I love helping French women overcome their shame,” says Sophie Dudemaine, with a quick smile. “Knowing how to cook well is genetically attributed to French women, but the reality is that the ’60s upended all that; many women went to work—lots of daughters never had a mother or a grandmother to show them the ropes. There are no stupid questions in the kitchen. I’m still learning things all the time, too.”
For such a terrific cook, Dudemaine is unexpectedly modest, especially for someone who is not only the best-selling cookbook author in France but also the country’s best-loved television chef (on Allo Sophie, she makes house calls to home cooks in distress). Now, this bigger-than-life personality is on the brink of what could be her biggest success yet: the publication, this month, of Ducasse Made Simple: 100 Recipes from the Master Chef Simplified for the Home Cook, her first book to be translated into English.
Dudemaine said she never set out to do a book with Alain Ducasse. A chance encounter with an executive from his organization who was staying at La Maison de Sophie, her charming guesthouse in Normandy, put an idea in her head: Simplify the master’s recipes for the home cook. “After he left, I called his office and kept leaving messages,” she says. “One day, the phone rang and I heard a voice: ‘This is Alain Ducasse. It seems that you’ve been looking for me.’”
To be sure, Ducasse wasn’t exactly hitching up with a novice. Though Dudemaine’s culinary credentials were acquired through lots of experience and hard work, she was also born into a great French gastronomic dynasty—her family owned the restaurants in the Eiffel Tower and in Le Drugstore on the Champs Elysées. Still, she says her parents were not enthusiastic when she announced that she wanted to cook. She prevailed, though, and went on to work with famous French chefs such as André Daguin (her cousin, actually), Alain Dutournier, Martin Cantegrit, and Henri Faugeron. She catered for a few years after that, then stopped working altogether when she had her first child. “I loved being a mother,” she says, “but I was restless, so I tried to find something I could do at home.” She started baking English-style tea cakes and selling them in the local market in Boulougne, and was soon turning out 100 cakes a week in her small kitchen. After finding a pâtissier who let her work in his professional space, she baked up to 200 cakes a day, producing both sweet, such as prune-Armagnac, and savory, like Roquefort-and-walnut. The business continued to grow, and after a couple of magazine stories about her appeared, a publisher asked her to do a cookbook, Les Cakes de Sophie. “The rest,” she says, “is history.”
Working from Ducasse’s Grand Livre du Cuisine, his massive Escoffier-based tome, Dudemaine selected 100 recipes—a mix of starters, meat, fish, vegetables, and desserts—that she thought could be simplified enough to appeal to experienced amateurs without losing the Ducasse culinary imprint. After she edited the recipes, they were cross-tested back and forth between Dudemaine and chefs working in Ducasse’s nine different French restaurants. “We wanted to make these recipes democratic without vulgarizing them,” Dudemaine says.
I, too, put some of the recipes to the test and discovered that they were all easy to follow and just challenging enough to be rewarding. I also like that they were evenly divided between ones you might actually make for a weeknight supper (cream of white bean soup, or salmon fillets with tomato sauce) and more special-occasion dishes (garlic-roasted Cornish hens with cherry sauce, or hake with pine nut chutney). But my favorite part of the book was the vegetable recipes, which reflect Ducasse’s cooking style more than anything else.
Dudemaine says her next English-language cookbook will be about terrines, “since Americans love meatloaf, non?” She is also taking intensive English lessons with the idea of doing a show in the United States. All I can say is, watch out, Rachael Ray—Sophie’s on the way. Ducasse Made Simple by Sophie: 100 Recipes from the Master Chef Simplified For the Home Cook by Alain Ducasse and Sophie Dudemaine, Recipes adapted by Linda Danneberg (Les Editions d’Alain Ducasse, $35)
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