‘To Drink and To Eat: Tales and Techniques from a French Kitchen’ (review)

Written and Illustrated by Guillaume Long
Published by Oni Press

My wife collects cookbooks but she doesn’t cook. I love to cook but rarely use a cookbook.

A few years back, though, a publisher hired me to test recipes in order to publicize a new Italian slow cooker cookbook. They paid for a new slow cooker and reimbursed my grocery ingredients bill each week. Every Sunday, I would choose one recipe from the book and try it out—preferably something with one or more ingredients I had never before tried or worked with. I’d create the dish in the morning and later in the day, my wife and I would always have someone over to try the resulting meal along with us. Then, I would blog about the results, which usually turned out quite well by following the book’s recipes. Last I heard, though, the book was canceled.

My point being, as I said, I love to cook.

The cookbook at hand today, however, was NOT canceled.  It’s not even an actual cookbook…or certainly not a typical one. More a FOOD book, To Drink and to Eat—Tastes and Techniques from a French Kitchen is a new edition of a book originally released in France in 2012 by Guillaume Long. It collects his often-brilliant comic strips on food which originally ran in the French paper, Le Monde.

Described in a hilarious new Foreword by chef Nguyen Tran (Starry Kitchen) as a “creative memoir cookbook,” that is precisely what it is. Long himself is both our narrator and a character as he explores various aspects of edible creations and his sometimes interactions with them.

Basically, it’s comic strips about foods and recipes.

Long’s art is charming. To my eye, the black and white (or black and sepia?) pages strongly evoke the style of the young, Help!-era Robert Crumb, especially his buildings. The color pages pop up throughout, though, too, and have a much slicker look. His writing is cute and funny, too, even in its English translations.

But all of it is about food. I love to read books ABOUT food, that aren’t necessarily recipe books. We have several. In this case, though, as educational and edifying as it is, it all felt a tad overwhelming, and sometimes even overly detailed. Taken in smaller doses as originally published, it would have been fine but here it just feels like too much information overload for the non-foodie.

If the Food Network is your favorite channel, then To Drink and to Eat might be for you. I liked it a lot but it really wasn’t my thing. I feel like if you were to read it for the info, you’d resent the cartoony interruptions, and if you were to read it for its fun and funny comics, you’d get tired of all the talk of food.