Cooking with Émile Zola
In her Eat Your Words series, Valerie Stivers cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.
It’s finally the season for the farmers market, which inspired me to dig out my copy of by Émile Zola (1840–1902), a book whose descriptions of the central Parisian market of Les Halles in its heyday are perhaps literature’s greatest market scenes. Zola was friends with Cézanne, and he spends a very many pages in painterly descriptions of Les Halles, where at dawn, for example, “piles of greenery were like waves, a river of green flowing along the roadway” and the light “seemed to transform” cabbages into “magnificent flowers with the hue of wine-dregs, splashed with crimson and dark purple.” Later, “the
