by Scott Ferguson
Patricia Wells is best known as a teacher, cookbook author, and cook, but not as a chef. In today's world of food and cooking, to not be a chef and to be well known is rather a rarity. Add to that the fact that Wells writes almost exclusively about French food rather than Italian food, which is the current international favorite, and you can appreciate how special her status is. But Patricia Wells has written about French food—and her love for it, France, and the French—for more than 20 years, and has seen her fame grow. That’s remarkable, but if you’ve read her books, you realize that once you’ve started one, you’ll just keep going.
According to Wells, it all started in January 1980, when she and her husband, Walter, quit their jobs at The New York Times and moved to Paris. He was to be deputy editor of the International Herald Tribune, she a Paris-based freelance writer. They were scheduled to be there two years, but, nearly thirty years later, they’re still there.
In Paris, with plenty of time on her hands, Wells began exploring, testing and tasting for what she refers to as her "Ph.D. in Food." And explore she did: in the markets, where all sorts of game, seafood, and other exotic ingredients tempted her; and later in the restaurants, both posh and everyday, where she found a wealth of temptations for her palate and her pen. She was soon writing restaurant reviews for the International Herald Tribune and sending regular reports back to the The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and Food & Wine. It is important to remember that her most famous book is not really a cookbook at all (although it does contain recipes): it is The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris. This collection of reviews of Paris restaurants, cafes, patisseries, bakeries, markets, and wine merchants was first published in 1983 and went through four editions. The last edition was issued in 1999, and it is now lamentably out of print. But, for almost 20 years, that book introduced Paris-bound travelers to both Paris food and to Patricia Wells.
The time she spent in restaurants, and especially in restaurant kitchens, led Wells to explore the world of French cooking for the home cook. And that naturally led to her first cookbook, Bistro Cooking, which was published in 1989 and won the 1990 IACP/Seagram Food & Beverage Book Award for European cookbooks. A first award for a first book was a strong indicator of great things to come. And, as her subsequent books were to prove, the judges made no mistake in their judgment: The Provence Cookbook won the James Beard Award for International Cookbooks in 2005.
A key element of Wells' success is the fact that she specializes in cooking you can really do at home. There are no endless lists of exotic ingredients unavailable to American cooks, and no recipes referring to other recipes, which can add up to many, many steps for the preparation of what should be a simple home dinner. Her recipe for Lemon Chicken in The Paris Cookbook is one of my favorites. It requires four ingredients (plus salt and pepper) and takes about one hour in the oven. And for an everyday roast chicken that is tasty enough for company, it would be hard to beat this.
If you are a cookbook reader, you’ll also find that in most cases Wells has written an introductory note to each recipe. After a while, these, and her excellent introductions to her books, begin to add up to a kind of autobiography. For the truly dedicated, she also conducts cooking classes, which she spilts between Paris and her home in Provence.
Her most recent book, Vegetable Harvest, continues this string of successes. In an acknowledgement to current dietary thinking, vegetables take center stage, but this is not a cookbook of denial. With recipes such as Spicy Butternut Squash Soup; or Chicken Breasts with Mint, Capers, and White Wine, this book—as with all her others—is one to explore and enjoy.
Books by Patricia Wells:
Vegetable Harvest
The Provence Cookbook
The Paris Cookbook
Patricia Wells at Home in Provence
Patricia Wells’ Trattoria
Bistro Cooking
Simply French
L’Atelier of Joel Robuchon
The Food Lover’s Guide to France
The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris
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