A place, a space. A Journal.

Bienvenue.

Sitting around a table is one of my favourite places to be. Or maybe it is my favourite place to be, only just ahead of wandering a farmers’ market or in the kitchen fondling the warm cherries we just picked from the tree down the road. Or sitting on a rock by the sea with a peach and a bowl of prawns waiting to be peeled, drenching them in lemon and letting yourself get messy and sticky because a dive is only minutes, or seconds, away. But, the table. Growing up, a seat at the table was always a place of comfort and conversation, of familiarity and family. The country, the school and the market smells may have been different, but the rituals, the French-blue Le Creuset pot and the roast chicken were (mostly) always the same, from Suva to Canberra to Port Moresby to Washington D.C. And perhaps this is what gave me my love of food; eating it, yes, but also that each and every night, with a table and food came a time of joy, ease, laughter and connection, to my clan, to the new place we called home and eventually, to a new community of people.

Luckily, this great love turned into work, sometimes on the floors of restaurants, sometimes in the kitchens of them; some years at Australia’s Gourmet Traveller magazine; some years in studios and on sets for television or magazines; and recently, on the editing of a cookbook by two remarkable women. It’s always fun, it’s always delicious. And at the heart of it, always, is a group of brilliant people (and often slightly insane, in the best kind of way) coming together because of food.

Through it all, I’ve come to understand and firmly believe that food is about something far greater than the plate, piece or photograph in front of you. Food is nourishment and nurturing. It’s community, connection, celebration, conviviality, collaboration. It’s climatic and environmental, it’s cultural and it’s political; it’s about history and traditions. It’s fun, frivolous, flirtatious and it’s friendship; it’s pleasure, it’s beauty and it’s romance. How and what we cook, eat and buy is about something deep. And so, too, is how we write, photograph and talk about food. But at the same, it’s simply what brings us all to the table, what starts the conversation. The learning is endless, and the more I understand about the complex world of food, in our increasingly complex world, the more I understand how much I have yet to learn.

I suppose in large, it was through this great love of food, my relentless curiosity and a never-ending compulsion to understand growing, cooking and eating it, and the people behind it all, that I packed up Australian life and moved to France. To eat, to dance, to speak French, to pick wild flowers, yes, but largely to deepen my understanding of food in all its facets; to spend time with the people mindfully growing it and the people mindfully cooking it in our world today.

So, with my other compulsion — to document — I am creating this: a place, a space. A Journal to share stories of brilliant people doing brilliant and important things in food, from farms to kitchens to embroidery ateliers to studios — the farmers, the producers, the chefs and cooks, the writers, the photographers, the ceramicists, the artists, the creatives; to share the food I’m cooking, growing, eating or reading about; to share conversations I’m having, or books I’m reading, or songs I’m hearing from the cities I’m in or farms I’m on; or maybe, to simply share a story. And probably, to share an occasional snap of my wrinkly hands clutching the season’s first plump fig.

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Say, just recently, sitting at a table at Le Baratin in Paris with my visiting family, I excitedly swivelled in my chair towards the blackboard menu that moves about the dining room, always perched precariously in front of a table of hungry people. With squinting eyes, deciphering the French of the menu, my focus shifted from searching for the listing of the always-perfect sweetbread to the face of the man sitting at the table. It was Hugh Corcoran, an Irish writer and chef living in Paris, and probably the reason you may have heard about an always-buzzy wine bar in Paris called Delicatessen Place. He’s since left, but when I first landed in Paris last year, I spent three nights of my first week at this watering hole. On my first visit, the kitchen bench that Hugh stood behind was home to a grand, red Le Creuset pot holding a rabbit stew (likely inspired by Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed), a plate of poireaux vinaigrette, a plate of caponata and one of peperonata, a part of a wheel of tomme de chèvre and a few other plates of perfectly and simply-cooked vegetables, probably sitting in a bath of olive oil. But, back to the night at Le Baratin. At the news that Hugh is writing his first book, our conversation quickly turned to the use of language, and how political ones choice of words are. This is particularly true in Ireland, apparently. Hugh talked about staying away from the term ‘supermarket' and instead using ‘market’, ‘butcher’, ‘boulangerie’. This small detail being a gentle nudge towards sourcing more directly, and with a little more thought. Normalising language to perhaps shift behaviour. It’s about being more thoughtful about how we engage with food, whether we’re eating it or writing about it. A conversation that swirls around my mind, weeks on. The butter-doused sweetbread and those tiny potatoes, too.

On another nourishing encounter, a few weeks prior: during a few days in the Jura (Comté country), I found myself climbing the lush hills of Arbois, a village an hour south of Dijon, with my parents and sister, 18 goats and the warm, welcoming and wonderful Carmen, a goat’s cheese maker who spent many years working with Australia’s Holy Goat Cheese. We visited Carmen, Christophe and their goats at their home and sat around the table sipping coffee and getting to know one another. Christophe comes from a family who was long involved in the production of Comté, the region’s main cheese, that has now gained huge popularity across the world, resulting in its production becoming rather industrialised. I need to understand more about this, it’s very interesting, especially for someone who is quite partial to a slab of Comté, and I’m sure difficult for families who have produced the cheese for generations. We talked about the differences between producing and selling cheese here in France to Australia, about the flow of Carmen’s days now that she’s running her own cheese-making business (which includes milking her goats by hand twice a day), about the changes in temperature and rainfall, and about the process of making goat’s cheese, from milking to selling. Once the coffee pot was empty, we wandered up the hill to meet the kids (goats, not children) and found that the clever things had escaped into a paddock with grass more to their liking — they calmly followed Carmen and her whistle back over the fence, their neck bells jingling away. We left that afternoon with three perfectly-formed rounds of chèvre, each a different maturity, and ate them over the following days for picnic lunches in parks around Dijon with a whole new understanding and appreciation for a cheese we’d all eaten many a times before.

Always fun, always delicious. Always fascinating. And, despite food being the driver, it’s about something greater, feeding you in more ways than one.

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Food. It’s big, and there are endless stories and there is endless learning. And I want to share it all, like we’re sitting around a table, and to maybe, hopefully be part of bringing a little beauty, a little escape, a little taste, a little story on human possibility, a little thought to your day.

Alors. Thank you for landing here, at the bottom of my words. It means a lot. And it will be pure pure joy to keep sharing with you, each week(ish).

— Harriet