Camont herbier one October morning
While some cookbooks are crafted as carefully as a building, with an army of helpers, testers, editors, designers, and sellers, my cookbooks seem to be born from a different pattern- chaos succumbing to order. You can read it as I write these words each month, swinging from lyrical descriptions of the French countryside to seasonal musings about fruit and vegetables to small heart stopping moments in my garden. This is the order of my days these days in Gascony. With the very disappearance of the weekly rhythms of guests and students, I have unearthed a different life than I ever imagined here at Camont. I am learning its rhythm.
The days now are more like letters written on those thin blue aéropostale sheets I would buy at La Poste to send a missive home every 6 months or so. Transparent enough to see through what was written on one side, just substantial enough to support the new thoughts live streaming from my pen. There was no editing and re-editing, autocorrect or spell check. I wrote the words down just as I thought them with blue ink Pilot pens before I folded, licked, and stamped them home. It seems a little reckless now. No thought given to rereading them from the ‘cloud’ one day. It feels a little like now, these days written and folded and tucked away without an audience mostly. I still share some photographs and these weekly words as a bribe to my inner self to archive the daily mundane and banal to be mined later for a larger cause. That is how this book is being written, a few pages at a time.