Frustrated at stay-at-home confinement, France’s celebrity chefs are cooking up an antidote to the gloomy days of pandemic and quarantine with the help of TV and social networks.
“Today it’s not chef Lignac talking, it’s Cyril who, like all French people, has to do his shopping near where he lives,” said Cyril Lignac, the country’s gastronomic media star.
On prime-time TV, he sports a T-shirt to prepare dinner from his home on his new show Everyone in the Kitchen.
The show focuses on everyday cooking and the travails of the public in a time of national emergency.
The coronavirus crisis has enabled chefs “to play a different tune in the kitchen,” he told reporters. “It’s very interesting to improve people’s daily lives by cooking just from the cupboard and the fridge.”
The show, which opened on France’s M6 channel on Tuesday last week, is scheduled to last only as long as the public’s confinement in their own homes.
Lignac said he wants to help his compatriots by proving how easy, good and well-priced it can be to cook at home.
Other chefs are following a similar path.
“There are no tricks,” said Paris chef Amandine Chaignot during an online class explaining how to prepare asparagus. “I have a tiny kitchen, if I can do it, you can too.”
Chaignot might be more used to serving up prestigious banquets, but she was whipping up a dish with one pot — asparagus and eggs bubbling away before runny yolks are mixed with butter and poured over chopped-up white stalks.
Her video was made for mates who often eat in restaurants, she said.
“You can miss so much if you tell yourself: ‘I don’t know how to do the simplest of things,’” she told reporters. “It has to be easy, quick and not involve a lot of equipment or ingredients you cannot source.”
In the Mediterranean city of Marseille, two-star Michelin gourmet Alexandre Mazzia described himself as a “dad” who does homework, sport and cooking with his children.
In a rare moment of downtime, he posted on social media some recipes adapted to a time of quarantine.
They include a chocolate cake that is “made like an omelette” with no need to whip up egg whites or sift flour, and a green Puy lentil salad that swaps kumquat for green apple and cashews for any nut.
“I received 350 text messages asking me what to do with Puy lentils,” the award-winning chef said.
Triple Michelin-star chef Christophe Bacquie has also taken to social media to help the nation to get cooking.
He wants to put Mediterranean tastes on people’s plates — endives in orange, honey and rosemary, lemon and olive oil cake.
“It was my wife who convinced me to go on Instagram,” he said.
With the markets closed, shoppers are unlikely to find such things as a John Dory fish to cook with asparagus, he said.
Instead, go for a traditional dish, such as potato galette without eggs or flour, Bacquie said.
“We use what we have,” he said. “Everyone is confined, we have a duty to lead by example.”
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