I’ve been wanting to write about Elizabeth Bard for a while now and her new book gives me a perfect excuse. It comes
out on April 7 and it looks every bit as delicious as its predecessor, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes,
which was a New York Times bestseller, an international
bestseller and winner of the 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best First Cookbook
(USA).
Elizabeth
is an American journalist and author, born in New York City and raised in
Teaneck, New Jersey. She graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a degree in English
Literature and later earned a Masters degree in Art History from The Courtauld
Institute of Art, London.
Elizabeth’s articles on food, art, travel and digital
culture have appeared in The New York
Times, The International Herald
Tribune, The Washington Post, Wired, Marie Claire and Harper's
Bazaar.
Since 2009, she and her husband Gwendal have lived in the
tiny Provencal town of Céreste, where they own and operate the artisanal ice
cream company Scaramouche.
The first book, Lunch
in Paris, told Elizabeth’s story of cute-meeting the perfect Frenchman at a
conference in London, and chucking her life plans to move to Paris to marry
him.
Picnic in
Provence picks up where Lunch in Paris left off, or, as the author says, “it’s about all
the things that happen after the
happily ever after: marriage, motherhood, entrepreneurship...and in our case,
ice cream!”
“It’s about unexpected choices and how they can be the best
choices we make,” she continues. “There’s no five year plan in the world that
would have gotten me here. And yet it’s exactly the right place to be.”
The 336-page hardcover has 60 recipes and is also available in
ebook and audiobook versions.
You can see a trailer for it here.
Elizabeth first met Gwendal at an academic conference when she was a
student in London. “I asked what his
research was about,” she recalls, “which is as good a pick-up line as any in
academia. He was finishing up a PhD in computer science and I was just starting
a Master's in Art History. So anyone who says you can't meet the love your life
in a lecture on a Hypertext Version of Finnegan's Wake is wrong...”
The crafty American soon made an excuse to come to Paris for the weekend.
Next thing she knew she was back and forthing on the Eurostar--they wouldn't be
married if it wasn't for the Eurostar, she tells me—and soon Elizabeth had a
decision to make: go back to New York to pursue her dream of being a museum
curator...or take that flying leap and move to Paris for love.
She chose Paris, of course, and the couple married in 2003. Those first years in Paris, she worked as arts
journalist and as a private museum guide. Eventually, she realized that “everything I'd
learned about France I'd learned autour de
la table –around the table. So I decided to write about my experiences from
the ‘market’ point of view, and include recipes with every chapter. That's how Lunch in Paris was born.”
On a last romantic jaunt before their baby arrived—he’s now five –the
couple traveled down to the Luberon in Provence... and a chance encounter led
them to the wartime home of the
famous poet and WWII Resistance leader René
Char, whom Gwendal had long admired.
“In what felt like a brush with
fate, the house was for sale,” she remembers. “Something about it felt
perfect--inevitable.” Under the spell of the house and its unique history—Char buried
his most famous manuscript there--Elizabeth and Gwendal decide to up and move--lock,
stock and Le Creuset--to the French countryside.
The full story of how they found their house is here.
‘’Almost as
soon as we arrived in Céreste,’’ she continues, ‘’we knew we wanted our careers
to become more local. Gwendal was working as an executive in Digital Cinema. In
the spring of 2012, he got a call about a job with Warner Brothers. He’d never
really wanted a studio job...he was more of an entrepreneur. We had a long
think about what we really wanted and we realized we wanted to do something
that would be fun for us and good for the town, something that would allow us
share the amazing local flavors we’d discovered here: melons so juicy they drip
down to your elbows, strawberries that taste like sunshine.” They spent a year
getting things together--six months of vanilla testing!--and opened Scaramouche
on a rainy day in April, 2013.
Word spread quickly and in August 2014, TripAdvisor published
their list of the top ten ice cream parlors in France: Scaramouche was tied for
#5.
Scaramouche is now a local mainstay and a destination. People come
for classics like salted caramel ice cream and bitter cacao sorbet and come
back for the odd ones: 1001 Nuits (Raz-el-Hanout ice cream with grilled
almonds), Pastis sorbet, Rose geranium ice cream with pistachios, and a brand-new
black truffle ice cream made with truffles from the nearby farm Les Pastras.
Elizabeth, Gwendal and their team make all their own ice creams
and sorbets in a lab on the outskirts of town. They use raw milk from a dairy
in Volx (don’t worry, the milk is pasteurized during the ice cream making
process), organic eggs, and the best local fruit they can find. Flavors change
with the season...and there’s always a line in June when the first tubs of
cherry sorbet arrive.
For those who can’t make it to Cereste, the products can be found
at La Bris de Glace in the center of Bonnieux, an ice cream shop launched a
year ago by the owners of the restaurant Le Fournil next door. It’s also
available at Luberon Paysan in Apt and Naturellement Paysan in Cousellet. For more places, check the Scaramouche
website.
And
you can look for their ice cream truck--the "Scaramobile"--in and
around Banon this summer.
Ok
so what about the new book? Filled with recipes such as stuffed zucchini
flowers, fig tart, and honey and thyme ice cream, Picnic
in Provence is about love, family and building a business
but also about a cook’s initiation into classic Provencal cuisine. Throughout,
Elizabeth reminds us that life--in and out of the
kitchen--is a rendezvous with the unexpected.
“If you had told me on my wedding day that, ten years later,
I’d be standing in a field in Provence making small talk with skinny cows,” she
writes on page 1, “I would have nodded politely and with a twist of my
graduated pearls, said that you had mistaken me for someone else.” The skinny cows produce the perfect milk for the ice cream, by the way.
In advance of the book’s April 7 launch, positive reviews are streaming
in. Kirkus Reviews said: "Like
the Provençal food and lifestyle it celebrates, Bard's book is one to be
savored slowly and with care. Delectable reading.”
Ok on to the giveaway! To enter to win a copy, just leave a comment
below, under COMMENTS. Tell us about a lifelong dream of yours (fulfilled or
not), or perhaps about your own experience taking a big leap of faith. Tell us
your favorite summer ice cream story...or about the book you’re writing...or
anything you feel like sharing! Just please be sure to leave us your email so
we can reach you if you win. Bonne Chance!
If you’d like to go ahead and buy the book, it’s on Amazon here.
Photos: The book, the shop on opening day, the happy couple.
