Suggested summer reading
Ongoing restrictions mean that for many of us travel is restricted to that which we can do in our imaginations. To that end, I compiled a list for shepherd.com of the five best books guaranteed to take you to the Perigord through wine, food, and history.
The full post can be found by clicking on this link.
The full post can be found by clicking on this link.
New Bruno podcast with "The Joys of Binge Reading"
You can find the podcast by clicking on this link.
Bruno's Garden Cookbook
The next Bruno cookbook, called Bruno's Garden Cookbook, is now out in Germany. We have high hopes for an English-language version; details will be available here as soon as I have them.
Bruno wine selection
Germany's Vin et Voitures is selling three different selections of Bruno wines via their website, available by clicking on this link. The website is in German, but the names of the grapes are familiarly French.
***Bruno wins 'World's Best Book on French Cuisine'***
The Bruno cookbook has been named 'World's Best Book on French Cuisine' at the Gourmand International awards, which were held this year in Yantai, China, home of China's booming new wine industry.
This is a great honour and the credit goes to my wife and co-author, Julia, who is the real cook in the family; to my brilliant German photographer, Klaus Einwanger; to book designer Kobi Benezri (from Israel) and to the glorious production by my Swiss publishing house, Diogenes; and my editor at Diogenes, Anna von Planta.
It says something about globalisation that a book on French cuisine, written by a Brit of Scottish origin who lives in the Perigord and published in German by a Swiss publisher, wins an international prize awarded in China.
In my acceptance speech, after thanking all the above, I added:
'It is wonderful that some four hundred people have gathered here from all over the world, in Japanese and African and Lapland and Azerbaijani and Guatemalan national dress, to name but those in the first few rows, to celebrate our common love for good food and wine. It reinforces my long-held belief that there is nothing like a fine meal to bring people together.'
The Bruno cookbook joins illustrious company - other winners this year include Michel Roux, Ollie Dabbous, Mario Batali, and Le Cordon Bleu series.
Getting to know Bruno
US crime blog The Weekly Lizard has just published an interview they conducted with me that digs deep into the character of Bruno. The full interview has since been taken offline, but here are a few choice excerpts:
Bruno is a peaceful, gentle fellow who likes to cook for his friends and is aching to settle down in St. Denis. And he aches to settle down with and be faithful to a woman who wants to bear his children and help share his vegetable garden, his horse and ducks and hens, and his reluctance to have a TV set in his house.
In the interview, you can learn more about the backstory that made Bruno the man he is:
Bruno, an ill-educated orphan, found himself drawn to the first educated and sophisticated woman he’d ever known. She gets him to read and changes his life.
Bruno is a peaceful, gentle fellow who likes to cook for his friends and is aching to settle down in St. Denis. And he aches to settle down with and be faithful to a woman who wants to bear his children and help share his vegetable garden, his horse and ducks and hens, and his reluctance to have a TV set in his house.
In the interview, you can learn more about the backstory that made Bruno the man he is:
Bruno, an ill-educated orphan, found himself drawn to the first educated and sophisticated woman he’d ever known. She gets him to read and changes his life.
Who is Bruno Courreges?
Bruno cooks, he hunts, he builds his own house and grows his own food. He organizes the parades and festivities and fireworks displays and keeps order in his fictional home town of St Denis. A pillar of the local tennis and rugby clubs, he teaches sports to the local schoolchildren.
Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off Brussels. The country folk of the Perigord have been making their foie gras and their cheeses and sausages for centuries before the EU was ever heard of, and see no reason to bow to its rules and regulations now.
Bruno also catches criminals.
But Bruno applies his own sense of justice in doing so, which sometimes put him at odds with the local Gendarmes, with the professional detectives of the Police Nationale, and with the politicians in distant Paris.
And much to the frustration of those matrons of St Denis with unmarried daughters, for whom he is the town’s most eligible and charming bachelor, Bruno remains stubbornly and contentedly single. He is, however, a great romantic with a profound if somewhat wary appreciation of the fair sex. He fell deeply and tragically in love in once, in his time in the French Army where he served and was wounded in the peacekeeping force sent to Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo. The incident is recounted in the first novel, ‘Bruno Chief of Police.’
Bruno never knew his father, and his unmarried mother left him as a baby in a basket in a church. Christened Benoit, the blessed, by the priest who found him and sent him to a church orphanage, he decided to call himself Bruno as soon as he was old enough to insist upon it. When his mother died and left a note explaining where she had left her baby, he was taken from the orphanage by cousins in humble circumstances and raised with their large family in the town of Bergerac. At the age of 15, he left to join the Army’s Youth Battalion. On his 18th birthday, he signed up for 12 years with the combat engineers, a period which ended while he was convalescing from his wounds.
Bruno reports to the long-time Mayor of St Denis, Gerard Mangin, a wily old politician who once worked as a political secretary to the future President of France Jacques Chirac. The Mayor’s political connections, his time at the European Commission as Chirac’s eyes and ears in Brussels and his brief stint as a member of the French Senate, always proved useful. Above all, they have ensured a steady supply of grants and funds from Brussels and Paris that ensure St Denis prospers when so many small towns of rural France have withered.
Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off Brussels. The country folk of the Perigord have been making their foie gras and their cheeses and sausages for centuries before the EU was ever heard of, and see no reason to bow to its rules and regulations now.
Bruno also catches criminals.
But Bruno applies his own sense of justice in doing so, which sometimes put him at odds with the local Gendarmes, with the professional detectives of the Police Nationale, and with the politicians in distant Paris.
And much to the frustration of those matrons of St Denis with unmarried daughters, for whom he is the town’s most eligible and charming bachelor, Bruno remains stubbornly and contentedly single. He is, however, a great romantic with a profound if somewhat wary appreciation of the fair sex. He fell deeply and tragically in love in once, in his time in the French Army where he served and was wounded in the peacekeeping force sent to Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo. The incident is recounted in the first novel, ‘Bruno Chief of Police.’
Bruno never knew his father, and his unmarried mother left him as a baby in a basket in a church. Christened Benoit, the blessed, by the priest who found him and sent him to a church orphanage, he decided to call himself Bruno as soon as he was old enough to insist upon it. When his mother died and left a note explaining where she had left her baby, he was taken from the orphanage by cousins in humble circumstances and raised with their large family in the town of Bergerac. At the age of 15, he left to join the Army’s Youth Battalion. On his 18th birthday, he signed up for 12 years with the combat engineers, a period which ended while he was convalescing from his wounds.
Bruno reports to the long-time Mayor of St Denis, Gerard Mangin, a wily old politician who once worked as a political secretary to the future President of France Jacques Chirac. The Mayor’s political connections, his time at the European Commission as Chirac’s eyes and ears in Brussels and his brief stint as a member of the French Senate, always proved useful. Above all, they have ensured a steady supply of grants and funds from Brussels and Paris that ensure St Denis prospers when so many small towns of rural France have withered.
