DORIE GREENSPAN: Thank you so much.
Hi, thanks for coming.
This is the first time you're seeing me
but it's not the last because I'm moving in.
Yeah.
I like it here, except that I was
told that I would be called-- what was it-- a Graygler?
Graygler-- yeah.
I don't know, that might keep me away, not sure.
So this is the 43rd year since my first trip
to Paris, the trip that just changed everything--
everything.
From the minute I stepped foot on Paris soil, my life changed.
And my relationship to my mother changed.
Previous to that trip, I thought my mother was swell,
I thought she was perfect.
One day into that trip, I realized that my perfect mother
had made a tragic, tragic mistake--
she had had me in Brooklyn.
I was meant to be born in Paris, there's no question about it.
And I keep thinking about all that I
missed by not being born in Paris.
I mean can you imagine how charming it would sound
if I were speaking to you with a French accent?
I mean it be great.
If I had been French, I would know how to tie a scarf.
It would be-- the scarf gene would be in my DNA
and I wouldn't have had to buy this.
This is the how to tie a scarf deck of cards from Hermes.
I also would have known the proper way to cut cheese.
The French are very fussy about how cheese is cut.
So you know a slice of brie, kind of triangular
slice-- cut that point off, call it the nose
and you'll never be invited to anyone's home again.
So to make sure that I still got invited I bought this.
It looks like your geometry textbook,
but it's called "L'Art de Couper la
Fromage"-- the art of cutting cheese.
I was serious about learning.
I would have known the difference between boeuf
bourguignon and boeuf a la mode.
A la mode's one big hunk if beef and bourguignon is just
little chunks.
I might even have been able-- maybe,
maybe-- to walk in high heels on cobblestone--
all the French women can.
I mean it's like they get the scarf gene
and they get the high heels gene.
I have none of that.
But had I been born French, there's
one thing I wouldn't have learned to do,
and that would have been to bake.
The bottom line-- actually the punchline-- is French people
don't bake.
They don't bake anything tricky, they
don't bake anything complicated.
They don't bake-- they buy.
So here's the line outside of Pierre Herme.
My favorite is this woman over here with her hand
out like I want money for desserts.
For the first 20 years or so so-- so
I've been living in Paris part time for about 20 years--
and for the first I'd say maybe 5 or 10 years that I was there,
no one invited us to dinner.
You have to really get to know French people to be invited--
is anybody here French?
Oh, I can say anything I want.
OK.
It takes-- this is changing, but it really
takes a long time for someone to invite you home.
And so you'll meet in a cafe for a drink or for coffee,
you'll go to a restaurant together,
and then eventually you'll be invited to someone's home
for dinner.
And when you are, they will make a fabulous meal for you
and they will cap it with beautiful desserts.
So you might get an eclair.
So these eclair are from a shop called L'atelier de Genie,
and the shop sells only eclairs, or maybe a strawberry cake
like this.
This is from Hugo and Victor.
Or the ispahan, which is Pierre Herme's famous, famous cake.
So it's a macaroon.
It's rose, the cream inside is rose, there's fresh lychee,
and there's a raspberry trim-- fresh raspberries.
Or do you love this?
This looks like this would be perfect
for Halloween, actually.
Pauline, maybe you should go for this.
This is a lemon tart with meringue on top.
Or you would get macaroon.
Macaroon are very, very popular in Paris.
So these are from Pierre Herme and these are macaroon from
McDonald's.
McDonald's has a cafe and they have
Laduree make their macaroon for them.
And I'm hoping when I go back somebody is
going to treat me to this.
Isn't this gorgeous?
This is also a Pierre Herme dessert.
It's called Venus and it's apple and quince,
and that's all fresh apple forming the flowers on top.
So I loved-- of course, I mean who wouldn't-- I loved all
of these very fancy, very polished pastries that I was
treated to at friends' homes, and they make me feel pampered,
they made me feel truly like a guest.
But at some point I started to wonder,
what are my friends having for dessert when I'm not there?
You know, what are they doing on a Tuesday night
when the kids come home from school
and have homework and mom's been working all day and dad's been
working all day and they're not having this for dessert?
Not only does mom not have time to go buy it,
this stuff is really expensive.
So this little lemon meringue tart
is 20 euros, so what, about $27.
This gorgeous cheesecake is only about this big
and it's 27 Euro.
And one little macaroon from Pierre Herme
is 2 Euro 10, or something over $3.
So I figured this isn't what they were doing.
I already knew that they weren't whipping up
complicated desserts, because one night I
had some Paris friends over for dinner
and I made a chocolate cake.
This is not my chocolate cake, but it might as well
have been because this was the style.
This is my friend Betty's and it's
a recipe from "Baking Chez Moi." but I brought out
a cake like this and I put it on the table,
and one of my friends said, where did you buy that?
And I said, I made it.
And around the table the response was the same-- why?
Why would you do something like that?
That's what pastry shops are for.
So it was only after really years
of living in Paris that I-- you know,
I was having friends to dinner at that point
and we were being invited to friends' homes for dinner,
and it was only then that I got a taste of what
they were making.
And I came to think of it as a parallel universe
to all of those beautiful patisserie,
pastry shop desserts that I showed you.
Here's what my friends were serving
at home and to their dearest friends-- moi, one of them--
loaf cakes.
These are called-- I love this-- in France, anything that's
shaped in a loaf pan is called a cake.
And cakes like these, which are good keepers,
are called either weekend cakes or gateaux voyage-- travel
cakes.
And so even if the travel is as far as the park for a picnic,
this is the kind of cake that French people will make.
These are little matcha financiers.
It's my version of a traditional French pastry
that's really easy to make and that a French person would
make at home.
So financiers were created in late 19th century in Paris.
There was a pastry chef who had a shop right
across from the stock exchange, and every afternoon-- see,
they didn't have Pauline and Charlie's and they
couldn't just go for pastries on campus--
so they would cross the street, go to the pastry shop,
and get something to eat as their treat.
But they were always complaining because it
took too long to eat what they bought.
They needed a knife and fork, and sometimes it's
spotted their ties if they weren't careful.
So they wanted, essentially, grab and go.
And so the owner of the shop, his name was [? Lanya, ?] I
think, created the financier.
It can be eaten out of hand, a couple of bites
and it's finished-- no crumbs, no knife, no fork.
And he named it for his stockbroker clients,
he called them financier.
He made them originally in ingot shaped bars
so they would kind of be familiar with that shape.
I make mine in mini muffin tins-- easier.
And he made them as rich as his clients.
There's a huge amount of butter in them.
Palmiers, so this is puff pastry.
No French person has ever made puff pastry at home,
I'm convinced of it.
They go to the corner market, they buy it ready made,
so do I. They buy all their tart dough ready made.
So this is really just an arts and crafts project.
You buy the puff pastry, sugar, fold it, bake it-- beautiful.
These are cookies, French cookies.
So these were given to me by Edouard Bobin, who
owns a great little bistro in Paris called Pantruche.
And he had served a little hazelnut cookie with coffee
after a meal, and I said, oh Edouard, I love these,
can you give me the recipe?
He said, I'll give you a better recipe.
I'll give you a recipe for cookies.
I though, I don't want your recipe for cookies.
When the French say cookies, they
mean only one thing-- Toll House cookies,
chocolate chip cookies.
That to them is a cookie.
And so when Edouard gave me this recipe, I looked at it
and I thought, he just gave me the Toll House,
you know, the back of the Nestle's chocolate chips
bag cookie.
It had the brown sugar in just about the same proportions,
it had white sugar, but these are really different.
These have almond flour in them, and almond flour
is so common in France that if you
go to the corner convenience shop, the one that's open 24/7,
you can buy almond flour in that shop.
Maybe you'll get a creme caramel.
This one-- this are all pictures from the book,
by the way, because these are recipes from the book.
A creme caramel-- this one is milk chocolate.
This was one of the recipes that surprised
me the most when I discovered this.
This is-- I think of it as the French equivalent of Rice
Krispies treats.
They're called desert roses, rose de sables,
which is the name for gypsum, and they're
made with corn flakes.
So it's corn flakes, dried fruit, nuts,
and melted chocolate.
And so it's a great thing to make for kids.
You can make it and put it in the refrigerator
and it will keep forever.
And in fancy restaurants in Paris,
they're sometimes made so that they're really tiny
and they become the after dessert dessert.
So they're on a platter after you've had two desserts
and when coffee comes around.
This is actually one of my favorite recipes in the book.
So I loved these desserts that my friends were making
and I did-- you know I was grateful to them
for making them.
It really made me feel like one of their family.
And so you can only imagine how I felt when I asked them
for the recipes and they said no.
These were my friends.
So I'd say, I love this cake, may I have the recipe,
and they'd say, no, no, you don't want it--too simple,
it's too simple for you, you don't want it.
And I'd ask and they'd say, too simple.
No, no, this one's not for you.
So I thought maybe this was-- all the years that I've
been in Paris as a faux Frenchwoman,
I thought maybe I've missed this little point of etiquette.
Maybe there's some ritual to this.
The asker asks, the askee refuses, the asker asks again,
the askee refuses, the asker gets down on her knees,
begs, and finally gets it.
Well finally, I did get recipes and I
realized that my friends' modesty was--
I'm taking it as modesty-- was actually genuine.
The recipes were so simple but they were also so perfect.
So here's a recipe for a gateaux Savoie,
which is one of the oldest cake recipes in the pastry cannon.
And this was given to me by a friend, Martine.
It's normally made in a savarin mold,
so what we would think of as a Jello mold-- you know,
just an oval ring.
And I made it in a bundt pan when I got back to America,
thinking that it would be so much easier for us to find
these pans, though I do have my mother's Jello pan.
My mother did not bake, she did not cook,
she used the oven as her bread box.
But she made Jello.
So I have her mold.
I could have done this.
I love this picture.
So these are canistrelli.
They're cookies from Corsica and they
were given to me by my friend Leticia.
And they are made with olive oil, white wine, and pastis,
which is an anise flavored liqueur.
And they're may be totally by hand.
So I love anything that you can just
get your fingers in and play with.
And so you start with a fork, you finish with your hands,
and you can just bake them in any shape you want.
And they're really great and they're not
sweet, really not sweet.
So you can have them as a dessert,
you can have them with fruit, or you can have them
with a drink, which makes them, I think, super nice.
And then this is the orange cake from Bernard's sister-in-law,
Odille.
Odille came to our house for dinner
and she didn't know what to bring us
as-- it was the second time we had met her
and the first time she had come to our home--
and she didn't know what to bring as a hostess gift
and she brought recipes, and I thought,
that's the best gift you can give someone.
Right, so handwritten, beautiful, and this
was one of them.
And so this is a really very plain, very simple
cake that get soaked with orange syrup.
And when I was testing it with my recipe tester, Marry Dodd,
the wonderful, we thought wouldn't it
be fun to put oranges on top of it.
And so we poached oranges-- you could do oranges,
grapefruits, blood oranges, tangerines--
we poached the oranges and then use
that syrup to soak the cake.
And this is one of my favorite recipes in the book.
So this is Laurent's slow roasted spiced pineapple.
Laurent-- well, Laurent is not my hairdresser,
he's actually Patricia Wells's hairdresser--
Isabel cuts my hair.
So in Paris there's Isabel at the hair salon,
and Isabel never cooks but she's great for restaurant
recommendations.
Right next to her is Laurent.
Laurent cooks all the time when he
has time, which is the weekends.
So after the weekend he comes in,
he's got his pictures on his phone of what he made,
and so I try and make an appointment for right
after the weekend so I can see what Laurent has made.
And one day I came in and the Laurent said,
I made this pineapple for dessert.
And I looked at it and it just spoke to me.
And I said, how did you make it?
He said, pineapple-- cut it, some jam, some orange juice,
some booze, spices, whatever you've got-- just really,
anything you've got in the cupboard.
And I said, little bit more info, like how?
You just put it in the oven, couple of hours,
baste it now and then.
I said, OK, how much jam?
He said, jam.
I said, how much orange juice?
He said, like this.
I said, how much alcohol, what kind of alcoholic,
do you need to use alcohol?
He said, well you know, rum, Armagnac,
cognac-- whatever you have-- more orange juice
if you don't want to use the alcohol.
I said, how much?
He said, about the same amount as the orange juice.
So I went home and I made it.
It was tasty but I knew it wasn't right so I went back
and I asked Laurent.
He said, I told you-- you know, like jam.
He wasn't in a good mood.
So the third time I asked him, I said, Laurent, I made it with,
like, three or four tablespoons of jam.
He said, no, the whole jar.
You need the whole jar.
I said, you didn't quite mention that.
He said, you should've known.
So it's the whole jar of jam and about this much orange.
So I went home and I actually turned it into a recipe.
But it is the kind of desert that you
can make with truly anything you've gotten the house
and there's always extra syrup.
And it's fabulous over ice cream.
And so this is the other recipe that really surprised me.
This is the Mocha DuPont.
Forty years ago, when we went to Paris for the first time,
we met Martine Collet.
About 10 years after that, she married Bernard Collet.
Well, her name was Martine, I've already
forgotten her maiden name.
Martine, we call her Martine.
And she married Bernard Collet and they
are best friends in Paris, we see them all the time.
And for 30 years, Bernard has been telling me
about his birthday cake called the Mocha Dupont.
And I said, and what is it?
He said, oh you know, it's the cake
that my mother used to make for me,
and it's called Dupont because she got the recipe
from Madame Dupont, who lived next door.
I said, we're really good friends,
Id like to taste your birthday cake.
And his wife said-- you know what
she said-- it's not for you, it's too simple.
I said, come on.
So when I was working on this book
and when I had had most of the recipes put together, I said,
you know I don't want to do this book without Bernard's birthday
cake.
Please tell me about it.
This is an icebox cake.
I mean this is just-- I couldn't believe it.
These are petit beurre cookies, they
can be any kind of cookie you want.
They're soaked in espresso-- I don't know why you would soak
a cake in espresso for a two-year-old,
but c'est la vie en France.
So it's espresso soaked cookies with a little espresso
buttercream and you just constructed
it any way you want.
And when I made it the first time,
Bernard said, it's not right.
And I said, what did I do?
He said, we like to put the icing
along the side of the cake.
I said, OK, fine.
And I did it.
He said, and we like chocolate shavings on top.
So I did that, too.
But when we did it for the book I
wanted everybody to see the pretty scalloped edges
of the cookies.
And so I showed him the picture in the book and he said,
that is not my birthday cake.
I said, Bernard, I made it for you so that you could taste it
and you said it was good, you said
it was just what you wanted.
He said, yes, but it didn't look like that.
He said, you have revisited it.
It is-- how would you say it-- [SPEAKING FRENCH] or something
like relooked.
And I said, what bothers you?
The ice cream.
We never had ice cream with the cake.
He's still a good friend.
He's forgiven me.
So because my friends had been so generous
and they had given me these recipes,
I wanted to create recipes for them
and I wanted to play with some of the classics
in French pastry.
So this is my version of a gateaux Basque.
So a few years ago Michael and I were-- oh,
it's more than a few years ago because the recipe is
in "Around my French Table"-- we were traveling through
the Payee Basque, the Basque country in France,
and we passed a sign that said, Gateaux Basque Museum.
If there's a museum devoted to a cake, I have to go.
Who wouldn't stop for this?
And we went to what we thought was the museum
and we discovered that it was really a cooking class.
There were just rows of, like, church pews,
and the place was packed with people.
And the chef was there with a stack of dough like this,
and he made a gateaux Basque.
He also did things that you're not allowed to do in America.
He grabbed a hunk of dough and said, I want you to taste this,
and just passed this hunk around so that every person grabbed
the hunk, right, and tasted it.
Then he passed the cream around, we all double dipped.
It was tons of fun.
So the traditional gateaux Basque
is two layers of a pastry dough that has baking powder in it.
So a, it means it's really forgiving-- no matter
what you do, it's going to bake up beautifully.
And two, the texture is somewhere
between tart and cake.
And in the traditional gateaux Basque,
it's filled with either pastry cream or cherry jam.
And if it's filled with cherry jam,
you use some of the pastry to make a Basque cross
over the top so you can tell you've got a jam cake, not
a cream one.
So mine is filled with dried fruits, nuts, and apples.
It's a great fall dessert.
And these are apple croustades, so they're, again,
another kind of arts and crafts project-- strips
of phyllo dough brushed with butter, sprinkled with sugar,
and filled with sauteed apples.
In the Perigord, the southwest, this
is sometimes filled with prunes, which is also nice.
And I make a caramel tart, which is not really
a riff on a classic, but caramel is
like-- you find it everywhere in France.
I once said that I wouldn't be surprised
if I walked into a drugstore and found caramel toothpaste.
It is like the flavors of France,
and so this tart is kind of an homage to French caramel.
And when it's strawberry season, you
see a fraisier, a strawberry cake in just about every shop.
And so this is my version of the fraisier.
The layers of cake are based on a recipe for French yogurt
cake.
It's the only cake that every French person
knows how to make by heart.
Right, they know the recipe by heart.
Because they get yogurt, pour it into a bowl,
clean out the yogurt container, and then they
use it for the four, they use it for the sugar.
It's like a one, two, three cake.
And a yogurt cake is the birthday cake
of choice in France, that's what most French mothers make
for their kid's birthday.
And they can make it in any shape
and just stick some candles on it-- it's great.
So this one is made with rose flavor.
So the inspiration was that ispahan that I showed you,
the rose macaroon with the raspberries around it.
So this is rose flavored yogurt cake with a rose cream
and the strawberries standing up,
like a little forest of strawberries,
which is the traditional way that fraisier is done.
This looks more complicated than it is to make at home.
And then the buche noel.
So this one is-- this is my Franco American buche noel.
It's gingerbread and the filling is cinnamon cream cheese.
So it's the buche noel, the French form,
with kind of American flavors.
And when I was in Paris in September,
it was not only Fashion Week, it was buche noel week,
and all the top pastry chefs were showing their buches.
And there was a press conference and pictures were taken,
and then in November, magazines and newspapers
will start showing-- it's like a dream catalog.
They'll show all the pictures of the buche
so you can decide what you're going to buy for Christmas.
We're there for Christmas usually so I always buy a buche
and I make a buche.
And some recipes I just invented,
just because I was in Paris, the ingredients were there,
and I wanted to.
So these are granola bars-- actually,
delicious granola bars-- based on granola.
And there's a recipe for my granola
there that I started to make for French friends.
So I started to make this granola
and I would bring it as house gifts and people would say,
it's so great, I love it, I love it.
And I'd say, here's the recipe, and then I'd say,
did you ever make it?
And they said, no, we want you to do that.
Would you do that for us?
So I stopped giving out the recipe.
This is a blueberry corn cream cheese tart.
So about two years ago, Philadelphia Cream Cheese
became the cult ingredient in Paris.
Before that time, I used to have to bring it
on the plane with me.
I would travel with 10 pounds of cream cheese
and I would travel with Graham crackers, too.
Now they can buy it themselves.
So when it was like-- you would see ads for it on bus stops
and on the buses themselves, it was really a big deal.
And so I made this no bake cream cheese filling
and I put it in a delicious French pastry tart,
and then thought, I'm just going to surprise them
a little bit-- them being my French friends--
blueberry and corn, and it turned out
to be something that they truly loved.
And then these little-- well, I caught them pielets.
So they're little apple pies.
They're filled with apples and raisins and spice.
And I said, look, don't you love the idea of an American pie?
And my French friend said, oh you mean a torte.
A covered pie or a covered tart is called a torte,
and so the French immediately claimed this as their own.
And some of the recipes in the book
are recreations of things that I love in French pastry shops.
So this is the tart Tropezienne, and years ago Pierre Herme--
I worked with Pierre Herme, we did two books together--
and at that time he wasn't yet known as the Picasso of pastry
or the Karl Lagerfeld of macaroon.
Now he's got a million names-- sometimes
referred to as the God of Pastry.
So it was Pierre who said to me, have you
ever tasted a tart Tropezienne?
I had no idea what it was and he said, it's mythic,
it's absolutely mythic.
And as usual, he was right.
So it's like a brioche.
It's a yeast, very rich butter and egg dough.
This is a little bit less rich than regular brioche
and it's filled with cream.
And it was invented in Saint Tropez, which
is why it's called Tropezienne.
And the story that goes with it is
that when Brigitte Bardot was filming
"And God Created Woman," this was her first film,
Roger Vadim was the director, it was his first film, Jean-Louis
Trintignant, Alaine [INAUDIBLE].
I mean all of these people who became great stars were
in Saint Tropez filming and they used the caterer
across the street to supply the craft table,
to bring food to the set.
And it was Alexandra Mika, who had come from Poland,
and every day he would bring a tart Tropezienne
because the crew just loved it.
And it was Brigitte Bardot who said to him--
I forgot what he used to call it, but it was Bardot who said,
you should call it the tort Tropezienne.
Now when you go to Saint Tropez, every other shop
is a shop that sells only tart Tropezienne-- little ones
like this, big ones like this.
It is like the food of St Tropez,
but there's only one Mika, and that's the label.
When he packages you've got Brigitte Bardot.
Somebody called me the Bardot of baking the other day.
That made me happy.
This is an Alsatian tart flambe, but a sweet one.
And Michael-- hello, Michael-- that's my husband over there.
We were in Alsace, in the east of France,
and the tart flambe is a signature.
It's a specialty there, usually made
with fromage blanc, caramelized onions, and bacon.
But we stopped at a restaurant called Flam and Co. that
served only tart flambe and served savory and sweet.
And so we each had a savory tart flambe
and then we were going to have the dessert.
But by that time, I had asked the server so many questions
that when I said, we'd like an apple tart flambe,
he said to me, would you like to make it yourself?
And so I got to be with the tart flambee-er
and watch how she made it and put it into-- they
had a wood fired oven, which was fabulous.
And so as soon as I came back, I started
to figure out a recipe so that I could make this at home,
and so can you.
And this is the grapefruit tart.
Remember the beautiful strawberry dessert
that I showed you earlier from Hugo and Victor?
This is a version of their grapefruit tart.
So the filling is a grapefruit and Campari cream-- very, very
light cream-- delicious.
With Ruby grapefruits.
And these are crackle topped cream puffs.
I think everyone should learn how to make cream puff dough.
It's like a life skill-- you learn how to drive,
you learn how to make cream puff dough.
It's important.
These days, there are cream puff shops.
The cream puffs are made on a regular basis during the day,
and then when you come in they fill them for you on the spot.
And where cream puffs used to be glazed,
they now have this crackle top.
It's kind of an innovation on a desert that's
got to be more than 500 years old.
So it's a little almond cookie, and you roll the cookie dough,
you roll it really, really thin and you cut a circle,
and right before you put the cream puff into the oven,
you put the disk on top.
And it breaks apart as the cream puff puffs.
And these are cream puffs crackle
topped from a shop called Popelini,
after the Italian pastry chef who came with Catherine de
Medici to Paris and introduced cream puffs to France.
They're beautiful, aren't they?
Don't they remind you of the sprinkles cupcakes?
Yeah.
And these are my bubble eclair.
So because it's unlikely that I'll be making eclair
like I showed you before, and maybe you will,
but I thought it would be fun because eclairs
are so delicious, to just do something that would be super
simple and everybody would be able to make them and enjoy
them.
And so it's cream puff dough just
scooped with an ice cream scoop or a cookie scoop,
and the scoops are placed close enough together
that when they bake they bake together.
And macaroon-- so "Baking Chez Moi" is my 11th cookbook.
I have never put a recipe for macaroon in a cookbook.
I thought everyone should just buy them.
I did one recipe, it was Pierre Herme's recipe,
it was in the chocolate book.
I tested it-- I can't remember whether it was 11 or 13 times,
but it was one of those numbers that we
know is supposed to be good luck--
but it took me a long time to get to good luck.
The recipe ran about seven pages.
This one is a long recipe, too-- not because it's hard,
but because I was spooked by it.
I was so spooked by the recipe I took a macaroon baking
class in Paris, even though I had made them before.
I went to Pierre's pastry shop to watch
everybody make macaroon.
I wanted to really get it right, and I did.
And I put them in the book mostly because I realized
I was being a wimp, that I was just spooked but by macaroon,
freaked by them, but no one else was.
When I started to look around the internet,
there were people posting pictures of the most gorgeous
macaroon and with lines that said things like,
I've never baked before but I thought
I would try making macaroon.
And all of these people made such gorgeous macaroon
I thought, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.
So this is the first time I've had a macaroon recipe.
And last month-- no, it's now two months ago,
in September-- when I was having dinner with Pierre Herme
and he said that he was-- I guess it's out now--
he was just publishing his second book of only macaroon.
And I said, oh, Pierre, that's fabulous.
And he said, yeah, but I believe people should buy them.
Even though this was his second book.
So I usually agree with Pierre on everything, but not on this.
I think you should go home and bake macaroon.
In fact, I think you should bake everything chez you.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: It seems that you're
a little bit of an internet phenomenon-- there's
a Tuesdays with Dorie, there's a whole community
that's built up.
Would you like to say a little bit about how that started,
what your relationship is with that and--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Thank you for mentioning-- this
is the most fabulous thing.
So when "Baking From My Home to Yours" came out in 2006,
a young woman named Lori Woodward, a young mom-- where
she found time to do this, I don't
know-- of three little boys, she got "Baking Chez Moi"
for her birthday and she liked it--
She got "Baking From My Home to Yours" for her birthday.
She liked it.
And she wrote to me and she said,
I have two friends who also have your book and we like a lot
and we'd like to bake from it every week.
And we'll put a recipe up on our blogs
and just bake through your book.
Is that OK with you?
I thought, sure.
I mean I knew the internet was-- I mean you
guys were born with it and you actually make the internet
now-- but I wasn't, so for me to see people
baking-- I mean I thought only my mother, the non baker,
bought my books.
But you know, I looked on the internet
and there were people baking from my books,
making beautiful things and posting pictures,
and I was so excited.
That's actually why I started my blog,
to be able to be in touch with all these people.
And so when Lori said she was going to do this,
I thought, oh, this is just great.
And I asked my editor, and she said, yeah, and my agent,
sure, why not?
None of us thought, what are the repercussions
of having every recipe in your book available online?
We just thought, oh this was really fun,
and it's only three people.
Well, they called their group Tuesdays with Dorie,
and there were only three people.
And then there were 30, and then there were 300,
and then there were thousands of people baking their way
through "Baking From My Home to Yours."
Oprah wrote about the group, "The Wall Street Journal"
wrote about the group, and it was so special
because I didn't start it.
This is really-- to me this is like the power
of the inter-- my husband always says
it's the internet at its best.
It just grew organically.
It wasn't me saying, gee wouldn't it
be great if I had a group who-- and so they baked
their way through "Baking From My Home to Yours,"
and then they started on-- and they're still
baking through-- "Baking with Julia."
And then when "Around My French Table" came out in 2010,
they started a group called French Fridays with Dorie,
and they're cooking their way through that.
And now, on November 1, they're starting,
they'll be baking every two weeks from "Baking Chez
Moi" and the other two weeks from "Baking with Julia."
And so anybody who wants to start
baking with this group of fabulous, supportive, generous,
adorable people, it's Tuesday with Dorie--
you have to Google it because I think
it's like blogspot or something.
It's got another little word in it,
but if you Google Tuesdays with Dorie,
the first thing you'll get is some woman
named Dorie who's not me who has a blog called Tuesdays
with Dorie-- I wish she would change it--
and then you'll get the Tuesdays with Dorie group
and you'll bake with them.
Thank you for asking me about them, yeah.
From my husband.
MICHAEL GREENSPAN: The thing that's
really magical about that group is
what Dorie started to talk about.
But Lori was really brilliant.
First of all, she-- the thing that's magical
is that Lori was brilliant.
DORIE GREENSPAN: Lori.
MICHAEL GREENSPAN: Lori.
DORIE GREENSPAN: Not me.
MICHAEL GREENSPAN: The person who
is the idea person and who is the manager of the group.
It's a tribute to her that the group is very, very supportive
of each other.
That's really incredible.
And the second thing was that it's a tribute to her
that she said, oh there's an author
and we can't just do this without paying attention.
So there was one rule that was inviolate--
if you want to be a member of the group you had
to buy the book, which was very nice of her.
And then the second rule she came up
with had to do with distributing your recipes, which
was the only person who could do the recipe online
was the person who chose the recipe for that week.
So that just-- all the recipes were still out there,
but they weren't out there in the thousands.
So it just was a nice gesture on her part
towards the author, which is really great.
DORIE GREENSPAN: It's a great group.
When I spoke at on the International Food Bloggers
Conference, and about 20 people who
are members of TWD and FFWD-- Tuesdays
with Dorie and French Fridays with Dorie--
came to the conference, so we actually
got to meet one another and they got to meet one another.
But they already-- they'd never seen one another
face to face but they really knew one
another from being part of this group.
And in fact, Lori went to Seattle
to be the matron of honor at the wedding of a Tuesdays
with Dorie member and they had never met.
They only knew one another through baking.
I just think it's fabulous.
AUDIENCE: A two parter question.
So the first part is at your house,
when you're in France, what do you cook when you
invite your French friends over?
And the second part is have do you ever thought, gee
this would be wonderful, they'll really love it,
and then not so much?
Like just their French taste didn't
quite jive with your American taste?
DORIE GREENSPAN: Oh wait.
OK, so that's an interesting question.
And I was going to say, I don't know the answer,
but Michael knows the answer.
MICHAEL GREENSPAN: [INAUDIBLE]
DORIE GREENSPAN: Yeah.
MICHAEL GREENSPAN: Um, when I was growing up--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Oh, I know exactly what
you're going to say, yeah.
I know.
Yeah, untouched.
Potato nik is not a French favorite.
Do you know I cook-- when my French friends come to dinner,
I cook-- sometimes I cook very traditional French food,
sometimes we'll fry chicken or we'll make hamburgers,
or we'll do something very American.
The French are-- I was going to say adventurous
and I'm wondering now that I'm saying it,
are they adventurous or forgiving?
They're usually really happy to have anything that I make
and they're very appreciative.
Some of them are just surprised.
I mean somebody said to me, oh, you
know how to make a vinaigrette.
I though, yeah, I know how to make a vinaigrette, right.
I think that there's some amount of surprise that Americans cook
and eat well, that there's this idea that-- I mean,
it's-- we are a nation of hamburger eaters to many people
outside of our country.
But I cook all sorts of things, and the food
that's in "Around my French Table"
really comes from the food that I've
cooked for friends around my French table.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I ever
did that they didn't like.
I don't think so.
The potato nik was just-- went over
like a heavy potato pudding.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
DORIE GREENSPAN: Hi.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm headed to Paris this summer for the first time--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Lucky you.
AUDIENCE: --and we are very, very excited.
My boyfriend's lived there for some time,
but it's my first time.
And I'm curious.
I've heard a lot of mixed reviews
about trying to speak French with the French.
What's the best way to not be hated, especially--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Smile.
Smile.
AUDIENCE: Just smile.
DORIE GREENSPAN: Just smile.
All you have to do is smile.
It's interesting.
Sometimes if you try to speak French
and your French isn't good, a French person
might answer you in English if he or she can do that.
And when I was younger, I used to think,
how dare you-- is my French that bad that you
won't listen to it?
But I think they're really just being helpful.
They want to make it easy for you
to be able to be understood and get what you want.
And if you say to a French person, oh,
I want to speak French, I have to practice--
[SPEAKING FRENCH]-- they'll speak with you.
But it's interesting-- when we first
started to go to France it was very hard to find people who
spoke English or wanted to speak English.
Now so many people do, and they really want to.
We have friends who work for French companies
but all of their meetings are in English.
It's really become the language.
So just smile.
As long as you smile.
You have a cute smile, you'll be fine.
AUDIENCE: I have a follow-up.
So obviously, your cookbooks are a great start
for kind of seeing where you go and what shops and restaurants
you like to visit.
Do you have any other kind of guides to Paris online?
DORIE GREENSPAN: Yes.
OK, so I think you should look at a website called
parisbymouth.com.
Do you know it?
Oh, I see a nod over there.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a great site for-- it's a food site.
It's a great site for restaurants, for pastry shops,
for bakeries.
They also do tours.
So I've taken the cheese tour and learned so much.
It's great.
They do a cheese tour, they do wine tastings.
Yes, it's a friend who started it, but it's a great site
and it's all in English.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] David Lebovitz's site?
DORIE GREENSPAN: Yes, David Lebovitz's site is great.
It's David L-E-B-O-V-I-T-Z. And Alec Lobrano,
or Alexander Lobrano's site, particularly his
Diner's Diary-- also good.
MALE SPEAKER: I guess on the subject of David Lebovitz,
we had him here earlier in the year
and so it seems like you two know each other.
Are there bake-offs or collaborations or things
like that?
DORIE GREENSPAN: No, no, no, no, no.
They're a happy going out to eat together.
Yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: Great.
DORIE GREENSPAN: Yeah, no competition.
MALE SPEAKER: Awesome.
And also how do you test the recipes in your cookbook?
Is there a--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Oh, that's a great question.
MALE SPEAKER: --trusted tester?
DORIE GREENSPAN: Yeah.
So all of these recipes were either gathered, begged,
groveled for in Paris or created in Paris
and then they were all tested, tested, tested, retested,
retested in America with American ingredients.
So the two ingredients that are hardest
to kind of translate from France to America
are flour and butter.
Because the flour is weaker in France, and so
in some instances I had to use less flour in a recipe,
and the butter is richer in France than it is here.
And so all of the recipes were tested here.
I worked with Mary Dodd, who was my recipe tester.
And by the time I would give Mary a recipe,
I had worked on it and worked on it
until I thought it was just right.
So I didn't send her things that had holes in them.
And I would send them to her fully written
so that she could test the actual formula, the ingredients
and test the writing.
You know-- do the directions make sense?
Because after-- if I've created a recipe, if I've made it
several times, you know I can take some things for
granted that-- so everybody needs an editor.
And so it was really good that she could read them and say,
do you think people will really know-- and point out
things like that.
So she tested everything and we tested the recipes
with volume measures-- cups and spoons--
and also with metric measures.
And I'm thrilled, I am so happy, to have metric in the book.
It's the first time my publisher has said yes so I'm happy.
MALE SPEAKER: Cool.
Any final questions to see us on to the book signing?
I'll end with another one-- the photos are so beautiful.
Do you use the same photographer with each book?
How do you approach the food photography?
DORIE GREENSPAN: So the photography
for my last three books, "Baking From My Home to Yours,"
"Around My French Table," and "Baking Chez Moi,"
it's the same team.
So it's Alan Richardson who does the photography,
Karen Tack does the food styling,
Deb Donahue does the props.
But Alan and Karen wrote books you might know-- "Hello,
Cupcake"-- yeah, they're the cupcakers--
"What's New Cupcake-- and yeah, so it's the same team.
MALE SPEAKER: Cool, great.
DORIE GREENSPAN: They're great to work with.
MALE SPEAKER: All right.
Well, on this Googleween, we were
supremely happy to have a salute to the French baked goods,
so thank you very much for speaking with us, Dorie, and--
DORIE GREENSPAN: Thank you, Cliff.
Thank you all for coming.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]