“I had been blogging [at Orangette] for a little while and honestly never thought I would write a book,” recalled Molly Wizenberg. “I was afraid I’d be writing at the mercy of the muses and felt out of control… Writing the blog was a particularly pleasurable part of my everyday life and of being connected to the place [my husband and I] live in.” The combination of cookbook and memoir that became A Homemade Life was, in some ways, a working backwards, retracing the family experiences that made Wizenberg such a passionate cook, beginning with her father. “One of the challenges for me,” she recalled during a recent visit to New York, “was to work within the rhythm but make it feel like a larger story, make it come together.”
“My father taught me how to cook as well!” interjected Suzanne Pirret, the author of The Pleasure Is All Mine, a similar combination of recipes and personal essays. (When we realized that Pirret and Wizenberg’s publicity trips to New York City were going to overlap, we immediately suggested getting together for coffee.) Her book isn’t so much a life story, though, as a more impressionistic portrait of a single foodie who doesn’t feel like waiting for somebody else to come along to cook great meals for. She’d worked in restaurants, then gotten into acting, and found herself interested in cooking again: “What did I want to do with all this passion for food?” she asked rhetorically. After training in Paris and London (where she now lives), she wanted to do a different kind of cookbook—a book that, while geared towards single-serving portions, wasn’t just another version of Delia Smith‘s One Is Fun!
For her, that meant (among other things) a refusal to skimp on ingredients; only the best stuff made it into her recipes. For example, she says she hated parsley when she first moved to London; now that she’s realized that the problem was that she was never getting good parsley, she uses it all the time. Wizenberg, who lives just ten minutes from a farmer’s market in Seattle, has a similar enthusiasm for the best foodstuffs. “Cooking is so much more fun for me when I’m waiting until the tomatoes are ready from the farmer’s market,” she explained. “It’s so much better than eating a crappy tomato in January.”
“I have a hard time describing the kind of food I like to cook,” Wizenberg admitted. “We have a lot of meals that would seem small and unsatisfying to other people.” So what dishes have the two authors been enjoying recently? Wizenberg spoke enthusiastically of celery remoulade, a dish combining matchstick-sized slices of celery root with mayonnaise and yogurt that she says reminds her of France. Pirret recommended a Sardinian pasta dish topped with a creamy sauce of butter, Amalfi lemon juice and bottarga that takes less than ten minutes to make.
(This video was shot at Soho House, where—as it turned out—Pirret had, during a previous visit, met then-William Morrow publicist Sarah Burningham, who thought Pirret’s cookbook idea was so fabulous that she arranged an introduction to editor Cassie Jones, who eventually bought the book.)