A farmer's daughter from Co Antrim has become a culinary sensation in France, where her 'sensual style' is bringing Nigella Lawson-like notoriety. Lara Marlowemeets Trish Deseine.
In a country that regards cuisine as an art form on a level with music or literature, it seems astonishing that a farmer's daughter from Co Antrim, a mother of four with no formal training, should become "the queen of culinary publishing", as l'Express magazine calls Trish Deseine.
The rave reviews don't end. "She has reconciled women with cooking, relieved the guilt of chocolate addicts, shaken the publishing world," says Elle magazine. "Through love, this blonde Irish tornado plunged into French cuisine." Deseine's Je Veux du Chocolat! (I Want Chocolate!), published in 2002, is the most successful of her nine books, selling 300,000 copies. It is written with humour - one chapter is entitled "Chocolathérapie" and is sprinkled with Anglicisms.
In her restaurant reviews for Le Fooding website and Le Régal food magazine, Deseine delights in creating hybrid words such as "les gastro-pubs" and "polentarisé". She dislikes the French term cuisine ménagère because the word for housewife is so dreary. So whenever possible, she substitutes "le home cooking".
For her last book, Ma Petite Robe Noire (My Little Black Dress - about food, despite the title), Madame Figaro praised Deseine's "very feminine and very sensual" approach to cooking. There is a certain coquettishness in the anecdotes Deseine slips into her cookbooks. The cover photograph shows her shoulder-length blond hair, warm smile and décollété to advantage, and Marie-Pierre Morel's photographs of Deseine's dishes make food look, well, sexy. At the end of the month Deseine will travel to Beijing to collect the World Gourmand award for best French cookbook for Ma Petite Robe Noire. Last November the same book won France's most prestigious cookbook award, the Lamazille, named after a famous French woman chef from Périgord.
In the midst of a messy divorce, the recognition meant a lot to Deseine. "It was as if they'd said, 'You are one of us'," she says. "I was being rejected from one family and brought into another, which is even more macho and patriarchal [than her husband's French family]. Deseine's informality, the way she can joke about dropping a steak on the floor and then washing it under the tap, is a key to her success in France. She refuses to revere "the different age" of French chefs, of Bocuse, Robuchon, Escoffier. The complexity and formality of their cuisine alienates too many people, she says.
"French restaurants are not fashionable any more in London," Deseine continues. "People think the best cooking now comes from Spain and London; it's not true. Go to little French towns and look through the windows, then go to Kirkcaldy or Coleraine; there's no comparison in the quality, variety and amount of love and care that goes into it."
Deseine learned cooking by watching her former mother-in-law and her ex-husband's French aunts. "It was a great way of getting to know people, like talking about the weather back home," she explains. The title of the first book she's written in English, Nobody Does It Better, to be published by Kyle Cathie in London in May, is testimony to her belief in the excellence of French cooking.
When Deseine set out to write Ma Petite Robe Noire, four years ago, she "was looking for a useful, kitchen-bible sort of thing. I love articles in women's magazines that say, 'Your ideal wardrobe is this. All you need is a navy blazer and you're set; if you have this, you're equipped'." Though the concept was abstract for a cookbook, her French publisher, Marabout, bought it.
The book's 160 recipes are organised like a fashion treatise: the basics (from roast chicken to crispy beef salad); accessories, including various sauces and side dishes; "la petite robe noire" - the dish that's sure to dazzle, whether it's brioche with caviar and crème fraîche or chocolate cake. The chapter on tenue de soirée (evening dress) contains cocktail recipes.
A childhood French teacher seems to linger in the background of every Frenchified foreigner. Deseine's was called Mr Snowball, and she was 12 years old and named Patricia Stevens when she developed a schoolgirl crush on him at Belfast Royal Academy. Thanks to Mr Snowball, "writing in French and getting it right is still my biggest motivation and pleasure," she says.
When she was growing up in Northern Ireland, "our parents instilled in us the idea that we were charmed and lucky to be living in the country," Deseine recalls. "The countryside was beautiful. If it hadn't been for the Troubles it could have been good." In the event, her childhood was unhappy; it was always understood that she and her two brothers would settle abroad.
Deseine's father was very involved in the farmers' union. Her mother was an activist in a unionist party. "It was stalwart, Protestant Co Antrim. Social life revolved around the party, the bridge club and the church." The Stevens children were bused to school in Belfast. "We had to be escorted to the bus stop. There were stones and bottles thrown at us," she says. "It was extremely violent. My father owned land over Cave Hill in Belfast, where bodies were dumped. Some of his employees were taken to jail. When you're a child and people tell you it's a normal place, you know it's not."
By comparison, France seemed "hugely exotic and romantic", she says. Deseine was smitten with Paris on a school trip at the age of 14. She studied French literature at Edinburgh, where she met a young man doing a year's voluntary service promoting French food and wine in Scotland. She loved him because he was French, she says; he loved her because she was not.
When they were newlyweds in Paris, Deseine worked for the Northern Ireland tourism office. "We had difficulty identifying what our product was," she says. "Our strategy was: Are you going to the South? Would you not like to pop up?"
Though she has spent half of her 42 years in France, Deseine doesn't feel French. "I have a British passport," she says. "When I was brought up, it was drummed into me I was British. I don't feel any nationality . . . I'm not French, and I don't feel Northern Irish. My agent [Ivan Mulcahy] is Irish. My best friend [Greg Delaney] is Irish. I'm always joking that I want the Irish to tell me I'm Irish. Growing up, the South always seemed freer, easier, more romantic. The southern Irish people I met seemed so laid back."
Though she has no desire to return to Northern Ireland, Deseine is relieved that the Troubles are over. "I love the fact that the goalposts have moved, that the rest of the world has caught up with them and that Northern Ireland's little problems don't matter any more, that the harsh realities of the world has Northern Irish people saying maybe we shouldn't be involved in this kind of thing."
In 15 years of marriage, Deseine had four children: Corentin, Timothée, Tanguy and Victoire. She and her ex-husband have been awarded custody on alternate weeks, an increasingly common practice in France. "My life is completely schizophrenic," she says. One week she is shopping, cooking and taking the children to school from the former family home in the affluent Paris suburb of St-Germain-en-Laye. The next week she is a single career woman living in the apartment she bought in Paris's 20th arrondissement, a sixth-floor walk-up with a view over the rooftops.
Many of Deseine's friends are activists in "le Fooding", which she describes as "a gastro-intellectual movement started seven years ago by two young food critics who decided to upset the apple cart, to showcase new French talent". Followers of "le Fooding" see food as "a style choice", she says. "They set up events, picnics and parties. Before Christmas they hold la Semaine du Fooding, with bars clandestins and tables d'hôte in designers' kitchens. It has a huge following."
Personal experience has turned Deseine into a feminist, because of the double standards applied to men and women, she says. Her ex-husband's family are in the food industry, and she began writing recipes to promote their products. She was pregnant with Victoire when Marabout, a division of France's largest publishing house, Hachette, "discovered" her at a food fair in 2000. Her first book, Petits Plats Entre Amis (Small Dishes Among Friends) sold 150,000 copies.
"As soon as a woman starts overshadowing the man, the whole balance shifts, especially when a woman leaves a man," Deseine says. "You feel the weight of French society against you. Accommodations can be made in a couple, but the family has to be sustained. Most of the sacrifices are expected from the woman."
Reading Deseine's books and restaurant reviews makes even the unsophisticated palate water. She has come a long way from the farm in Co Antrim, but her favourite meal remains "my mother's roast chicken, stuffed with bread, parsley and onion." For dessert, she likes the French cake called opera - "layers of coffee-soaked sponge and chocolate butter cream, topped with chocolate glaze". She'd savour the meal with a bottle of Condrieu, a white burgundy. "With a slight taste of resin, it goes down very well with foie gras," Deseine says. "It has been described as the sexiest wine in the world."
Recipe serves four
MOULES MARINIÈRE
"This is a very communal dish. There is a camaraderie attached to eating moules frites, mussels steamed in wine and herbs and served with chips. At the Braderie de Lille, a huge seven-day autumn flea market that invades the entire city and is France's largest public gathering, over 500 tonnes of mussels are consumed. Their empty shells are piled up on the pavement in front of each restaurant, in a competition to find out which place was most popular with hungry visitors.
At home, mussels are often pre-announced to guests as the raison d'être of the evening. "Come tonight, I'm cooking moules frites," your host will say. And, just as with raclette or crêpes or a leg of wild boar, or pot au feu, the gathering is defined and justified by the food being served. Rejoicing in and sharing it is the only goal.
My children love mussels. It's an attraction-repulsion thing, something I have exploited over and over to get them to try things: it starts as a "bet you won't eat that" challenge and then, miraculously, they discover they love the taste. They also love the way you can use one empty hinged shell to pinch out the next mussel, the fact that there are often little hitchhiker crabs hiding inside and the way each empty shell can be neatly slotted into the next one, bending a shiny, black purple garland around their plates."
2kg mussels (avoid the pre-cleaned and pre-packed variety, and buy them as fresh as you can. In France, choose "bouchot", the best, grown on wooden posts)
50g butter
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
2-3 shallots, finely chopped
Good handful curly parsley, finely chopped
2-3 glasses dry white wine
Freshly ground black pepper
Clean the mussels: under cold running water, scrub them and pull off the gritty beard. Discard any that are open and do not close as you press on them.
In a very large, deep saucepan, heat the butter with the oil and gently sweat the garlic and shallots. Add the parsley, white wine and some pepper and bring to the boil.
Throw in the mussels, put the lid on and cook for two to three minutes. Give the pan a shake or dig down to the bottom once or twice with a ladle to make sure they cook evenly. The mussels are cooked when the shells are open and the flesh is tender.
Discard any mussels that have remained closed, then with a large slotted spoon transfer the mussels to deep plates. Ladle the glorious cooking liquid over them and serve.
Other tasty possibilities are cooking the mussels in pastis instead of wine, or, for moules à la crème, adding a few tablespoons of crème fraîche to the cooking liquid after the mussels are cooked.
Recipe taken from Nobody Does It Better: Why French Home Cooking Is Still the Best in the World, by Trish Deseine, which will be published in May by Kyle Cathie, €36.50