parisian restaurants, I am enrolled in a five-month course at an international culinary school. In writing about the experience, I’m trying to avoid the pitfalls outlined here (see the fourth paragraph from the top). Instead, my goal is to record what I’ve learned about food and to keep the self-revelatory schmaltz to a minimum. When I stray from cooking details into more general Buenos Aires information, I'll title the post “Between Meals,” which you can skip if you’re not a close relative.
As Liebling wrote in his memoir, “There would come a time when, if I had compared my life to a cake, the sojourns in Paris would have represented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge.”
By August, I hope to say the same.
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