I’m not going to say a thing, because I’m certain I did the same thing back in the day. But a lot of people who are en route to Paris ask me where they can find things like bouillabaisse, a true salade Niçoise, or Kig ha farz, and when I answer, “You can’t”, they either don’t believe me, or get irked because they think I’m…
When I worked at Chez Panisse, we had a customer who would come for dinner several nights a week and eat downstairs in the kitchen. Jean lived by herself in San Francisco and took a cab across the bridge to Berkeley for dinner once or twice a week. When the waiters knew she was coming, they’d set up a small table next to the pastry…
I was in the middle of a lovely spring lunch at Chez Prune up by the Canal St. Martin the other day with Paule Caillat, a friend who taught cooking classes in Paris. We talked about many things, but of course, the conversation quickly turned to the most important subject of them all: baking. And soon she began to tell me about this tart dough…
The most commonly-asked question for a certain cookbook author, aside from “Can I replace the corn syrup?” by a longshot, is: “Can that be frozen?” So the fellow in question wrote an ice cream book, knowing that I—I mean, he would get a break from being asked that question.
Turn on the television any night in France and chances are excellent that you’ll land on a program, held in a brightly-lit studio, where celebrities, authors, and other French luminaries mingle, chat, and talk about issues—or whatever they feel like. For some reason, though, they don’t run a banner at the bottom while the person is talking, like they do incessantly on American television. And…
I don’t know when it took hold, but le Brunch has become popular in Paris. Unlike the Bloody Mary and Mimosa-fueled repasts we had when I lived in San Francisco, in Paris, the concept is a little different. For one thing, Sundays are blissfully “sacred” and no one seems to want to wake up and go anywhere until — well, Monday. And the places that do…
I thought I’d better get this one out of the way right off the bat, at the start of the year. This recipe was languishing on my kitchen counter, resisting publication until I could resist no more. (And if you saw my kitchen counter, you’d know a piece of paper takes up about 25% of it, so I’m especially eager to get it out of…
I promised a bunch of holiday-friendly recipes this month, and this one is a doozy! Peanut butter cookies, filled with salted peanut caramel—do those sound as good to you as they do to me? The recipe is from The Art and Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet, who is one of America’s best bakers. Her name might not be on the edge of your tongue,…
I finally got a chance to track down that butter I found worthy of rapture from Le Jules Verne. Oddly, when I searched the name, I found out that I actually commented on way back in 2006. How I forgot about it, I’ll never, ever know. It’s from Pascal Beillevaire, a chain of cheese shops in France. While their cheeses are very good, I have…
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