A Season for That

May 20, 2024
Food writer Hoffman debuts with a finely detailed memoir about learning to live, cook, and eat like a local. When the author, a longtime Francophone, and his wife traded their Minnesota suburb for a small village in southern France in hopes of helping their kids master the language, Autignac turned out to be less than the quaint immersion site they’d expected (“Nowhere in France isn’t pretty... except for the place we picked to live for the next six months”). Hoffman felt excluded from the “harmonious bubble” of village life until trips to the grocer, nights spent cooking unfamiliar dishes, and long days of harvesting grapes with a neighbor yielded insights into a culture that tightly linked food, wine, land, family, and community. Hoffman’s musings on his adopted home sometimes lapse into sentimentality (“, figs were those rare and precious things” on charcuterie boards, while “Here, ubiquitous and free, they were the blue collar refreshment that Yvan the carpenter grabbed from the tree in the alley”). Still, the author’s perceptive dissections of such small moments as watching his son try an oyster for the first time, and, he imagines, experiencing “a feeling of joining the adult world in some way he couldn’t make happen in other realms,” speak lucidly to the challenges and rewards of connection at home and abroad. Francophones and foodies will be charmed.