Last Friday, you read Part 1 of Dragana Arežina Harris’s conversation with Anne Willan, a James Beard Foundation Award winner, well-known cookbook author and author of the recent One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France (2013). Here the conversation continues.
You have an extensive cookbook collection and you co-authored The Cookbook Library: The Cooks, Writers and Recipes that Made the Modern Cookbook with your husband, Mark Cherniavsky. It won the Jane Grigson Award for outstanding literary writing.
Indeed it did. It was Mark who collected the books. We’ve been collecting for nearly 50 years, since we were married, and it’s he who is the collector. He loves the books, and I’ve got enormously involved in them because seven years ago Mark had a major stroke and that changed everything. We gave up the chateau and moved to Santa Monica, and though he still collects books it was he who was going to write that book and then it devolved on me. It’s won three prizes already.
Tell me about The Cookbook Tree of Life broadside I came across on your website.
It’s a new project that has just been launched on our website. It’s a 16” x 20” broadside (poster) that tracks the history of cookbooks and starts with the four pre-16th century printed cookbooks – all the previous writings were manuscripts. Before 1501 there were only about 700 books published, and four of them were cookbooks. One cookbook was written in Latin, one in French, one in German and one in English. To me it’s fascinating that those four totally different countries were thinking about writing about food within the same 25-year period in the late 15th century. These four cookbooks were the ancestors of all the cookbooks published today.
You were inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. Congratulations!
Thank you! It is up there with the best things.
One of my friends gushed when I asked her about you. She loves your cookbooks, especially the instruction, photographs and diagrams. She says that anyone can learn to cook by looking at your books. She mentioned the Dorling Kindersley series.
That is coming out as an eBook soon. It’s lots and lots of technique and it’s dateless. It came out in the early 1980s, and fileting fish is still fileting fish.
I read an article online headed “A culinary aristocrat arrives from Burgundy” after your move to Santa Monica, California, in 2007.
Aww … I don’t claim Burgundian aristocracy. Goodness!
How has that adjustment been?
We’ve lived in the states before, and our daughter was living in Santa Monica and we visited her often. To our surprise we like the city, because Los Angeles is not everybody’s cup of tea. But Santa Monica is very much its own city with its own independence and its own image. It’s now unfortunately, as far as we’re concerned, enormously prosperous and expanding. Metro is coming to the sea next year, I think.
Have you started cooking classes in your new home?
I have a kitchen – not a very big kitchen – with an overhead camera and a large table that has a neat little gadget that allows it to turn 90 degrees. We can host a maximum of 15 students, and I invite well-known chefs to come and cook. It’s fun.
You have five grandchildren. How do you instill good eating habits?
I’m delighted with my grandchildren. They are very small, the oldest is seven and the youngest is about to have a first birthday. They all love to eat, and I’m happy that none of them are picky eaters. This summer, they all went for their first snails and they loved it. It’s rather fun with the tongs. All of them by nature will try anything. They help with salads and we get them involved.
What is your favorite food city? If you were to travel for food where would you go?
I think it’s got to be Paris still, because I go for that really good old-fashioned bistro food. But it’s certainly not as cutting-edge as it once was. Sydney, Australia, has wonderful food and much more experimental with a lot of Asian influences. El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, is very good and is reputedly the best restaurant in the world at the moment.
The chef returns with just one bite-sized cheese ball. “He brought just one,” she whispers to me as she breaks it in two. “We’ll share it! Only three ingredients and they keep forever.”