“As a child, I traveled a lot. I spent my first years in the United Arab Emirates, Gabon then Cameroon. One of my earliest childhood memories is the club sandwiches we ate by the pool in Dubai. I also remember restaurants in Douala where my father took us, a Chinese one in particular – I loved the sensations, the smells, the atmosphere.
After Cameroon, we returned to France and I did all my schooling in Versailles. When I went to my grandparents’ house in Dombes, they came to pick me up at the station and said to me: “We’re going to eat frogs!” » This meant that we were going to dine out, because we ate in the restaurant what we didn’t eat at home: frog legs, chicken in cream, snails in parsley… They were small country inns, but I loved it: chatting with the boss, having an aperitif.
A little later, I discovered gastronomy. My father told me: “If you have an honor in the baccalaureate, I invite you to a three-Michelin star! » So we went to Georges Blanc, in Vonnas (Ain) and I fell into an unknown and wonderful world. I didn’t understand anything about what I was eating, there was a frozen soup with sot-l’y-laisse, arctic char (I had no idea what it was), zander with savagnin ( neither). What amazed me the most was the service, with the silver bells, the white gloves, the ballet of the waiters. I came away transformed.
A highly ethnological subject
From that moment on, I was obsessed with the idea of working in gastronomy, I dreamed of being a Michelin inspector, so I could go to restaurants all the time. I turned to a history and ethnology course at Nanterre, after reading Claude Lévi-Strauss. Cooking is a highly ethnological subject, since only human beings cook. We have studied it in all societies: the way in which we transform food and the way we transmit knowledge characterizes civilizations.
For my thesis on the “grand restaurant”, I spent a year in the dining room at Lucas Carton, under observation. Everything was so codified that it was fascinating: the kingly customers, the silent dialogues of the waiters, the obsession with cleanliness… In a great restaurant, you recreate a world that doesn’t exist! After college, I started writing for newspapers, Cuisine and terroirs, Gault & Millau, and especially Flavors, where I worked for twenty years. A few years ago, my husband, Mathieu Pansard, and I had the idea of making videos. I wanted to tell stories, to analyze the restaurant as a social fact.
We fumbled around and it was when he started talking to me from behind his camera that we found our way. During confinement, I, like many, cooked a lot and Mathieu continued to film me and chat. This zucchini terrine, a recipe inherited from my mother, is one of the most successful dishes : it has a grand-century look even though it couldn’t be simpler to make, it gives pride of place to vegetables and it makes everyone happy. »
It’s better when it’s good, nº2, available by subscription, on newsstands and in bookstores. The YouTube channel.