How to cook, eat like a local in Paris
Clotilde Dusoulier’s ‘cliché-free’ cookbook lets you eat like a local
Where do you turn for“a cliché free” culinary guide to one of the world’s most fabled food cities? To a local, naturally — but not just any local.
“It’s a trait of my personality that when I’m enthusiastic about something, I really have a strong desire to share it,” award-winning French food writer Clotilde Dusoulier says.
“It’s given me the triple benefit of experiencing it for myself at first and then experiencing it again when I share it, and then experiencing it for a third time when people report back and say that it improved their life one way or another.”
Dusoulier has been chronicling Paris’s food scene for the past 15 years on her bilingual blog, Chocolate & Zucchini. And in her fifth book, Tasting Paris (Clarkson Potter, 2018), she offers an insider’s view into how Parisians eat today.
“There are very many beautiful things … and beautiful books that are written about Paris, but I noticed that not very many of them are written by actual French people,” Dusoulier says with a laugh.
Opening with a classic café au lait and closing with Parisian onion soup, Dusoulier arranged the recipes and stories in Tasting Paris according to the rituals that punctuate the day: from le matin (morning) to tard dans la nuit (late night).
“I wanted to really make the book a celebration of Paris not just as a city but as a city that you inhabit … Telling the story of the many ways that a day can unfold is really the best way that I know to have people imagine that they’re actually living that day with me or like me.”
Recipes excerpted from Tasting Paris: 100 Recipes to Eat Like a Local by Clotilde Dusoulier. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter.