It’s a few months since I read One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake, but it had such a large effect on me that I felt I really should write a little more than the brief paragraph in my June reading round-up.

I’ve followed Cloake’s food writing for years. Her “How to cook the perfect…” column for the Guardian hits just the right practical, experimental note and her sense of humour makes for fun reading even when it’s not a recipe I’m likely to ever make. And her Instagram account is an excellent mixture of cookery, food markets, restaurants and her dog Wilf. It’s probably the account I pay most attention to that doesn’t belong to someone I know in actual real life.

This is the first of Cloake’s food-and-travel memoirs, based on her 2018 journey around France by bike and train. Her aim was to sample the best versions of her 21 favourite French foods, while keeping to a fairly tight schedule. She packed her panniers and jumped on the Eurostar with her bike. Over the next two months, she cycled a circle around France (roughly) – sometimes accompanied by friends, sometimes alone. And occasionally jumping on a train. France is a big country, after all.

“So I’ve got the bike and the kit and the rudimentary vocab, having … ploughed my way through various Inspector Maigret mysteries instead of packing. This at least means I’ll be able to discuss murder weapons with confidence on my journey, if required. Yet such is the rush before I go that I don’t quite make time to check if all my gear will fit in my new bright yellow panniers … I have a sneaking suspicion that once I’ve included important morale-boosting items like Marmite and sloe gin, there might not be an awful lot of room for luxuries like spare inner tubes and plasters.”

While I do share Cloake’s love of French patisserie, particularly the croissant, I am much less enamoured of the rest of French cuisine. I mean, I don’t eat meat and my body does not get on well with large quantities of dairy, especially cream, so a typical French menu rarely has anything to excite me.

Cloake, on the other hand, reveres French food as many food critics do. No doubt her descriptions of the different styles of boeuf bourguignon in different cities will thrill those readers who share her enthusiasm. Even as a non-fan of most of these dishes, I did mark the pages with recipes for moules marinière and Provençal fish soup. I am definitely giving those a try.

But this book is more about the travel than the food. Cloake describes with gentle humour the minutiae of cycling long distance, the state of the various cheap rooms she stays in, the struggle to look presentable at restaurants after several hours of hard exercise. Her mood fluctuates with the company (or lack thereof), the weather and, of course, the availability/quality of food. I can relate.

She also squeezes in some brilliantly cheesy tourist attractions, mostly food-related, such as Mercier champagne cellars (complete with tourist train) and the cookie cutter collection in the Museum of Alsatian Life.

“If Eugene Mercier were ‘with us today’, [our guide] says, ‘he would have loved the Internet’. I believe it: the man has viral stunt written all over his amazingly moustachioed face.”

Cloake doesn’t romanticise travel but her narrative made me fall completely in love with the idea of long-distance cycling. So much so that I spent this summer building up my cycling stamina in the hope that one day I might manage a similar adventure (but probably not in France). Our recent holiday in the Lake District proved that I can cycle several days in a row, albeit not the distances Cloake covers. I’ll work up to it.

Published 2019 by Mudlark.

Source: Waterstones.