Road Tripping - Steve Hoffman

And so tell us too about, I think when you were younger, you weren't necessarily a food person at first, but certainly by the time you brought your family there as an adult, um, you write that you became very aware how the food of this place, of this village, was also very different than the food of that Parisian fantasy.

For sure.

I, I was, I had experimented with cooking before we got here.

I loved, I love the sort of, um, pageant of a Sunday afternoon, putting the apron on at 4:00, opening a bottle of wine-

Mm-hmm

... creating lots of dishes, uh, and then, uh, doing, you know, more, uh, sort of fancy cooking.

Mm-hmm.

Um, that's, that's mostly what I'd done earlier.

I had not had any experience really cooking for a family or the, uh, n- no sense of the daily demands of what, of what truly, you know, household cooking means.

So I got there with a, with a love of food, a love of restaurants, and a love of that kind of cooking.

Um, but this was again, you know, the food, the quote French, quote, unquote, "French food" that I, uh, was used to was really restaurant food, and it was haute cuisine.

Mm.

Uh, it was fancy.

It had been often handed down by, you know, uh, male chefs in restaurants.

Um, and it w- it, there's, there's an interesting book, uh, called The Food of France by an author named Waverley Root.

And in it-

Mm

... uh, h- he fairly somewhat famously, and I think somewhat anecdotally, [laughs] uh, divides France, it, d- divides French cuisine by its fats.

So there is-

Oh, interesting

...

the France of butter, the France of lard, and the France of olive oil.

And I had spent-

Oh, cool

... to whatever extent I'd ever spent any time in France, I had spent my time in the France of butter primarily, and maybe a little bit the France of lard, which would be sort of the, the, the, the confit, uh, duck and pork areas of around Bordeaux, um, the sort of Dordogne Valley.