THE FEAST

Dorie Greenspan celebrates life’s simple pleasures in her latest cookbook

‘This is my food,” says Dorie Greenspan of her latest cookbook, Everyday Dorie (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). The James Beard Award-winning author describes the collection of enticing and often unexpected recipes as her “pantry and fridge book.” The casual food she’s accustomed to making for her family and friends, and a true reflection of her cooking repertoire.

Renowned for her impeccable and approachable baking books – and past collaborations with Julia Child and French pastry chef Pierre Hermé – Everyday Dorie is Greenspan’s second “cookbook cookbook.” In contrast to her first, Around My French Table (2010), which focused on her brand of Parisian home cooking, she wrote Everyday Dorie at her home in Westbrook, Conn.

While she created each of her 13 cookbooks with the home cook (or baker) in mind, Everyday Dorie is especially practical. Greenspan divides her time between New York City, Conn. and Paris, and although the book shows traces of all three of her homes, it also reflects the fact that she wasn’t a block away from the nearest specialty shop but an hour round-trip from a supermarket.

“I’ve always loved to play around with recipes to give home cooks and home bakers the chance to take a recipe and run with it, and tweak it so that it’s what they want it to be. But I realized that I was creating recipes that way because if I didn’t have an ingredient, I had to find something else to give me the flavour that I wanted,” she says.

“I’m not a fancy cook. I’m not even a fancy baker; I don’t decorate things. If I find a new ingredient, I love to play with it but at heart I’m pretty down-to-earth. But I think that I’m even more basic and more practical here.”