To kill the wait, sit in the soft comfort of an armchair at Jòia, the chic bistro that Hélène Darroze owns rue des Jeûneurs, in the 2e arrondissement of Paris, we chose on the coffee table, at random, a voluminous collection of recipes signed by the head of the premises which seemed quite harmless. Except that between the wood pigeon of Landes hunting flambé au capuchin and the section of roasted turbot on the edge, we read something completely unexpected: “Your kisses tasted like truffles, each time our lips brushed, each time our tongues mingled, I munched on an Alba truffle. “
It wasn’t exactly the vintage method of Easy recipes by Françoise Bernard (Hachette, 1965) – excuse the madeleine -, but one passage among others, all equally alluring, from No one will steal from me what I danced – translation of a Spanish proverb. An erotic, gastronomic and iconoclastic autobiography that Hélène Darroze wrote in 2004 and published in Recherches Midi, and which interweaves a story of shameless love and nostalgic dishes of her childhood.
Noises of pans
This success of the bookstore had caused some noise of saucepans in the starchy circle of large kitchens. It was early in his career and the work had allowed Hélène Darroze to stand out from the start within an ecosystem of very pronounced masculinity whose most starred representatives ended up giving the impression of cooking with the whimsical spontaneity of a congress of notary clerics.
For all intents and purposes, we wrote down a few “recipes” and then closed the book, but we didn’t think we were reading so well because, when we asked Hélène Darroze, once she arrived, what pleased her the most about her job. , she replied bluntly: “Write”. She was obviously not talking about “writing” the daily menu on the slate provided for this purpose, but, as she has not published anything since 2004, the answer could leave baba.
“Hélène understood that today a chef can no longer be satisfied with frying fries. »Michel Guérard, three-star chef
“I have always taken great pleasure in writing. I started a book two or three years ago. I’ll take it back. ” The opus is visibly wiser than the previous one, even if our ideas are really badly placed, since it will be titled “Please, draw me a salsify”. A culinary journey through the gardens of his Basque-Landes childhood.
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