How to Read a Cookbook- Part 1.
Champêtre: Cookbooks at Camont
Champetre: a Field Guide to French Country Living is the overall title of my 2024-25 publishing season in The Camont Journals. These essays and stories, recipes, and photographs are the everyday journals of my life at Camont, a 300-year-old farmhouse in Gascony in Southwest France. And I invite you inside.
Like a digitally unbound book, these posts—18 so far, when collated later, will form the signature pages for a published book. In the meantime, you can browse in any order you wish. Each month’s free post starts with Champêtre: French Dreams, a lengthy newsletter for all subscribers. Now, as I reach the next chapter of Champêtre (all gathered in the archives here,) I have decided to reserve the rest of my writing energy for paid subscribers only. Paid subscribers are those who carry the weight and who can support the time it takes to read, research, write, cook, and photograph the seasonal celebrations of this French life—Spring, Summer and return to Autumn. When you pay, you are buying this next book called “Champêtre!”
Did you know you can access ALL my ebooks as a paid subscriber? A Culinary Journey in Gascony, Cassoulet: a French Obsession, all 12 volumes of A Gascon Year- Jan-Dec 2021. I’ll post a separate link to “Kate’s Cookbooks,” you can download all of the ebooks as PDFs and read them at will.
Cookbooks: Choosing the Essential Ones.
I often refer to my kitchen library, that couple of dozen, well-worn French-centric cookbooks that march up the ashwood staircase in the Relais de Camont’s resident’s kitchen, as the foundation of my Gascon kitchen and all I cook within. And while there is a lot written about cookbooks here on Substack—how to sell one, write a proposal for one, and promote one, there is little about how to read a cookbook.
What do I even mean by that?
