THIS AIN’T YOUR GRAND-MÈRE’S COOKBOOK
Sublimely elegant and sensual
Noted French-canadian artist Marc Séguin is Martin Picard’s best friend and was his creative partner on the Sugar Shack project. Séguin may be a contemporary artist but the visual direction of the cookbook has a decidedly retro feeling, with folksy styling (orange Le Creuset, well-loved copper pots) and warm amber photos reminiscent of a 1960s cookbook — no crisp, blown-out flash or stark white dishes here.
“We wanted to make something different than all the cookbooks that are reigning now,” Séguin explains, by phone from Montreal. “I don’t want to say lo-fi, but you know it’s like the Montreal indie sound, which used to be lowkey, or old-school. The pictures had to be that as well.”
“One of the criticisms of Picard’s first cookbook,” Séguin continues, was that it was almost impossible to make the recipes, “because they’re really hard. And although we’re talking here about gastronomie, it’s pretty precise but if people do it the right way, they work.” Accordingly, the hefty 386-page tome includes 2,000 photographs, culled from the more than 75,000 taken, many of them detailed step-by-step pastry and butchery technique tutorials (“if it needs six pages to explain, it needs six pages”) but also sensual portraits (in one, a woman guzzles maple syrup that pours all over her shirt, like a stickysweet wet T-shirt contest).
Between t he provocative pin-ups, irreverent gag cartoons by Tom Tassel and elaborate sous-vide instructions, this ain’t your grandmère’s cookbook. Alternately squeamishly graphic, sublimely elegant and sensual, it is, however, perfectly evocative of Picardesque excess: equal parts Cooks Illustrated and Pirelli calendar.
Marie-claude St-pierre’s saucy pin-ups set the mood for each chapter and the restaurant’s pretty young pastry chef Gabrielle Rivard-hiller makes several cameos, most notably bathing naked in a tub of maple syrup.
“Actually Martin and I were really shy to ask them first,” Séguin ruefully recalls of the female restaurant staff they featured. “It had to be asked after a glass of wine or something, when everyone became more brave. Martin had ideas also for pictures but his were very first degree and not as subtle as these, although they might be in your face, his were a lot more than that!” Throughout the process, Séguin refrained from looking through other cookbooks, especially the ones that play it safe. “There they are,” he says of celebrity chefs, “claiming they’re hedonists, that they live fast, drink alcohol and live a crazy life and then all their cookbooks are made for bourgeois!”
Instead, he treated the book’s visuals like his art and writing. “It was important to push people a little bit to their limits as well.” As a result, though, both their “top New York literary agent” and a Canadian publisher interested in the book balked as the initial proposal was fleshed out, but the pair stuck to their original idea and self-published the cookbook, even printing it in Quebec.
“It’s a good sign that it pushes the edges. And you know,” Séguin adds, “Martin would never have started Pied de Cochon if he had listened to what people were saying.”