The Cook and the Gardener : A Year of Recipes and Writings for the French Countryside Cover
Podcast Mentions

The Cook and the Gardener A Year of Recipes and Writings for the French Countryside

Amanda Hesser

The unique, award-winning cookbook―a collection of seasonal recipes from a traditional French garden. Winner of the Best Book on France by a Non-French Writer Award at the Versailles Cookbook Fair; finalist for the Julia Child Award, the

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How I Built This with Guy Raz

In two episodes, Amanda Hesser talked about the title, explaining that it originated from her year spent with a French gardener and was intended to preserve a seasonal way of life. She emphasized that it was one of the earliest cookbooks to champion seasonal cooking and highlighted its focus on recipes tied to the garden's rhythms. Her comments presented the book as a noteworthy and innovative contribution to culinary literature.

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Episode: Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021)

It was inspired by her time spent with a gardener in France and chronicled a year in the garden, with stories and recipes based on the seasons, and was one of the first cookbooks to focus on seasonal cooking.

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And I felt like there was a story that like I wanted to preserve. I wanted to preserve in like some tiny way this way of life.

And I didn't really think there was anything necessarily innovative about it. I was really focused on this, the preservation aspect.

But you know, it really is, it was one of the earlier cookbooks that celebrated seasonal cooking and kind of made a point to say that it matters and that it's a better way of approaching cooking.

It was $10,000, I believe.

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