Dorie Greenspan likens herself to a culinary anthropologist.
Over the past five years, the bestselling cookbook author has been collecting and developing recipes in France for her latest book, Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere, and she’s the first to admit that some of those recipes came to her in odd ways.
There’s ‘Laurent’s Slow-Roasted Spiced Pineapple,’ passed along by a stylist and avid home cook at her hair salon, and a method for cannelés — rum-infused little cakes named for shape of the mold they’re baked in — shared by a perfect stranger at a restaurant one evening.
“The recipes come from real people and real home bakers, and not recipe writers, cookbook authors, or developers,” Greenspan tells Cityline.ca in a recent interview. “I did have to work on them, but that’s part of the fun and the job of being a cookbook author.”
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One of the revelations in Baking Chez Moi is the fact that French baking is not all fancy pastries and fussy preparations. In fact, as Greenspan notes in the book’s introduction, ‘Real French people don’t bake! At least they don’t bake anything complicated, finicky, tricky or unreliable.’ They leave that to the experts at patisseries, and instead bake simple, homey, but still delicious fare: weekend loaf cakes scented with vanilla and browned butter, icebox cakes made with store-bought cookies, and pots de crème in a dazzling array of flavours.
“It took me a while to understand this,” Greenspan admits. “I’ve been living part-time in Paris for almost 20 years, and I have great French friends. When my husband and I started to be invited to friends’ homes for dinner there would be great meals, and they’d always end with some gorgeous pastry bought at a patisserie. I felt pampered, the desserts were delicious. But I should’ve realized earlier that this was really special, this wasn’t an everyday thing. I started to wonder, what were my friends having on Wednesday night when the kids had homework, and they were coming home from work, and no one was a guest for dinner?
“That’s when I started to ask my friends what they were cooking and baking at home, asking them if they would stop treating me like company and show me some of the things that they baked,” she says. “They were reluctant, saying, ‘Oh, we really do very simple things.’ And they were right, they do make very simple things. But they’re great.”
When Greenspan’s not living in Paris, she splits her time between New York City and Connecticut, and the American influence is evident in a number of her latest creations – for instance, a Franco-American spin on strawberry shortcake, and a blueberry-corn tart made with a very American ingredient, cream cheese (in France it’s known as “Philadelphia”).
There’s plenty here to tantalize home bakers – and Greenspan confirms that there will once again be an online baking club working its way through her book. Dorie fans first started baking their way through Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours in 2006, dubbing their group Tuesdays with Dorie. The tradition continued with 2010’s Around My French Table, which inspired another baking club, called French Fridays with Dorie. The Baking Chez Moi club, which anyone can join, kicked off on November 11 with its first recipe, the iced cookies called Palets de Dames.
“While I’m travelling, I always get to meet someone from one of the groups, and real friendships have been formed,” Greenspan enthuses. “Laurie Woodward, who started the [Tuesdays with Dorie] group, ended up being the matron of honour at [another baker’s] wedding in Seattle, even though they’d never met, they’d just baked together virtually for years. I hear from so many of the members – and this is the best thing that anybody can tell me – that they learned to bake from baking through my books with this fabulous group.”
Baking Chez Moi: Recipes from My Paris Home to Your Home Anywhere is now available in stores and online.
More from Dorie:
The ‘French bake’ and why you should let your shortbreads and pie crusts brown: “Please do that. I really feel like it’s so important to get colour on crusts, and on shortbread. You’re kind of shortchanging yourself by baking pale, because you’re not getting the full flavour of the ingredients.”
Why you can’t bring a 5lb bag of sugar on a transatlantic flight: “[I tried to bring] sugar [to Paris] once, which is so unnecessary, but I thought, ‘I’m leaving and I have this five-pound bag of sugar, I’ll bring it with me.’ I got stopped by the TSA (Transportation Security Administration), because you can use sugar to make bombs, I didn’t know that. You know home bakers… dangerous lot.”
Dorie’s holiday baking: “Cookies! Cookies, cookies, cookies! I love baking cookies and I love having them for the holidays. There’s a recipe for speculoos in the book that I will definitely make, and shortbread cookies, which keep really well. I always spend Christmas and New Year’s in Paris, and have for almost 20 years now, so I always make the [gingerbread] bûche de Noël [from Baking Chez Moi], and I always buy a bûche de Noël, because in Paris all the top pastry chefs create bûches de Noël. I think as soon as Christmas is over they’re creating their bûches for the following year. In September they have what amounts to a bûche de Noel fashion show for the press. So they all present their holiday desserts, and then in about November, the newspapers and magazines show them, so it’s like a wish catalogue. I can’t resist.”