Back in January, when I first started this project to revive the Cookbook of the Day feature, one of the very first books I featured was the Farmhouse Cookbook, by Susan Herrmann Loomis. I had picked it up at a thrift store and fallen in love with the way that the author had captured local, fresh, direct-from-the-farm cooking. Commenters on that post mentioned that she had written other cookbooks and that Loomis also had her own cooking school in France. Intrigued, I started looking around for copies of her other work, picking up the Italian Farmhouse Cookbook (surely to be featured here someday) and her memoir, On Rue Tatin.

It's On Rue Tatin that I want to spotlight here today. It took me several months after buying my copy before I actually found the time to read it, but once I started I became totally engrossed. It combines many of my favorite things: stories of exploring new places, old houses and the challenges of making them livable and lots and lots of food and cooking. Each chapter is followed by three or four or five recipes that were previously mentioned in the text. Reading them is nearly as good as reading the rest of the book, as she always includes a description of where the recipe came from and the situations during which her family has eaten that meal.

As someone who lives in a modern apartment building, in the middle of a big city, where farmers markets don't start until May, and the clerks at the corner convenience market are surly and decidedly unhelpful, I loved the opportunity for interior travel that reading this book allowed me. If you long to exist in a food world different from the one you know, this book will give you a chance to do that, even if it's only for a brief while.

I guess I missed this over the summer, though I can't imagine how something so strange could have slipped through my Google Reader! Apparently, a dairy farm in France offers cheese made from human breast milk.

I'm not entirely sure that I believe this, but a web site for the farm, Le Petit Singly, does exist in French. There's a post about it on Why Travel to France from last June, as well as a mentioning of that post here on Serious Eats -- but neither confirms the existence. According to a Wikipedia post, breast milk was sometimes consumed in the ancient world in fertility cults, and it's thinner and sweeter than milk from other mammals.

So if it does exist, there are certainly some questions to address. Firstly, would you taste it? And how would you eat it -- plain? On crackers? Would it mean an entire line of human breast milk products are on the horizon?

There's a new magazine out of France, and it's kinda cool in that weird, hipster-y PoMo sort of way. It's called Yummy, and its calling itself a "JunkFoodDesignMagazine" (because spaces between words are so passé).

The magazine - and web site - are mostly en Français, but obviously, art transcends language, and all that jazz, so your lack of French-speaking skills will not hinder your appreciation - or revulsion - from the site.

The featured art runs the gambit from Whodonut?, Virginia Barre's slightly disturbing illustrations of people living in a fast food nation, to Show Her, which seems to be a big excuse for the artist to show photos of a half-naked woman in a rainstorm, occasionally holding a soda bottle (hence, the food connection, I suppose).

Go check it out - you might just be inspired to make some food art of your own. Or just be really grossed out.

Yeah, I had to do some searching to find out just what Pears Helene is.

It's sometimes called Pears Belle Helene, and Expert Village has a video that shows you step by step how to make the dessert. It's a popular dessert in France, and includes chocolate, vanilla ice cream, and sometimes almond cookies.

Here's a recipe from RecipeSource, and here's one from My French Cuisine. I think that pears are sometimes the forgotten fruit (competing with apples and oranges and bananas), so it's time to start eating pears again.

Several days ago, I asked you, my beloved Slashfood readers, for help on what to do with about a bazillion cherries I had picked up. One of the overwhelming responses was for a cherry clafouti - the French dessert-t thing that's made with a pancake batter and fruit. I am not yet telling you what I am doing with the cherries -- it may or may not be a cherry clafouti -- but until I post that, here are eight cherry clafoutis from around the food web for your viewing, reading, and perhaps eating, pleasure:

1. Noshtalgia is cheery about cherries
2. Amy does Julia Child's recipe
3. 28Cooks uses sour cherries
4. You might get a muffin top if you eat the clafouti from MuffinTop
5. Mahanandi is the one in the picture
6. Clafouti from Becks N Posh is not for the Frenchman
7. Lucullian Delights adds a little spice
8. Smitten Kitchen's clafouti is a cliche come true

It's not unusual to put vegetables, things we normally consider savory, into sweets. We have carrots in carrot cake, zucchini in zucchini bread and muffins, and obviously we have broccoli in broccoli cake.

Wait. What?

I have to say, it has never occurred to me to ever make or eat broccoli cake. However, blog Chic City Rats came across this broccoli cake, perfectly sliced to show off the florets inside, at Rose Bakery in the Parisian rue des Martyrs. Unfortunately, there is no additional information about the cake itself, but just the idea might get our culinary creative juices flowing.

Laubade Floc de Gascogne blanc is 17% and a light yellow gold with an arresting aroma of sharp and bitter notes and alcohol. The taste is tart, sweet and dry at the same time. Quite sharp and fruity tasting, it has tones of pineapple and hints of pine sap, making it very interesting, refreshing and complex. I have tasted the December 2005 and the March 2006 bottlings, each when they were 8-10 months old, and found them quite similar.

Appelltion Floc de Gascogne contrôllée is a style of lightly fortified sweet / tart wine usually served in France chilled, without ice, in a wine glass as an aperitif. It also goes well with foie gras, dessert and chocolates. Floc de Gascogne is meant to be drunk immediately and should be enjoyed within a year or less of of the production. The date of bottling is usually hidden in very small type on the bottom of the back label. Once it gets to around a year or more in age it starts to deteriorate rapidly.

Floc de Gascogne is made from traditional Gascony recipes originating in the 16th century by combining 1/3 fresh, unfermented grape must (juice) with 2/3 of the finest Armagnac. The grapes are grown in Gascony vineyards located in Gers and a few parishes in Lot-et-Garonne and Landes of South West France. The Armagnac must be made from grapes grown, distilled, and aged in the same winery as the unfermented must. After blending, the wine is then stored in barrels for at least ten months for aging.

G'Vine Floraison is a 40% abv. / 80 proof, small batch, numbered bottle, copper pot still, hand crafted gin made in France. Floraison translates roughly into bloom, blossoming, or flowering. Which is the perfect term for this gin.

The base spirits are distilled from grapes as opposed to grain neutral spirits as is common with most other gins. Wine from Ugni blanc grapes growing in the Cognac region of France is distilled four times to produce the neutral grape spirit. Then the botanicals; juniper, nutmeg, coriander seed, cubeb berries, ginger root, liquorice root, green cardamom, cassia bark, and lime are infused for several days with the spirits before distillation. This gin is then blended with infusions of the unique fleur de vigne (green grape flowers), as well as fresh botanicals, and distilled again. It is these blooming, green grape flowers, that lead to the use of Floraison in the name.

Anyone who loves sugar, loves caramel. This is primarily due to the fact that caramel is cooked sugar, often with butter, cream or other flavorings added to it to alter the texture and taste. Regardless of the specifics, however, a good caramel is a wonderful thing and Trish Deseine's Caramel has plenty of wonderful things to offer a reader with a sweet tooth.

The book was originally published in French under the title Du caramel plein la bouche and made it to translation for an English-speaking audience due to the popularity of some of the author's previous works, as well as her fine writing style. The book goes into great detail about the process of making caramel and well over 100 recipes that it can be incorporated into. Desserts and other inherently sweet dishes are obvious inclusions, but Deseine includes recipes that feature meats and vegetables, as well. The idea of a primarily savory caramel dish might sound slightly odd, but only until you consider that there are many dishes that involve natural sugars from fruits and vegetables, including caramelized onions and caramelized pineapple, which is included in Pizza with smoked chicken, caramelized pineapple and mozzarella. Some of the sweet dishes include Caramel Fondue and Caramel Fudge.

Charles Lafitte Brut Cuvée Spéciale NV Champagne, made in France it is 12% abv. The color is a light to medium gold and has tons of dashing and beautiful small bubbles vigorously streaming up the glass. The aroma is refined with hints of citrus and tart apple.

It is an elegant champagne with a combination of light flavors you expect in both mature and young French champagnes like lemon zest, yeast, toast, hints of toasted nuts and a bit of oak and flint. It is a round wine with a long, dry, crisp finish that ends with a bit of sweetness. It is a nice deal in champagne at around $20-$25 a bottle and I am carrying a few with me tonight on New Years Eve to crack open at midnight. Now if I can just find my old sabre...

Champagne is a term that applies to sparkling wines that are from the Champagne region of France. This name is protected, in Europe, by Protected Designation of Origin status and in France by Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, both of which state that to use the name "champagne," the wine must be produced in France, in the Champagne region and in a traditional manner to produce a specific product. Everything else is just a sparkling wine, not champagne.

This standard is followed throughout Europe and many other countries, although the US, for example, does not follow it and any sparkling wine can use the word champagne, which is considered to be a generic term. In France, the word carries a premium image and a premium price, so there is an incentive for sellers to use it instead of other descriptors. Just last week, the police arrested a number of people for passing off "tens of thousands of bottles of low-priced bubbly wine" as champagne, selling it for 5 to 10 times the original price after replacing the bottles' labels with false champagne labels. Most of these wines were sold "via associations or in door-to-door sales," which goes to show that if you want a premium product, you are better off going to a reputable source.

Mendiants are small disks of chocolate that are studded with dried or candied fruits and nuts. Traditionally, they are part of the Christmas celebration in France, where the fruits and nuts on top of the chocolates were chosen to represent "the four mendicant monastic orders and the color of their robes." The original toppings were raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnuts for the Augustins, dried figs for the Franciscans and almonds for the Carmelites. Now, chocolatiers are just as likely to get creative with the toppings for these bite-sized treats as they are with any other confection.

You can always buy a batch that is already made, but making mendiants is a simple process. Start by assembling a selection of toppings, such as cacao nibs, nuts (pistachios, walnuts, pecans, almonds, hazelnuts), dried fruits (cranberries, raisins, cherries, candied orange peel) and anything else that pairs well with chocolate, like small chunks of butter cookies or fleur de sel , as recommended by Clotilde. Melt some good quality chocolate and drop spoonfuls of it onto a sheet of wax or parchment paper to make circles. Place a small assortment of toppings on each disc and set aside to harden. Peel off when ready to serve.

Rhum Clément Creole Shrubb liqueur is 40%abv. / 80 proof. It is a Curacao orange liqueur produced and estate bottled at Habitation Clément in Martinique, and it has only recently become available in the US.

It has a medium light body to it and is a light orange gold in color. The aroma is an intoxicating blend of Curacao orange peels and musky Rhum Agricole, with a touch of exotic tropical spices.

The taste is much less sweet than similar orange liqueurs and very smooth on your tongue. It has a deliciously sharp and slightly bitter orange zest flavor that wakes up your palate immediately. I find that there is a complex, and quite different orange flavor than I have experienced with other orange liqueurs. It is tart and tangy, as well as full and round. The bitter orange is balanced nicely with the sweetness from pure, freshly crushed, sugar cane syrup and a sprinkle of Caribbean spices. The whole liqueur is carried on a solid base of fine, dry, wood aged rum. It has an extraordinarily long finish, rich with the essence of orange, rum, wood tannins, and just the barest hint of spice that lasts and lasts.

Creole Shrubb is one of the most enjoyable liqueurs I have ever experienced. I hope you get the chance to as well.

For several years many European vineyards have been making a percentage of their wine into alcohol to use in disinfectants and as gasoline additives. The European Union may have to force vineyards to destroy some of their vines because the over-production of wine is getting out of hand. The EU has been trying to control prices on wines and been spending $190 million a year in destroying perfectly good wine to do so. Now there is a proposal out to destroy 100,000 acres of wine, more than 10% of Europe's total acreage of vines, over the next five years as a way to control the surplus. Europe, especially France has suffered from poor wine sales the past decade.

Other wine producing areas such as New Zealand, Australia, South America, South Africa, and the US are producing very good wines at decent prices that are now controlling the market. It is yet to be seen whether the European vineyards will be cut back or if some other method of control will be used. Personally I might drink more French and European wines if the price dropped, especially for the better quality products which I don't try as often as I would like.