I have written about my grandmother on a few occasions in the past. She is my father’s mother and she lives not too far from me, which allows me to visit and bask in the glow of her tenderness and her general wisdom on all things life.

In the past few years, my ever-growing passion for food and cooking have definitely brought us closer: as a devoted cook herself, I can see how happy she is that a grandchild of hers would share that interest and be delighted to converse endlessly about tips and recipes and tricks of the trade.

Since she doesn’t speak English and has never used a computer — much less been on the Internet — it is somewhat difficult to explain what C&Z is, but I try (clippings help), she gets the general idea, and she’s very eager to help. Most recently, she decided to entrust me with one of her cooking bibles called L’Art Culinaire Moderne written by Henri-Paul Pellaprat, which she acquired in late 1946 as her handwritten ex-libris attests.

I am fascinated by vintage cookbooks and this one is no exception. With more than 700 pages, 3,500 recipes and 270 pages of illustrations, the author’s ambition is to establish the standards of la bonne table française et étrangère — French and foreign cuisine — for the use of the home cook (needless to say, this is a woman we’re talking about here).

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Brochettes d’agneau au thym

It’s strange how much more comfortable I am around vegetables than meat. Vegetables feel familiar, safe and easy to work with. I never run out of things to do with or to them, I know how to choose them, how they’re supposed to feel in your hand, how long they keep and how they react to various treatments and seasonings.

Meat, on the other hand, is a much more mysterious matter to me. Different breeds, different cuts, different levels of quality, tenderness and fat content, different methods of brining, curing, searing, roasting, grilling… and most of the time at the butcher shop, I have to rely on the little labels pricked into the meat to even know what animal it comes from.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy eating meat, but I have to push myself outside my comfort zone to cook with it.

I was waiting in line at the butcher’s the other day, trying to decide what I could get that looked tasty and interesting, when I spotted their pre-made lamb skewers, all colorful and pretty. I was tempted but I thought, where is the fun in ready-to-cook skewers? And since I had tomatoes, onions and bell peppers at home, I opted to just buy the meat, and make my own simple lamb and thyme skewers.

Assembling skewers is every bit as fun as stringing pearl necklaces, only you get to eat the tender, fragrant, caramelized meat afterwards — an even nicer reward for your efforts.

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Finally! It’s here! My birthday present and new best friend, my stupendous cast-iron cocotte by Staub!

My parents came by my apartment yesterday and were kind enough to lug it on the metro with them, after driving it all the way back from Les Vosges, snuggly bundled up in multiple layers of bubble-wrap.

31 centimeters in length (12”), weighing in at 6.3 kilograms (14 lbl) when it’s empty — I’ve been buffing up my arms with dumbbells in preparation for its arrival — it can hold 6 liters (6 qts) of something yummy and stewy and even-better-the-next-day to feed six happy friends.

And how could anyone resist a kitchen implement that so proudly brandishes its name? Ever thought how convenient that is, when you see it lying around somewhere in the kitchen and think, “hey what is this thing?”, and you get closer, read what’s on the lid, smack your forehead and exclaim, “but of course! it is la cocotte!”

The secret of the Staub cocotte, I am told, lies beneath the surface (am I scaring you yet?), on the underside of the lid, where all around the cocotte’s belly-button are tiny little pikes — the technical word I believe is picot — that gently invite the evaporated liquids to drip back down onto the food, thus preserving all the flavors and juices.

I feel a little like Calvin when he collects the points from his boxes of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs* to receive a propeller hat, with which he thinks he will be able to fly all over the world. I really believe my cocotte is a magic wand that will make whatever I cook so good my guests will go into tastebud shock and faint.

*Calvin describes these cereals as “tasty, lip-smacking, crunchy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside, and they don’t have a single natural ingredient or essential vitamin to get in the way of that rich, fudgy taste”. Quite the little food writer.

On this rainy August day (this is not the weather I signed up for! I want a refund!) I just had to share with you the perfectness of these here tomatoes, bought at our produce store on rue des Abbesses. They are everything you could possibly hope for in a tomato — stark red, heavy in your hand, thin-skinned and fleshy, fragrant, sweet and juicy.

This particular variety, with its plump ribs just begging to be sliced, is called Coeur de Boeuf — literally “beef heart”. And seeing that we also have tiny olive-shaped tomatoes that go by the name of Coeur de Pigeon (“pigeon heart”, but you figured that out), it sort of makes you wonder why produce marketers have to resort to carnivorous metaphores to sell their tomatoes, no?