Published by Mudlark, 2019, 344 pages

A travel book by a food writer—what more could you want?

Felicity Cloake, inspired by the Tour de France, decides to do a tour herself with a slight difference. She would cycle around France, stopping to eat regional delicacies and at least one croissant a day, hoping to find the perfect one. (She rates each one on a scale of 1 to 10 at the end of each chapter.)

She starts in Cherbourg in the northeast and circles the country, heading south along the coast, then following France’s contours until the grande finale in Paris (where she finds two almost perfect croissants.) Her constant companion is Eddy the bike, with friends joining her for some of the stretches.

Coake’s trip is planned around food, with each stage ending in a town famous for a dish: oysters in St. Malo, buckwheat crêpes in Redon, chocolate in Bayonne, cassoulet in Castelnaudary, Carcassone and Toulouse (I was very impressed with the fact that she had three cassoulets in three successive meals, but that’s what you can do when you cycle), fish soup in Marseille, choucroute garnie (saukerkraut with pork) in Strasbourg and onion soup in Reims.

Cycling isn’t always easy: she is almost blown off a mountain road on the Col de Joux, often led astray by Google Maps into dead-end roads, and victim to Eddy’s uncertain brake pads. But she has time to appreciate the countryside and can set her own pace—at least, most of the time when she’s not rushing to get to a dinner reservation in a town still miles away.

The book has some wonderful moments. One wet morning, trying to stuff her “sopping tent back into its reluctant bag”, she finds two snails sheltering in her handlebar bag, making inroads into her expensive Bayonne chocolate, “having snobbily shunned the Milka”. Then there are the old men in Marseilles who offer advice on getting an authentic Marseille tan: “Lots of oil is the secret, they confide”.

And there’s the food, which is really the point of the book. Cloake’s descriptions of what she eats are mouth-watering. In Redon, she is served “half a baguette, a plump golden croissant and four little pats of Paysan Breton beurre demi-sel, which does actually appear to be 50 per cent salt, 50 per cent delicious dairy fat—I end up eating everything, just so I have an excuse to finish the butter.”

And the hot chocolate she drinks in Bayonne reminds me of the one you get in Spain—rather than the milky stuff you get elsewhere, this is “[i]ntensely bittersweet, rich but not creamy, with a handsome mousse of chocolate bubbles rising out of the rose-patterned Limoges porcelain like a crown”.

You should really go to France to savor the food, but just in case you can’t and are feeling adventurous, the end of each chapter has recipes so you can recreate her journey at home. Even the croissants.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.