Dwight Garner: food lit

But the greatest food novel ever written, hands down, is ‘‘The Belly of Paris,’‘ by Emile Zola, published in 1873. Anthony Bourdain has called it ‘‘the ‘Citizen Kane’ of foodie books,’‘ and that’s pretty apt. Reading Zola’s novel, set in Les Halles, the great Paris food market, makes you feel as if Mario Batali had taken his sensual Manhattan emporium, Eataly, and tipped it sideways, slowly burying you under its contents. (I mean this in a good way.) The book tells the story of an unjustly imprisoned convict, Florent, who escapes and finds a job as a fish inspector in Les Halles. This novel has a sharp political edge; Florent, a thin and poetical man, is disgusted with bourgeois society (’‘Respectable people . . . What bastards!’‘ is among this book’s famous quotations) and the complacency of a populace grown fat. But the book’s beating heart resides in Zola’s lush, funny and insanely erotic descriptions of the bounty of Les Halles: cheeses, charcuterie, offal, game birds, mountains of things like black radishes and coral-pink carrots. This is the sort of book in which dinner conversation involves topics like the winter salting of meats, and in which even the dawn has a ‘‘balsamic scent.’‘