Making plans for bison

An unexpected bright spot in the recent trek to DC was an encounter with the good folks from the U. of Nebraska Press. Bison Books, their trade imprint, has started a new food series, called At Table. There is no info to be found on the site about the series at large, but Pampille's Table, one of the early entries, is a keeper. It is Shirley King's translation and adaptation of Marthe Daudet's Les Bons Plats de France, a tome mentioned several times in Proust's Recherche. The adaptation is a bit more aggressive than I would like, as it is hard to tell where Daudet ends and King leaves off. On the other hand, this work makes it a more viable cookbook--it offers intelligent and distinctive approaches to most of the classics of the French bourgeois table, with the odd idiosyncracy. The onion soup is a case in point: Pampille advocates adding broth slowly to the onions, which makes sense to me, but pushes for parmesan instead of gruyere, which does not. I will investigate and report. By and large, though, it is a delightful book--the kind which you hope your spouse would prefer you not read  next to them on an airplane, because you will be interrupting them constantly to share a sentence or a paragraph. More deets when I have the book with me--her description of medlars is worth the price of admission.