Focus on the books and recipes of Paula Wolfert
- the acclaimed American food writer and cookbook author is our June focus with the cookbook club
In the late summer of 2013 our holiday took us to the commune of Lunac (population 435) in Aveyron, south-west France. We’d rented a big house (big for just the 2 of us, anyway) with a big pool and, what seems to me when I look back at the photos, a small and slightly odd kitchen. The kind of kitchen that now would make me click away and look for somewhere else, but in 2013 my kitchen needs were maybe simpler. Or maybe it’s that this region, that kitchen - or more specifically, a cookbook I found tucked up on a shelf in that kitchen - had such a profound impact on me that cooking went on to become much more central to my life and work.
The book was Paula Wolfert’s The Cooking of South-West France.
In 2013 it would have been generous to call me even a fledgling food writer. I knew I wanted to write, and I was certainly cooking a lot, but those two ideas were only just beginning to meaningfully connect. I thank Paula Wolfert for pushing me over the edge into becoming a ‘proper’ food writer. The writing and recipes I discovered in that book resounded with an appreciation of regionality and food heritage, of seasonality, and of simple cooking done well. Tenets I have held onto strongly since.
The Cooking of South-West France came out in 1983 and was the third of Wolfert’s nine cookbooks all focussed on the foods that line the coast of the Mediterranean. These are books to cook from over and over and to be inspired by. All good reasons why the work of Paula Wolfert is going to be the focus of our cookbook club digital discussion in June.
Read on for more background to Wolfert and her books, links to recipes to try, and why her last book earned this mic drop cover quote from Claudia Roden no less:
“There is no book on the food of Morocco as good as this one”
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