This is the third episode of my Book Update series, in which I share the ins and outs of writing a cookbook — or at least the way I’m tackling it. (You can read the first two parts about The Book Deal and The Recipes.)

Back in late July, when the sun was shining bright and the air was crisp with elation and hope and the workmen had not yet adorned the facade of my building with an ugly brace of light-depriving scaffolding, the list of recipes was ready. That was all good and dandy, but of course the real work was just about to begin.

My mission, should I choose to accept it — and considering I had signed a contract in blue ballpoint pen there seemed to be little doubt about that — was to bring these recipes to life by testing, tasting, and writing them up if I deemed them worthy of my readers’ taste buds.

Since my previous dayjob had taught me that any project looks easier on a spreadsheet, I drew one up with two tabs: the first one was labelled “To test”, listing my seventy-five recipes, and the other one “Tested”, which looked dauntingly empty at first.

In the to-test list, I flagged the recipes that I could cook for my weekday lunches, the ones that were more suitable for company, the ones that were easy (because they were already tried and true and I just needed to give them a final whirl to check quantities and cooking times), and the ones that required a little reflection and research (because I knew what I wanted to achieve, but didn’t quite know how yet). I also highlighted those recipes that had a high seasonal factor, with ingredients that made a fleeting appearance on market stalls — such as strawberries, nectarines, or young zucchini — to make sure I tested them in their right time.

I started to work my way through the list, choosing whichever recipe fitted the day’s mood, taking every opportunity to share the fruits of my labor and get outside opinions, striving to test three or four recipes a week, getting dangerously backlogged when other writing projects competed for my time, and then doubling my efforts to make up for it. We’ve been eating quite well I must say, and I thank my lucky stars that we have a dishwasher (the appliance, not the employee).

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[War Ration Stamps]

As if those two books my grandmother gave me weren’t fascinating enough, leafing through them unearthed other treasures, slipped between the pages over the years.

A yellowed advertisement for a bottled remedy called Le Contre-Coups de l’Abbé Perdrigeon (Abbot Perdrigeon’s back-kick), which will help you recover from heavy falls and blows, brain congestion, apoplexy, and will ease the pain from arthritis, rhumatisms, hypertension, and miscellaneous maladies de la cinquantaine, those ailments that hit you in your fifties.

An ugly promotional bookmark for the Larousse dictionary (“Le Larousse est toujours à la page”, the Larousse is always up-to-date). A torn little card from a rest home near Paris, Le Château de Grignon. A thin book with instructions on how to use a mysterious powdered binding agent called Zite, which purportedly replaced eggs, butter and oil in recipes. A scrap of paper on which my grandmother copied one of her (and my) favorite poems, Le Dormeur du Val.

And in an old envelope, faded strips of ration stamps from March and April 1946, allowing you to buy meat (90 grams per stamp) and fat (50 grams per stamp); the food rationing in France went on for four years after the end of World War II, until 1949.

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[My Recipes For Your Home]

When my grandmother gave me her superb edition of L’Art Culinaire Moderne, she also entrusted me with two much-loved little books, which had belonged to her mother before her.

Mes Recettes Pour Votre Ménage and Mes Recettes Pour Votre Dessert (“My recipes for your home” and “My recipes for your dessert”) are two books in a series of three that were written during World War I, and republished several times after that — I have the 9th edition. The third book was called Mes Recettes Pour Votre Cuisine (“My recipes for your cooking”) but I have just two torn pages from that one — the asparagus section if you must know. My grandmother explained that the author was a popular columnist for La Croix du Nord, a catholic newspaper from the North of France. Under the nom de plume Marmiton (kitchen boy), he answered reader’s questions and shared tips and advice — sort of a Dear Abby for the homemaker.

Mes Recettes Pour Votre Ménage begins with a section on canning and preserving food, with recipes for syrups, liqueur and jams. (In passing, I was very surprised to see that one of them calls for agar-agar, to be purchased from your phamacist.) The second section is called Economie Ménagère (home economics), and holds an enchanting miscellany of tips to take proper care of your home and yourself. How to clean silk stockings and lace, how to revive rancid butter, how to prevent and cure chilblain (engelures in French), how to get rid of wasps, ants or toads, how to make purple ink (that’s a good one: mix red ink with blue ink), how to clean bird wings to decorate your hat, how to salvage a wet fur coat: life-saving advice for every ménagère.

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It was Maxence’s birthday last week, and one of the things we did to mark the occasion — in addition to one glorious meal at Les Ambassadeurs — was to invite friends to join us and celebrate at a small cocktail bar that recently opened in our neighborhood, on an improbable little street we’d hardly ever noticed before. Maybe it didn’t even exist.

Moist with a fluffy crumb, this cake has a lovely and deep chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by little specks of toasted coconut.

The bar is trendy yet cosy, with a cushy banquette and plenty of stools to sit on, artwork on the walls (of course no one will settle for just being a bar anymore, they have to be a bar-cum-art gallery) and a long mirror to check your makeup in. And just as importantly, the music is soft enough you don’t need lipreading skills to communicate, and the drinks menu features classics and a few bartender specials, at prices that won’t have you file under Chapter 11.

A grand time was had by all, and around midnight, when we had slowly but surely taken over the place, I whipped out the box of coconut chocolate cake I had brought. I learned on previous occasions that attempting to cut a round cake in thirty slices on some small and sticky corner of a bar whilst holding up your end of an animated conversation, is tricky at best. And contrary to popular belief, the Champagne really doesn’t help. So this time, I baked the cake in a square pan and cut it in small servings just before we left: all I had to do then was pass the box around for everyone to take a piece.

This cake is a variation on the Gâteau au Chocolat Aérien, using less sugar, substituting fromage blanc (or plain yogurt) for some of the butter, and coconut flakes for part of the flour. Moist with a fluffy crumb, it has a lovely and light chocolate flavor, delectably tickled by the little specks of toasted coconut.

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