237: Cassoulet — Complex, Delicious, and a Metaphor for Life
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Summary
Award-winning food and travel writer Sylvie Bigar found herself in 2008 “writing more about food than travel and had turned into a stroller-pushing Upper West Side Mama.” Needing to “escape,” as she admitted, ”she decided to head to France to research cassoulet, that “slow-cooked carnivorous orgy of pork, lamb, duck, beans, and herbs stewed together in an earthenware tureen.” A quick, fun story, she thought. “I couldn’t have been more wrong,” she discovered.
Guest
Sylvie Bigar was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and lives in New York City. Her writing has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, Washington Post, Food & Wine, Forbes.com, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Edible, Departures, Travel & Leisure, and National Geographic Traveler.
Sylvie co-authored chef Daniel Boulud’s definitive Daniel: My French Cuisine, Living Art: Style Your Home with Flowers with floral artist and designer Olivier Giugni, and the recently published Cassoulet Confessions: Food. France, Family and the Stew That Saved My Soul.
Sylvie in front of her some 600 cookbooks
Takeaways
√ Where, what, and when people eat gives you a sense of their culture.
√ Cassoulet is a bean-based stew with duck confit, sausage, pork, vegetables, and various herbs.
√ Sylvie’s investigation of the complex story of cassoulet — its history, ingredients, method of cooking, and the region where it originated — became a metaphor for her investigation into her personal history.
Links / References
Online social
@sylviebigar
Articles
Show Credits
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