Queen of the foodies

Patricia Wells has written eight books about French cooking and eating.

She is that rarest of people - a foreigner the French seem to take seriously. And what's even more impressive is that they take her seriously when she talks about a subject that's close to one source of their national pride: food.

Patricia Wells is an American writer living in France, spending time in both Paris and Provence. She has been there for almost 25 years and writes regularly about food for various English-speaking newspapers, including the influential International Herald Tribune. She is also the only foreigner ever to become a food critic for French newspaper, L'Express.

So how did Wells, who started her career as an art critic for the Washington Times, get the notoriously fussy and traditionally xenophobic French to take her seriously on the subject of their national cuisine?

"I guess because from the beginning I had the respect of the top chefs for the way I worked, which is and always has been very professional," explains Wells, one of the top names at the Savour New Zealand food and wine festival in Christchurch on May 7 and 8. She enjoys New Zealand wine and hopes New Zealand food will be just as good. She will take several classes in bistro-style cooking at Savour New Zealand.

Wells admits that when she first moved to France after her husband became editor of the International Herald Tribune, her biggest problem - as one might expect - was the language barrier.

"In the beginning, the early 1980s, I spent as much time as I could just observing in the kitchens. So when top chefs such as Joel Robuchon took me seriously, the rest had to follow."

She said she did not move to France to tell the French how and what to eat.

"I really only thought my audience would be Anglophones. But it turned out otherwise."

Wells has written eight books about French cooking and eating, several of which have won international awards. She also regularly hosts luxury week-long cooking schools at the Provence farmhouse (complete with private vineyard, of course) she and her husband own. These apparently sell out to visiting tourists, even at around $5000 a student.

Judging from the reviews of her books she has never tumbled into the celebrity-chef trap and she has told interviewers that she considers herself a food writer above all.

In fact, Wells seems to be keeping it real in general. This philosophy applies to her food too.

For instance, if she's at the local market shopping for strawberries for a desert and they're not at their best, she will simply change her plans and get the cherries instead.

"If you use the freshest ingredients, 75 to 90 per cent of your job is already done," she explains. "Just make the asparagus or snow pea or oyster taste as good as it can; respect it, do the least possible, and you'll be rewarded."

This is one of the reasons she is still so enamoured of French cooking.

"Good French food always takes the seasons into account, as well as the regions in which the food is grown, and I do believe that our bodies react to those naturally occurring matches in a very positive way," she says. "So many [classic] French combinations - such as asparagus and morel mushrooms, salmon with sorrel sauce, spring lamb with spring vegetables - were born out of natural seasonal combinations that just seem to be made for one another."

Indeed, if you were to ask Wells what the secret to French cooking is, she would continue in the same vein: "Buy the very, very freshest ingredients and do the least possible with them," she says.

The biggest culinary mistake, she notes, is making it more complicated than it needs to be. She then adds that a few other basics also need to be mastered: learn to make a perfect vinaigrette, perfect pastry, and make your own chicken stock.

All of which is obviously easy for her to say. After all, this is a woman who actually grows and cures her own capers in vinegar.

It takes a tonne of patience and just the right soil and climate, she cautions, before launching into a relatively long-winded explanation of what to do with capers once you've actually managed to grow the little blighters.

And it is that sort of down-to-earth enthusiasm that probably accounts for her success in revealing the mysteries of French cooking to the non-French-speaking, hamburger-eating general public.

"I do get excited and enthused about my classes and my books. I truly enjoy them and don't every think of them as drudgery," she says. "And I think it shows through. The enjoyment is infectious and so, hopefully, my readers and students are enjoying it as much as I am."