Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are. This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honore de Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings.

Full of surprises and insights, Balzac’s Omelette invites you to taste anew Balzac’s genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.