“When I receive at home, I make my guests work”

“I love to eat, but I don’t pretend to know how to cook: I have too much respect for people whose job it is not to make a difference. Of course, I know how to cook, I am quite good at cooking, but I stick to the basics, pasta, rice, grills… On the other hand, I have a good culinary culture, resulting from my many travels and meetings. From my beginnings in the automotive press, at age 20, I had the privilege of being invited to luxury hotels and starred restaurants in France and abroad. These are the joys of the profession: automotive journalists are invited by companies to luxury hotels to test their cars and then dine with great fanfare.

At the time, I was just in a rush to drive and it annoyed me to spend three hours at the table, but in doing so I sharpened my palate, sampled hundreds of dishes and met the chefs. Some have become friends, and I have a lot of people around me who know how to cook wonderfully: I take this opportunity cowardly to do as little as possible. When I receive at home, I make my guests work. I have a very well-equipped kitchen and there is always a good soul to cook while we are talking, while I play around and set the table.

Eight-day sauerkraut

I come from Polish families on both sides, Catholic on my mother’s side, Jewish on my father’s side, who left Poland for different reasons: my maternal grandparents came to France to look for work, while my paternal grandparents fled the growing oppression. This generated a very different relationship in the native country as in the host country: a lot of nostalgia on the maternal side and, conversely, a joy to be in France, with a real desire for integration on my father’s side. …

The only link to the country, to tradition, which has remained, is the cuisine. All my childhood, I saw my grandparents take great pleasure in preparing Eastern European dishes, for everyday life and for the holidays. While we ate classic French cuisine with our parents, grandparents made all kinds of Polish dishes for us that I loved and craved: kluskis (potatoes in white sauce), krouchtikis (bugnes), matzebra (French toast) matzo), bubelekh (a kind of sweet omelet), or even bigos, a legendary sauerkraut that cooks for eight days.

The klops (“dumplings”, in Polish) was one of my favorite dishes, a mixture of meats with bread, sometimes hard-boiled eggs (my family doesn’t use any), a nice onion sauce and potatoes. Earth. It is a convivial dish that my grandmother made regularly, and which my father took to carry on the tradition. It’s quite impressive, because he prepares it identically, while my grandmother cooked on instinct, without anything in writing. It was my father who put the recipe on paper, so that he could pass it on and share it. This makes this simple meatloaf all the more valuable to me. ”