‘The French Ingredient’ Review: Learning to Cook in Paris

In 2009, Jane Bertch, who is from Chicago, opened a cooking school in Paris. In her entertaining and often hilarious memoir, “The French Ingredient,” she writes about the challenges she faced dealing with Parisians whose favorite word was “non.”

Ms. Bertch, a self-described “Midwest American meat-and-potatoes-eating gal,” first went to Paris at the age of 17 after graduating high school. The eagerly anticipated visit was not a success. Her efforts to speak the language were treated with such disdain she vowed never to return.

A decade later, she found herself back in Paris, now as a banker, unhappily transferred from the branch where she had worked in London. Her new colleagues were aloof and she was lonely. “French life was so coded, from its professional trajectories to its wardrobe.” Everyone, man or woman, she writes, wore a scarf.