The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

The dollar was pretty strong throughout much of this, but I was shipping pounds and pounds of books, so the advance was gone kind of quickly. And there was just so much, you’d find these incredible, lavish books, and they were not going to be available in the next town. There were so many trips, I’d be over there for three of four weeks at a time, two or three times a year. You had to pay for the art, and the art was half of it. But it was new to me, I’d never heard of it.Ī: You run out of money so quickly. On the day that we mailed the manuscript, she asked, “How do you want to celebrate?” And I said, “You’d mentioned this place called Costco.” I know, it’s the antithesis of the artisans. Q: How did you celebrate the finish of the book?Ī: Marjorie is almost as obsessed with food shopping as I am. She’s going to help you, and I’ll pack the computer in a way that you can reconstruct it, and you go for as long as you need.” And I was dumbstruck. She wants you to move into the apartment in her basement. I’d just hit a wall, and I had a deadline, and at some point Frank said to me, “I’ve been on the phone with Marjorie. I actually finished the book in Denver, at my friend Marjorie’s house. Is that where you wrote the book?Ī: Yes, although I was back and forth to Italy a great deal. Q: In 1985, you moved from Brussels to St. I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ And I realized: Emilia-Romagna. If you’re on a desert island, a breeze has a whole new meaning. In an environment like that, you become attuned to different things. Not just learning about a dish, or a culture, but about a different way of being. about three to four years earlier than we’d planned, that’s when I realized that there was some way I wanted to mark, to memorialize, to record what this precious time had meant, and what I’d learned. When we were told we were going back to the U.S. Why there, and not elsewhere? That’s the underlying question in “The Splendid Table.”. But the intellectual piece was, this is the only region in Italy that produces three of the most iconic foods that come out of that country. Of course, the emotional piece came quickly.

It started the first time I went to the region as a journalist, and really got hooked. How much time did you invest in it?Ī: It was about 10 years. Q: “The Splendid Table” – the cookbook – was published in 1992. Here’s more from our conversation with Lynne Rossetto Kasper (find the first part here).

The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper