311: Sanaë Lemoine

0:00This episode is brought to you by Rezzy and American Express. Resi is a digital platform that connects restaurants to restaurant lovers by elevating dining experiences, providing original industry content, and helping to fill some of the country's most exciting dining rooms. Because restaurants have always been more than just places to eat. The amazing world of restaurants is just a few taps away in the Resi app and at resi.com. Hey Matt, let's talk cheese. Yes, Eliza, the holiday season is here, which means one thing. It's cheese board season. One of my favorite cheeses to put out is Parmigiano Reggiano, a cheese that is in a class of its own.

0:36Made from only three ingredients, Parmigiano Reggiano uses a century-old process and comes directly from Italy. And the bottom line is that Parmigiano Reggiano is more than a cheese. It's a cornerstone of the Italian culinary culture and a rich experience filled with culture, history, savoir-faire, and of course, flavor. I agree. I love putting out hunks of Parmigiano Reggiano to pair with holiday cocktails or drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Add a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano to your holiday spread and elevate your hosting experience. Look for Parmigiano Reggiano in the premium cheese case of your favorite grocery store or deli.

1:14You can recognize it by the full name listed on the package and the unique rind dotted with the Parmigiano Reggiano name. Visit www.parmigianoregiano.us for more holiday inspiration. You can check out the link in our show notes as well.

1:40What if I wrote recipes from the book and I put them on my website? And so it was a funny sort of reverse engineering of trying to figure out, OK, what does this dish actually look like and taste like in practice? And I wanted the recipe to work for a reader. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbinell.

2:07Sinaa Lemoine is a novelist and cookbook writer whose work is united in its ability to make you very, very hungry. Before writing her novel, The Margot Affair, she worked as a cookbook editor at Martha Stewart and Faden. And now she combines her love of literature and food in her own writing and co-writing cookbooks, like Make It Japanese with Rie McClenney. It's a joy to have her on the show to talk about her process, her favorite spots for croissants in the city, and more.

2:41Sinaia Limwan, this is Taste. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for inviting me and having me today. Thank you for being here. I'm curious about what your pastry consumption has been like today. To start. You know, because I brought you some, but I actually haven't had the pastry that I purchased about an hour ago yet. I'm saving it for later. But I did stop by Le Cabre, which is maybe my second favorite. Right now, my second favorite pastry spot in the city. They have a really delicious canelé, which you just tasted, with a really crisp shell and custardy interior. And then they have a pain suisse, which I love.

3:21It's like a chocolate croissant, but theirs is really crisp. It kind of shatters when you bite into it. and there's chocolate and a little bit of custard inside. Wow. Is that what you're saving for later? Yes, that's the one I got for myself. You have one as well. I have one for later also. I'll text you when I eat it and compare notes. But I think of you as like one of the most prodigious pastry eaters in my life in the city. So I'm curious if you're saying La Cabra is number two, what your number one slot is right now. Number one has been Nick and Sons for many years. and I just, I love their laminated pastries, especially their croissant, their pain au chocolat.

4:02They have a ham and cheese croissant on the weekend. That's really extraordinary. And I discovered them a couple of years ago and unfortunately they're only open, I think it's Thursday through Sunday. They have pretty limited hours and you have to get there early. But what I love about their pastries beyond the buttery flavor and texture and how light and airy and crisp they are is that they're incredibly fresh. And I think that can be hard, especially in New York. I find that sometimes even the best bakery will have these sort of like stale or on their way to being stale pastries. And with a croissant, they're such a short shelf life.

4:42So ideally you get them kind of right out of the oven when they're still almost warm. Or you can revive them. You know, you can reheat them at home if they're feeling a little dry. That's a good tip. I feel embarrassed because I've never been to Nick and Sons. And whenever I try to go, it's like 11. See, this is what I was worried about. It's like 11 a.m. on a Saturday. The line is down the block and I just get antsy. And I kind of feel like, oh, is it really worth it? But if you're telling me that it's worth it, I think I need to just get myself out of bed earlier. It sounds like. Yeah, I hear you because I really don't like to stand in a line anymore.

5:18And I would have brought you some today if they were open. But they're not open on Tuesdays. No, the trick is to go early and, you know, ideally around eight or nine at the latest. There will barely be a line. But they're also they're so friendly and lovely, which is nice. Like despite the fact that they are incredibly popular and there's often a line down the block like they're they're so sweet, which makes it all the better. Some things actually are worth waiting for. And I think that once you have the experience of waiting in line and having it be worth it, like Taqueria Ramirez, I'll wait in line all the time for those tacos.

5:55And they go quickly in the same way that getting a pre-made pastry would go quickly. So I think that I just need to, like, make it through. And then the next time I'm in line, I know what I'm waiting for. I have that kind of motivation. Yes. And once you've had one bite of that fresh croissant, you will come back many times. I promise. So as listeners probably would pick up based on your flawless pronunciation of all of these pastries, you have a French background. I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about just your childhood and like what kind of food you were eating growing up and how maybe that's shaped your diet and your cravings today.

6:30Yeah. So my father is French. He's from Brittany, which is the land of salted butter and buckwheat crepes, oysters. And my mom is Japanese. And I was born in France and we actually moved to Australia when I was four and then moved back to France when I was 12. And both my parents are very, very passionate about food to the point where we were all so obsessed with food and cooking when I was growing up that I assumed that everyone else had that same obsession. And then I got to college and it was a bit of a shock to realize that it wasn't as common as I thought it might be. and both my parents loved to cook.

7:12I spent a lot of time in the kitchen growing up, but my mom was definitely the primary cook. And as I mentioned, she's Japanese, but she spent much of her adult life in Argentina. So her style of cuisine is a mix of Japanese cooking with some Western and Argentine influences. She makes a really delicious milanesa with mashed potatoes. but the base is always Japanese in terms of there being rice, miso soup, the kinds of like small plates and vegetables that she prepares. We went through a very strict phase in my life when mostly when we lived in Australia where my mom was cycling through various diets.

7:54They weren't for losing weight or like calories or restricting. well there was a form of restriction but not in terms of like how much we were eating but more what we were eating my mom became really interested in macrobiotic food and eating according to our blood types and we all had different blood types in the family so that was complicated what's your blood type um i'm o positive so what is eating for an o positive blood type look like apparently it's meat like not being a vegetarian which we were vegetarians for a while so then we had to shift. But it was it was very like when I say it was strict, it was to the point where I truly thought that if I ate sugar, my hair would fall out, like something terrible would happen to my body.

8:43I was eating maybe brown rice three times a day. We had a lot of savory breakfast because of my mom's Japanese background. It was a lot of beans and vegetables. And thankfully, she's one of the best cooks that I know. So even when she was making something that you might think is super healthy, it was still like very well seasoned. And she would cook with a lot of herbs and spices and olive oil and kombu to flavor things. But it was definitely an unusual diet. And so, but then I would go visit my grandparents in France, and they would feed me everything. It It would be, you know, hot chocolate for breakfast, like dipping super buttered toast into hot chocolate, pork riette, cream everywhere.

9:32And so I was sort of oscillating between this very, very healthy parsley forward diet and this very sort of luxurious, decadent French diet with a lot of butter. And it was hard for my body. I would always have like a moment of adjustment when I would go visit my grandparents. And I think that upbringing really reflects in the way that I eat and cook today. Like I do love vegetables and even one meal like lunch or dinner without a green vegetable is hard for me. I'm always thinking about incorporating vegetables. Sometimes I'll throw a handful of parsley into fried rice if I don't have a vegetable.

10:13like I really do think about the balance of ingredients and most of my cooking is at home is more vegetarian leaning I would say but I do have these sweet cravings and for instance most days after lunch I have something that I affectionately call lunch dessert. Oh I love Lunch dessert. Lunch dessert is the best. So it could be half an apple. It could be a few. Wait, that's not lunch dessert. That's just a snack. Okay, okay. It's more like, so if I'm doing apple, it's more like apple dipped in tahini with a little bit of honey and salt. Okay. Like I'll dress it up. You have to choose it. Yes, exactly.

10:56Though if I'm in a rush, it might just be an apple, but I will always slice it so it feels a little more special. Like I very rarely just bite into an apple. There's something about cutting it that that feels like I'm, I don't know, preparing a little treat for myself. As somebody that has always loved to eat and probably like cooked for a long time, did you always want to be writing about food in this kind of way? Like how did food become a character in your work? Yeah, that's a great question. Because for a long time, my writing and my food work felt very separate. As in my novel writing and this career that I was growing in food were sort of existed on different planes almost.

11:39I went to school for writing. I got an MFA in fiction writing. But when I was looking for a full time job, I immediately thought of working in food because of my passion for cooking and recipes. I didn't want to go to school again. I already had a master's and an undergraduate degree. So I was like, OK, I'm not going to go to culinary school. What can I do? how can I learn the skills while working? And I was very lucky to find this job working in a test kitchen of a food startup called Martha and Marley Spoon, which happened to have two women who worked in the test kitchen who had magazine backgrounds.

12:16They came from Bon Appetit and Martha Stewart. So they trained - So it was Don Perry, right? Yeah, Don Perry and Jennifer Aronson. And they trained me in recipe development and writing and editing as though we were at a magazine. So it was sort of the best training that I could have hoped for. But in a very intimate environment, it was just the three of us at first. I was washing dishes. I was running to get ingredients. I was helping with photo shoots. And then slowly I worked my way into recipe development and editing. I learned to write a recipe. and then I sort of just kind of naturally transitioned to cookbook writing.

12:56I wanted a job that would be more focused on the writing side and less on the cooking side of my food work and so I ended up working as a cookbook editor at both Martha Stewart and Fidon and there I learned a whole different side of food. But coming back to your question about how food and my writing have interacted or nourished each other, I did think of them as separate things because all this time I was writing a novel and I wasn't really talking about it. Even when I went on submission with my novel to editors, at the time I was a cookbook editor at Fidon. And I remember I wanted to keep it really separate.

13:48I didn't tell anyone about it. And it wasn't until much later when my novel was published and people came to me and commented on the food descriptions and how much I seemed to love food that I realized, oh, all this time, of course, my love of food has been making its way into my fiction. and they have been feeding each other. Like they're not these complete separate spheres as I thought they were. Right. And I think that it's easy to think like contemporaneously that there's been a lot of growth in recent years in terms of literary cookbooks or food in culture in terms of even like TV shows and movies like The Bear.

14:25But there has been a history of like literary characters loving food and also like movies, just kind of fictional things that have food as a character that I think is so entrancing. And I wonder if like you maybe had any references or things that you look to in terms of like food literature or things in that creative space. I'm mostly drawn actually to movies that depict food. I think there's something about the visual medium and how sensual it can be that inspires my writing and feels separate enough from the writing as opposed to maybe reading a lot of food writing. Like I'm almost embarrassed that I'm not a super avid reader of food books aside from cookbooks, which I will – I can read for hours.

15:18but you know aside from a couple of writers like I I love Tamar Adler's writing for instance but aside from a small handful I really do turn more to kind of to to movies and their their depictions of cooking one movie that I watched countless of times as a child is Tampopo the i knew you were gonna say i was waiting for you to say this because i think tampopo is such a beautiful well i'll let you tell me what you like about it but yeah i think it's great i'm so glad you've seen it it's um i think it was a movie that my mom must have loved because it was playing all the time and i was very young so you know it's also a very sexy movie it's funny fish scenes oh no it's it's really extraordinary um and i was able to see it at the movies a couple of years ago, which was so exciting because before that, you know, had just been on a TV or on a small screen.

16:17But I think what I love so much about it is that it really shows you the process of cooking as well. It's not just someone taking a bite, but it's how the food is made in a kitchen. It's the way that people move when they're cooking. Like that's something that I love to describe in writing. I think a scene where someone is cooking or eating can be so incredibly rich in terms of descriptions and what's happening beneath the surface and how characters are interacting. It reveals the dynamic. It reveals so much about touch. And then recently I saw this movie that in some ways is so different from Tampopo, but I kept thinking about Tampopo as I watched it.

17:01It's a French movie by a French Vietnamese director called The Taste of Things. And it was just showing at the New York Film Festival. And it has these extraordinary cooking sequences. They are so long and so sumptuous. And you just you feel like you're in the kitchen with the characters and you can smell and hear the sizzle. And it's it's like you're I mean, your whole body is is involved in a way and I think about that when I'm writing like can I give the reader an experience you know whether it's honestly a food scene or a sex scene or anything that's that's like having to do with the body can I give them an experience that really involves all of their senses and then makes them feel entirely immersed in the story okay I have to add that movie to my list then especially if it reminds you of Tom Popo and I'm curious you know writing The Margot Affair, there are all these scenes and recipes like for periclafoudi or tomato tart that I noticed you actually have shared recipes for some of these dishes.

18:04Did you have the recipe in mind when you were writing about the dish or did the recipe come later? How did that work? Yeah. So as I was saying earlier, I was very stubborn in terms of wanting to keep the fiction writing and the food writing separate. So as I was writing my novel, I was like, yeah, there are these food descriptions, but it's really not about that. It's about, you know, the characters and their desires and the mother-daughter relationship. And it is about all of that. But there is a lot of food. And the recipes came much later. So I had finished writing the book, we were getting ready to publish it, and then the pandemic started.

18:43And the book was scheduled to be published in June 2020. And so there was a period of a couple of months where I knew that publicity was going to be really tough, that it was hard. It would be hard to reach readers because the more traditional channels for publicizing a book weren't available. Bookstores were closed. And I was ruminating and I thought, well, what if I kind of as a fun exercise, what if I wrote recipes from the book and I put them on my website? And I didn't think that anyone would actually cook them. But because I had some extra time to spare, I really developed them. So I went back and I marked all the sections in the book that had food, kind of whether it was a dinner party scene or a really simple recipe, not even recipe, just description of food.

19:32And then I selected my favorites and I developed recipes based on the descriptions. And so it was a funny sort of reverse engineering of trying to figure out, OK, what does this dish actually look like and taste like in practice? And I wanted the recipe to work for a reader. Like I was very rigorous in terms of testing and writing it. And then to my great delight, people started cooking them. And, you know, people would go to my website and there's a tab that says what Margot ate. And I guess we had we had a lot more time on our hands back then in our kitchens. Yeah. And I think was it Deb Perlman and Smitten Kitchen shared some of the recipes also, which I imagine like I think for any recipe developer, like when the Smitten Kitchen fandom can cook something or latch on to it, that's exciting.

20:25Oh, yeah. That was a dream come true. I emailed Deb Perelman out of the blue. I didn't know her, but I love her work and have admired her for so many years. And I emailed her saying, I'm sure you have your schedule fully booked for many, many months to come. But would you be interested in maybe featuring a recipe from the book? I have these recipes that I've developed and she had read the book and she had posted about it. So I knew that she was familiar with it. But it was really a shot in the dark. And it was such a surprise and such a gift when she responded and said, yes, let's do the tomato tart.

21:05And so then I went back and retested the tomato tart many times. In a panic. I know, in a panic and, you know, and made sure that it was really as perfect as can be. And a lot of readers have come to me through the tomato tart recipe. I love the idea of people like accessing a novel through the recipes that were created after the fact. It's such a like strange little backdoor into that world. But I think it makes so much sense that especially if you have such a personal connection with the recipe, like you make it, it works, you eat from it, that you kind of already have vested interest in reading the book.

21:39And to me also, it's interesting with your work because a novel is such a solitary thing. And then you've been doing cookbook co-writing, which is kind of the opposite part of that project. You have this book with Rie McClenney, Make It Japanese, that will probably be out by the time this interview is out. What was it like kind of transitioning into that collaborative co-writing space? It was the best, honestly. Like, really, I was so, so lucky to be able to write this book with Rie McClenney. She was a dream to work with. I think, you know, such an important part of a collaboration is getting along as two individuals.

22:18And I was very, very fortunate that we get along as friends. We became friends through the process of writing the book. When I was a cookbook editor, my favorite part of the editorial process was talking to the author and bouncing around ideas and talking about food. I mean, I can talk about food on end. It's like it never tires me. And so to be able to do that in an even more intimate way with Rie and to talk about her recipes and her food memories, to kind of pull out more content, to flesh out stories that she already had was was just like the the best kind of job that you could expect. And writing a book, of course, is so, so hard.

23:04It is by no means an easy thing. And it's a very creative endeavor as well. But there was something so special about being able to do it together. And to be there really to give voice to her story, I loved the sort of like ghostwriting aspect of it or where I was listening to her and interviewing her and then using her words in order to craft a narrative. You know, it's so different from writing your own book. And I really liked that experience of embodying her voice and her story. Yeah, I think that sounds really exciting and also maybe like a little bit of a relief to get to step out of like your own head and your creative process and peek into someone else's.

23:55And I'm curious because, you know, as we've talked about, you did grow up eating like Japanese food at home. Were there any moments when there was a recipe that like maybe you would approach in one way and she was approaching completely differently or that you had different associations to? Yeah, I mean, first of all, I learned so much from her. That's one of the other pleasures of collaborating because you're so deep in the recipes and you can, you know, you have these long conversations where you're just asking questions about the most minute thing that I think would only interest us when it comes to food.

24:28Like, how exactly do you wash rice? But you really do learn so much from the way that another person approaches ingredients in cooking. And with Rie, the sort of beautiful thing is that the recipes would both feel familiar and new. Like she has a lot of cold noodle dishes, which I also grew up eating. It's very typical to eat them in Japan in the summer when it gets really hot and humid and you need something to cool you down. And there's one recipe in particular, hiyashi chuka, that my mom would make. And Rie has a recipe for it in the book. But hers is different. And so it's both familiar. Like when I first made her recipe, I thought, oh, I recognize these flavors.

25:09And yet this is very much Rie. Like she's added her own ingredients and her own twist. And I felt that way with all of her recipes where there was an element of comfort and familiarity, but also she was stretching my thinking or she was approaching something in a way that, of course, my mother didn't. So that was such a pleasure to rediscover these recipes through her. Yeah, I love that. I'm curious like what the difference is between like Rie's Hayashi Chuka and your mom's. I mean, in general, I would say my mom because of her sugar aversion. Her Japanese cooking is a little different from most Japanese home cooking because sugar is an important ingredient in Japanese home cooking.

25:51And Rie actually does an extraordinary job of having it feel really balanced. Like none of her recipes are too sweet. In fact, she would often bring down the sugar from what it would be in like a maybe more traditional home cooking recipe. But my mother, really, there was no sugar. So that was something that I noticed immediately, like the balance of flavors was different. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like there are so many parts of the cookbook making process that are so foreign to somebody that has never worked behind it, especially in the kind of way that you have both as an editor and now as a writer.

26:26Are there any parts that you think are maybe like underratedly important or like not part of the conversation in terms of when people are buying a book that you find to be interesting? Yeah, I mean, I think there are two parts that come to mind. One is the actual bookmaking process, the production side, which is really just so involved. I mean, everything from like choosing the paper to the end papers to designing the cover, the printing, the images. Cookbooks are such beautiful objects. And it's something that really surprised me and just sort of blew my mind when I was working as a cookbook editor, especially at a place like Fidon where the books are so gorgeous.

27:11And there's such attention to the quality of the paper, to how they're being printed. And so I really learned an appreciation for the bookmaking process. And I'm a perfectionist, so I will notice even if a comma is out of place. So I feel like the sort of like thinking about the book as an object and not just the content and the story and the recipes like that was something new to me and that I think people maybe don't always necessarily see or like realize how much work goes into it. And then the other side that is always, I think, interesting to people who don't work in the industry or like these are questions that I often get is about the cookbook shoot because it's such an important part of the process of writing a book.