In the first sentence of her latest cookbook, Erin French — who created and presides over virtually every aspect of her acclaimed restaurant The Lost Kitchen — sets out to make one thing clear.
“I’ve always been the first person to point out that I am not a chef,” she writes. “I learned how to cook on the line of my father’s diner, cranking out fried eggs and bacon, burgers and fries, and cup after cup of (microwaved) chowder.”
Fair enough. That’s how she started out.
But after a decade of running The Lost Kitchen, winning extravagant praise (Bloomberg placed it on its list of “12 Restaurants Worth Traveling Across the World to Experience”) and having to turn away far more customers than she could accommodate in the 19th-century mill she transformed into a restaurant in her hometown, she still doesn’t consider herself a chef?
“I didn’t go to school and actually learn how to be a chef,” she explained. “I never figured out how to follow those exact rules. So I follow home cook rules.”
‘The Lost Kitchen, Volume III – Seize the Supper’ is, as the title implies, her third cookbook. The focus this time around is on making memorable dishes from the freshest seasonal ingredients. In her case, from the farms and fields and waters of Maine: apples and squash in the fall, roasts in the winter, rhubarb in the spring, raspberries and heirloom tomatoes in the summer.
I put her on the spot and asked her to name her favorite food season. “That’s a hard one,” she admitted.
Finally, she said that her favorite time for comfort food comes in the winter, especially when she can look out her kitchen window and see snow piling up outside.
“You have permission to slow down. You’ve got nowhere else to be. You’re stuck inside with a snowstorm, and you just can cook all day long,” she said. “You’re not missing work because no one else is at work. The only people who are out are the snowplow guys. And you can just be in that moment. I love that.”
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Dining and Cooking