What are some of your favorite culinary writers — both contemporary and historical?

One who was a source of entertainment to me was Édouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), whose book I bought for some reason I cannot now remember when I was a student. I will always remember his description of a cherry clafoutis, long before I had ever tasted one, in which he exhorts the reader to turn it out and look with dismay at the blackened pastry made soggy by cherry juice, but then taste this unlikely finished product with delight. French translates very badly into English (I had to read it in English in those days) but de Pomiane’s glee at the emotional inversion involved in the transition from seeing to tasting was my first experience of the playfulness of French culinary writing as a whole, had I but known it.

Food was not just about nourishment or even taste, it was about art and design.

However, I must admit that as a rule I am not a huge reader of today’s culinary literature, though I do read restaurant reviews. Nor do I particularly subscribe to the cult of “personality” chefs. Of course the past culinary writers fascinate me, but less the well-studied elite gastronomic writers of the nineteenth century than the obscure cookbook writers of the eighteenth — about whom, even after my own (rather perfunctory) research efforts in Eating the Enlightenment, still virtually nothing is known. There are some recent doctoral theses on Parisian cooks being published at present, but even these researchers have found out nothing new on the widely-read culinary authors of the eighteenth century, people like Menon or Marin. To say that I found in the course of research for the book that several contemporaries attributed the authorship of Marin’s famous preface in Les Dons de Comus (Paris, 1739) to Voltaire, is perhaps to explain why I am particularly fond of that preface.

Your personal favorite French food or dishes?

A large part of Eating the Enlightenment is taken up with the history of the food artists in France — not only the cooks but the makers of prepared foods of different sorts: liqueurs, pastries, confectionery, the foods whose production required, or offered the opportunity for, real skill, talent and imagination. France is not alone in such bounty. Growing up in Italy and Germany, I took it for granted that there would be shops selling all kinds of diverse and ornamental breads, cakes, cheeses, chocolates, ice creams, sausages, even fruits.

Food was not just about nourishment or even taste, it was about art and design. To return to Britain aged twelve was a horrible culture shock. In Rome I had eaten white peaches from gold-rimmed bowls of ice water; in London, tinned figs. That was what you could expect even in the best restaurants. Therefore what I love about French food is diversity. Being able to go into a local Monoprix and find over a hundred cheeses from all around Europe, three different varieties of basil and six of grapes, twenty different kinds of pastries, is a great cultural achievement. Elizabeth David writes wonderfully about the reasons for the de-skilling of British food since World War II, and only in very recent times have some higher standards crept back into Britain, so I am not quite so cut off from food pleasures as formerly. But for me gastronomic tourism is also a voyage to my own childhood, which is emotional.

And your favorite cafés, bistros, eating addresses or food shops in Paris, or elsewhere in France?

Oh, this is hard, because in recent years I have been a single parent. Whenever I have come to Paris lately, therefore, I have had neither the money nor the opportunity to eat out. When my husband and I were still together, we went to a wonderful restaurant, in one of the hilltop villages outside Avignon. So I will just mention that: La Table de Ventabren.