Around My French Table

Last Sunday, I took the train to Kingston to take part in the Kingston WritersFest, specifically to be part of an on-stage tete-à-tete with American cookbook author Dorie Greenspan. We had never met but I was eager to remedy that after reading her tenth and latest book, Around My French Table. Dorie’s story is fascinating. At the age of 13 she burned down her parents’ newly redecorated kitchen while attempting to make some French fries and did not cook again until after she was married. Soon after, she abandoned her original plan to be an academic – she had started a doctoral thesis on gerontology – to become a pastry chef but ended up writing about food for Elle magazine. Since then she has won five James Beard and IACP awards, has been named to the James Beard Foundation Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America and has collaborated on cookbooks with some of the great cooks of our time, including Julia Child, Daniel Boulud and Pierre Hermé. She is the best person I know for translating chefs’ recipes into the very different language of domestic cooking. And she is the baker we all aspire to be. Her life is also pretty enviable: she divides her time between three homes and three kitchens – one in New York, one in Connecticut and one in Paris.

Around My French Table is a collection of recipes for the things she likes to cook in her apartment in the 6^th arrondissement, and as such is also a vivid look at the way savvy French women cook these days. There are recipes involving leftovers and others that make use of things one might buy in a supermarket because they are well made and convenient. She tells amusing stories – my favourite concerns her daring to complain about an unripe brie in her local cheese shop and the respect it earned her from the cheesemonger (“in France, if you complain they think you’re a connoisseur”). She shares the little dinner-party secrets of her friends and the best recipes of her neighbourhood bistros and cafés. And of course, given her brilliance at baking, the dessert section is particularly strong. A baker or patissier cannot cook au pif, by instinct, but Dorie’s recipes are eminently doable – long, sometimes, but only because they are full of detail and exceedingly thoroughly tested. It’s impossible to read the page about making gougères without heading for the kitchen.

Our conversation in Kingston was not without incident. It was the final event of the festival and involved a brunch for 120 on the top floor of the Holiday Inn, a lovely venue with a fine view of the Military College across the water. Almost as soon as the doors were opened, however, the omelette station in the dining room set off the smoke alarms (though mercifully not the sprinklers). The guests were remarkably good-natured about it all and tucked in as if nothing were amiss, even after fully equipped firefighters burst into the room, pausing in a classic double-take at the sight of the party. The rest of the hotel had been evacuated into the car park.

Delightful Dorie was entirely unfazed and charmed us all with her humour and knowledge.

One of the early adopters of the internet and blogging, Dorie runs a very cool web site – www.doriegreenspan.com – where we can all join in the latest pash, French Fridays with Dorie. Fans will cook a recipe from the new book together every week and compare notes online.

The best place to find her book is, of course, The Coobook Store: www.cook-book.com .