“Before dying in the Sobibor camp at the age of 58, Jeanne was alive. She lived, she loved, she had children, she cooked”

I have Jewish origins on my mother’s side, Armenian on my father’s side. But from Armenia, we no longer have much, because my grandfather was born in France to stateless Armenian parents who only wanted to speak French to their sons. Only a few cooking recipes have survived, such as baklava with filo sheets, clarified butter, nuts, sugar syrup. At home, my mother managed daily life and cooked simple things: soups, endives with ham, rice with curry. It was heterogeneous, sometimes bizarre. For example, she put ginger in her quiche Lorraine, which revolted my sisters and me.

I had a very free upbringing, I did athletics, music, I enjoyed everything. As a teenager, I got into rock and drums, we founded the Plasticines with high school friends. It was the BB Rockers era, things were moving well. I quit my studies because I thought I was going to become a rockstar! Then we signed with a record company and I got dropped from the group.

I went back to school, in cultural mediation, I did an internship at Cuisine TV, with press trips which amazed me. Then I discovered radio while working for “Le Fou du roi”, by Stéphane Bern, on France Inter. After six months of Erasmus in Bucharest, Romania, where I ate a lot of dumpling soup, I started a food blog, “Les durs à fait”, and I became interested in gonzo, or ultra-, journalism. subjective.

Cooking loosens tongues

My first published article is the experience of a meal, written in the first person, for Le Monde Académie, a newspaper initiative The world. Great pride. This is what I implemented in my podcast “Casseroles”: portraits of eaters with whom I share a meal to get them talking. One thing led to another, and I wanted to do a longer podcast, which talked about family…

I knew that, in mine, my maternal grandfather was a “hidden child” during the war. He was going to die and he wanted me to record it. He died when we were talking about his 8th birthday, but he had time to talk about his grandmother Jeanne, who was deported. A distant cousin, Racheli, introduced me to this grandmother’s cookbook and I decided to go “in search of Jeanne”. The result is a five-episode podcast – and, now, a drawn book.

Before dying in the Sobibor camp at the age of 58, Jeanne was alive. She lived, she loved, she had children, she cooked. His hand-written collection is full of French bourgeois recipes, peppered here and there with stuffed carp or matzo balls. One of my favorites is chocolate cake, very simple, moist and tasty.

I went to ask his children, his grandchildren, and I cooked for them by having them cook. Some were very shy, thinking they had nothing to say, like Lionel and Catherine, one of his granddaughters, with whom I prepared the famous cake. But cooking loosens tongues and it was around the stove that everyone finally told me about Jeanne.