"Bloch-Dano displays here erudite command of culinary history with both literary and historical anecdotes. . . . Digesting the contents of this little book yields a trove of trivia with which to impress shoppers and vendors alike at the farmers’ market."

Booklist

"This allusive, impressionistic, quintessentially French tour of the kitchen garden takes us from aphrodisiac artichokes to Zola’s gritty market stalls, with many a literary and gustatory detour. Lazy summers in grandmother’s garden, the frenzy for fresh winter peas that gripped the court at Versailles in 1660, the global travels of the chili pepper, the contested history of Cinderella’s pumpkin--it’s all here, and it’s all fun."

Jane S. Smith, author of The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants

"From Grandma’s vegetable garden to our childhood tables, from personal memories--yes, members of the pumpkin family are also Proustian madeleines--to the origins of vegetables and to the way they have been cooked throughout the ages and on different continents, from the healing cabbage to the aphrodisiacal artichoke, we feast upon so much new information and upon how we can benefit from it."

Marie Claire | on the French edition

"A book that Colette would have adored, one that gives vegetables back their original flavor, that restores the parsnip or the cardoon, leads us through the kitchen garden into a child-like thrill of literature, and celebrates the democracy of pleasure."

Le Nouvel observateur | on the French edition

"A lovely book that makes you feel at once hungry for these plants and satiated by the knowledge you just reaped about them."

Audubon

"Quirky . . . entertaining. . . . Bloch-Dano’s book confirms that we are what we eat, and that vegetables, like Bloch-Dano’s gardens, are firmly rooted in the realm of imagination."

Times Literary Supplement

“This is a wonderfully evocative and indeed mouthwatering celebration of vegetables and the joys of gardening. . . . Bloch-Dano takes 10 vegetables, from the carrot and the cabbage to the pumpkin and the pea, and explores their history, drawing on literature, art, language, geography, genetics and horticulture. She even throws in some recipes. There are many delightful details. The artichoke was Freud’s favourite plant, apparently reminding him of tearing up a book as a child. On parsnips, she cites Samuel Beckett: ‘I like parsnips because they taste like violets, and violets because they smell like parsnips.’ Bloch-Dano says ‘gardens are rooted in the realm of the imagination.’ So too are vegetables, as her slight but rich book shows.”

Guardian (UK)