FOOD FILE:IF YOU FOUND a book token in your Christmas stocking, this is the volume to spend it on. Stéphane Reynaud's 365 Good Reasons to Sit Down to Eat is a complete delight, peppered with jokes and amusing stories about the fictional Vachecrot family, quirky illustrations by José Reis de Matos and photographs by Marie-Pierre Morel. And there are 365 very different recipes to rifle through, one for every day of the year. But your late start means you'll be able to skip New Year's Day's penitential detox soup – it includes two aspirin and a jog, as well as health-giving green veggies. Today's recipe is another healthy one, for cabbage soup, but thankfully there are plenty of indulgences too.
“It’s food for every day. This book has been written for the person who doesn’t already know how to cook,” explains Reynaud, on a recent visit to Dublin. The recipes – unashamedly French in character, but in a modern, time-efficient way – were tested by someone who doesn’t normally cook and her queries and questions to the author are included as little notes and asides, so as to ensure that every instruction and technique can be understood by even novice cooks.
As a chef and restaurateur, was Reynaud surprised by the questions asked by Aurelie, his recipe tester? “Sometimes, yes,” he says, recounting with a laugh her confusion at a recipe for terrine that called for kinou and agrettes. “Have you seen the date?” he asked her. Seeing that it was April 1st, she got the joke and gave up her internet search for the mythical ingredients.
The book, Reynaud’s fifth, all of them gigantic doorstoppers, is full of humorous touches like this. There is a recipe for February 30th, for instance (a delicious looking lobster with herb butter worth adding a day to the calendar for).
Reynaud, a most uncheffy, quietly spoken man, studied hotel and catering management, but realised he wanted to be a chef. So he opened a bistro in Paris, at the age of 24. “It was very hard to get the money, but I found someone who said ‘okay, let’s go’. It was a very friendly bistro, full of people every day, everybody singing at night. It was . . .” his excellent English faulters for a moment as he struggles to find a word to describe the experience. “Full-on?” I suggest. “Yes, it was,” he says. “I had the bistro for 10 years, and after that I was too tired.”
For the past seven years, in addition to writing books, Reynaud has run a restaurant called Villa9trois, in what he described as “a suburb with a bad reputation” to the east of Paris. Why open a restaurant in a bad suburb? “To show that there are good things in this area, too,” he explains. “It’s French food, but with my inspiration. I look for good seasonal products, then it’s easy to make good cuisine.”
It was a chat with a customer that launched Reynaud’s career as a writer. Trish Deseine, the Paris-based food writer and author, originally from Northern Ireland, was a regular at Reynaud’s bistro. “She’s a very, very good friend,” Reynaud’s says, his face lighting up. “One night we were talking, with a glass of wine, and I told her I had written a little story about my family, and the pigs they kept and so on, and she told me that Hachette was looking for someone to write a book about pork.” Deseine made the relevant introductions, and the result was Pork Sons, Reynaud’s first cookery book.
His next book is shrouded in secrecy and Reynaud initially declines to discuss it, but a little gentle probing reveals that it will be another epic creation of door-stopper dimensions. “It will still be about food, it will still have recipes but will have other things too. It will be for people who prefer to do things themselves rather than ask other people to do them. For example, if you want to smoke your own fish, it will have drawings showing you how to make a box to smoke your fish in, and instructions on how to make it.” Sounds like one worth making space on the shelves for.
365 Good Reasons to Sit Down to Eatby Stéphane Reynaud is published by Murdoch, £30
