Happy New 2025! I have some news.

my first cookbook is getting a #2 in 2025

Twenty-four years ago, quite pregnant with my fourth baby, my daughter, Victoire, I moved most of my kitchen to Longchamp racing course in Paris. Longchamp was the early summer setting for a swish lifestyle fair and a few months beforehand, I had launched a cookery ingredient and equipment brand, “Au Comptoir des Chefs”.

As I was demonstrating how to use my products - good chocolate, small utensils, professional ingredients unavailable in usual shops, (ah, the good old pre-Internet days!) I was approached by the brand-new editorial team of Marabout books, part of Hachette Livre, who thought I should write a cookbook, my first, of course, but also theirs. A year or so later, a few months after Victoire, “Petits Plats entre Amis” was born, and incredibly, was a success, quickly becoming a bestseller in France, and generating translations around the world. The book started a new, completely unexpected career for me, which would blow up my life in every way, good and bad.

My girl Vic on Île de Ré in 2022

Last spring, Hachette Cuisine, now the largest cookery imprint of Hachette France, with whom I’ve been publishing my books for the last few years, invited me to produce a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book. I said yes in a heartbeat, and Hachette’s team started negotiating the transfer of rights from Marabout.

It’s now all sorted out, and I am over the moon to announce that “Petits Plats entre Amis 25” (working title!) will be published in France in the autumn.

This book is a gift. Not only have I been handed a mission to delve into what made PPEA a special book back then, but also to look back over twenty-five years of French home cooking. Taking PPEA as a snapshot of how we cooked and entertained in France at the turn of the century, what has changed? What should I keep in the book? What needs an update and what has to go?

Twenty five this year!

I’ll be asking that question of the original owners/readers of PPEA, mostly in French, and writing about it here, at a slightly schizophrenic remove, in English. That said, even if cookbook publishing’s national borders are as well defined as ever, permeable only really for big or new names, big budget productions or most striking “concepts”, I find that home cooking conversations transcend language and culture. And hopefully some of those conversations will be with you as I work with my team over the next months.

Making this new/old book is also an irresistible opportunity to look back at more than just my recipes, but also at how, when and why they were made, served and enjoyed (or not) throughout my years in France. My sixtieth is already such a pivotal year, and here, almost in the middle of it, it’s time to write some of those years out of my system, and see what happens when I do. This morning I’ve posted a story of coffee crème anglaise and the gastronomic baptism of fire that was meeting my belle-famille.

See you soon!

Tx