Welcome to my world—The Camont Journals
The Camont Journals mark my time living at my 300-year-old French farmhouse in Gascony, Southwest France. I write to capture the house's days and seasons—its kitchens, gardens, and the markets I haunt. These are stories of a quieter life, recipes for authentic food, modest but fertile gardens, and the generous farmers and wonderful neighbors that have formed a writable life. Here are the stories and recipes that define my first memoir, Finding France, and now in 2025, Champêtre: A Field Guide to French Country Life.
Reading Kate Hill’s The Camont Journals is like taking a 10-minute vacation to France—every week.
Hungry for France?
Subscribe to The Camont Journals and join me every week for a small bite (and the occasional deep plunge!) into what makes the cooking of Southwest France so memorable and vital.
Free Subscribers receive and have access to:
A monthly newsletter featuring seasonal stories of the French countryside, the French Dreams that fuel our Champêtre life, and where we look for inspiration.
Special free links to popular archival posts to whet your appetite for cooking month-to-month through the French seasons.
Supporting Subscribers who pay monthly (6€ a month) or annually (just 50€ a year) receive all free content plus:
Subscriber-only weekly posts for Champêtre: a Field Guide to French Country Living. This is a year of living the French way with small gifts of inspiration to incorporate into your life at home.
Audio recordings of all new posts.
Full Access to all Archives (over 270 posts, essays and recipes!) for The Camont Journals, Finding France memoir, plus the stand-alone indexed Recipe File archive.
Become a member of the Club Camont Community: monthly discussions of recipes, techniques, and Q&A on the Live or Chat feature of the Substack App.
Ask me any questions about cooking, shopping, gardening, brocantes, markets, restaurants, and traveling in France.
Club Camont members also receive free ebooks from Kate as they are released.
Kate at 70+
The first half of my life was formed as a restless international adventurer, working as a baker, a restauranteur, a yacht chef, an art dealer, a puppeteer, and a barge captain while traveling across the USA, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. In my mid-thirties, I slowed down to take a long, deep dive into the food and culture of Southwest France. I began to write in 1995 for the media and in my published books—A Culinary Journey in Gascony, Cassoulet: a French Obsession, and A Gascon Year- Jan-Dec.
In 2021, after a decision to stop teaching cooking and charcuterie in person, I created a new way to share my experiences writing here on Substack in The Camont Journals and by hosting writers’ and artists’ residencies year-round at the newly branded Relais de Camont. This transformation to embrace both full-time writing and to encourage other writers and artists by offering “a quiet place to work” allows me to continue a slow, sustainable adventure of understanding how to live the good life in rural France. For more information, read about me and the Relais de Camont here.
My Instagram account, @KateHillFrance, illustrates my writing with personal photographs of my home and garden, table, and art.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to The Camont Journals—my new book of stories and the many recipes from this old stone French farmhouse floating in a Gascon landscape—as well as the Relais de Camont website. Never miss an update, a recipe, a video, or a celebration of seasonal French life. Subscribing keeps the stories flowing; paid subscribers are the fuel. Paid subscriptions keep us writing… and sharing. Every new episode of The Camont Journals goes directly to your inbox, or you can read it on the Substack App.
Readers who read, share, and support these publications are a part of the growing way we communicate and share the delicious worlds we live in. Thank you for contributing, supporting, and celebrating life in the slow French lane at Camont. As a writer running a writer’s residency, I know that every little word counts and adds up to the bursting-at-the-seams library we call Life.
