As the world knows, France is an eternal food fest, and there is no more festive place to be this week than at the Paris Cookbook Fair, or Festival du Livre Culinaire. The February 22 to 24 event spotlights the latest in cookbooks, culinary efforts and food trends from across the globe. Edouard Cointreau Sr. of liqueur fame is president of Gourmand International, the host and sponsor of the fair.
This year’s festival is being held in the heart of Paris at the Carrousel du Louvre, the shopping mall and conference space located underneath the Louvre Museum. The Carrousel du Louvre’s main entrance is at 99, rue de Rivoli right near the entrance to Paris’s Decorative Arts Museum. When you go down the escalator towards the inverted pyramid by I.M. Pei, you’ll find the underground entrance to the Louvre Museum on the left and Paris Cookbook Fair on the right, just after the La Maison du Chocolat boutique.
Open to professionals and the public alike, the Paris Cookbook Fair will feature exhibitions by more than 200 cookbook publishers, talks and lectures by leading figures in the industry, chef demonstrations, food and wine tastings, author signings, culinary art and photography, professional meetings, and more. The festival’s splash event is the the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards held in the Carrousel du Louvre’s 1400-seat amphitheatre.
More than 171 countries are entered in this year’s Gourmand Cookbook Awards competition highlighting the fact that food is THE hot thing in every corner of the globe. And each year, one cookbook is given the Hall of Fame award which honors a work having a major impact on the cookbook industry. Last year, Anne Willan, one of the world’s foremost authorities on French cuisine, and her husband Mark Cherniavsky received the 2012 award for their groundbreaking book The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes that Made the Modern Cookbook. This year, they are the U.S. guests of honor at the festival.
I have been perusing the festival’s program and have found lots of great sessions to attend. Friday at 10am is the Welcome speech by Edouard Cointreau followed by an hour-long talk by Anne Willan at 11am. Later that day, Guy Savoy, the famous French restauranteur and Michelin-starred chef, will be speaking and all manner of chef’s demos and tastings will be taking place. On Saturday, I think I’d pass on the cupcake demo by American chef Alisa Morov – cupcakes are now everywhere! – in favor of sessions on global cookbook trends, a new book on French wine-making, and a chef’s demo by the Paris Ritz chef Michel Roth. Sunday features more cuisine, wine and cookbook industry sessions again with food personalities from France, Europe, Asia, Latin America and more.
Tickets to the event are 35 euros for one day and a three-day pass costs 60 euros. For additional information on the festival, please click here. And if you are a cookbook lover and are in Paris this week, you won’t want to miss this extravaganza of the latest in cookbooks, chefs and cuisines from around the globe. Bon appétit!
French Take-Out ~ La France à emporter
This year’s French Affaires’ French Cookbook Club hosts its own ‘cookbook fair’ of sorts as we celebrate British-American food writer and cooking instructor Anne Willan. Anne is one of the world’s foremost authorities on French cooking and has written more than 30 books and cookbooks. She founded La Varenne Cooking School in Paris in 1975, one of the first professional cooking schools in France to offer simultaneous instruction in French and English and accredited, professional culinary degrees. After several years, she moved La Varenne to her 17th century château in Burgundy where it continued to offer high-caliber French culinary instruction until 2007. Today, Anne and her husband live in California where she writes books and hosts culinary events.
Our 2013 French Cookbook Club gatherings in Dallas will start with Anne’s earlier cookbooks and culminate in her masterpiece The Country Cooking of France along her new memoir One Soufflé at a Time to be published later this year. And we are thrilled to announce that Anne will attend our final French Cookbook Club gathering of the year – it will be a fabulous evening of delicious French food and conversation with this lovely grande dame of French cuisine!
For more details on this ‘year of Anne Willan,’ please click here. You can also click here for a recent French Affaires’ interview with Anne.
