Once upon a time . . .
Oooops, the ugly duckling ...
Young and rebel, I did as I pleased. After a high school diploma painstakingly obtained and an unsuccessful first year of University, I moved to the Carribean, first in Guadeloupe where I began a fashion and design school that came to nothing except a nice and fancy pink piece of paper adorned with various frills. After various extravagant –and even very serious !- wanderings, I thought to myself why not resuming my academic studies ? Which I did, first through a distance learning
. . . a story about truffles and cooking
When I was looking for work as a botanist, an idea I had many years ago came back and teased me… Truffles and cooking. This is not that they were ever very far from my mind. As a child, I used to hunt truffles with my parents in our garden and the surrounding woods, I was nurtured with stories of my great-Uncle who hunted truffles in the forest and made a living from his harvests, and there is also my father’s family in which so many members specialized in patisserie and gourmet cuisine. I who for many years, with my dear and sweet husband, also a botanist, was flirting so closely with Truffles. It goes without saying that my husband was already flirting closely with my cuisine, which I must confess, did not leave him indifferent. This was thus a revelation, and all became a matter of course: Truffles and Cuisine. Truffles dinners were organized for friends at home… But it is now high time for my passion for botany and cuisine to be much more widely shared. In all simplicity, but also with all its complexity. Truffles must be earned and deserved during their search in the field as well as during their degustation with our taste buds. They have to be approached by cherishing them, and we should give-up any claim if we wish to sublimate them. They must be understood, pampered, listened to, observed. That could go unended, Truffles are so complex, but also so simple to those who know how to look at them, for those who know how to let them offer all their riches. A little jewel within easy reach for those who know how to bend down appropriately. This is the richness of a family transmission, grand-parents pastry chefs and passionate, other grand-parents innkeepers, my brother executive chef in palaces, my sister winemaker in a Burgundy domaine, my grand uncle truffle hunter… In autumn the menu of the inn of my grand-parents in Molloy, a little village in Burgundy, was enriched with the Truffles collected by my grand-uncle in the surrounding forests. Responding at
programme at Marseille University, then through fieldwork in the forests of French Guyana, and finally through laboratory and Herbarium work in Paris (Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle) and New-York (New-York Botanical Garden). This endeavor ultimately led me up to a PhD in Botany, and more specifically in Systematics and Taxonomy.
last to what could only be called a family atavism, I found myself spurred to enrich my cooking experience with training at the Alain Ducasse Institute in Paris, where I was trained by famous Chefs such as Christophe Marleix (Plaza Athénée, Paris). And I am now ready to offer you the best of the Truffle, or, more precisely, the best of the Truffles. For there are a few Truffle species that can be found on the market in France, and all are beautiful and desirable, each with her own specificities, aromas and tastes. Some people will prefer one species, other will prefer another species, but I do not wish to rank them in a hierarchy: they all have their own touch of magic if one knows how to present them in their appropriate frame and how to let them reveal their best. This is the task to which I am now devoted, with great pleasure, delight and jubilation for so much remain to be discovered ...