Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac - Paperback

by Anka Muhlstein (Author), Adriana Hunter (Translator)

The acclaimed biographer offers a fresh, insightful view of Balzac's life, time, and works through the lens of food.

"Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are." This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac's The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings.

Full of surprises and insights, Balzac's Omelette invites you to taste anew Balzac's genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

Author Biography

Anka Muhlstein is the author of biographies of Queen Victoria, James de Rothschild, and Cavelier de La Salle; studies on Catherine de Médicis, Marie de Médicis, and Anne of Austria; a double biography, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart; Monsieur Proust's Library (Other Press, 2015), The Pen and the Brush (Other Press, 2017), and Camille Pissarro (Other Press, 2023). She won the Goncourt Prize for her biography of Astolphe de Custine, and has received two prizes from the Académie française. She and her husband, Louis Begley, are the authors of Venice for Lovers. They live in New York City.

Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than ninety books, including Marc Petitjean's The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris and Hervé Le Tellier's The Anomaly and Eléctrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation's 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.