3 minute read
Food + Drink
food+drink Fat of the Land
For chef and food writer François de Mélogue, cooking is about stories
BY SUZANNE PODHAIZER
In the back of a freezer at his St. Albans home, nestled near trays of homemade moussaka and dozens of containers of garden tomato sauce, François de Mélogue keeps tubs containing six pounds of “super fat.” For more than eight years, de Mélogue, 58, has been saving the flavorful cooking fat from his duck confit, occasionally mixing in other fats such as wellseasoned pork lard. After he uses and cools the mixture, it goes back in the freezer until he needs it again. And again.
De Mélogue’s super fat has a story — a history made of up many meals — and that suits him well. A writer, photographer and erstwhile founding chef at the acclaimed Provençal restaurant Pili Pili in Chicago, de Mélogue owns more than 2,000 cookbooks, most of which are historical and French. He’s busy writing three of his own.
Today, de Mélogue earns his baguettes and beurre as a freelance writer and owner of VT Snapshot, taking photographs for architecture firms, real estate agencies and other small Vermont companies. What binds all of his work together is a passion for weaving tales using light, color, words and food.
Some of de Mélogue’s culinary essays — such as “How a Rabbit Taught Me to Cook,” about the time that he was tricked into eating his childhood pet — appear on Medium’s Heated site, which was originally curated by Mark Bittman.
While Bittman’s cookbook persona is that of “the minimalist,” however, de Mélogue leans more toward “maximalist,” embracing an aesthetic characterized by abundance and vibrancy. His kitchen is neat and spacious, but it features a dispenser used solely for pastis, a clear, pale green, anise-flavored liqueur that turns opaque and milky when mixed with a few drops of water. Nearby is an antique mezzaluna, a curved Italian tool for chopping herbs, resting on a thick butcher block hollowed from use.
Through a sliding door, visitors find a trim yard and an everexpanding garden, bursting with French and Italian heirloom tomatoes, radicchio, and alliums such as leeks and shallots. Deep-red piment d’espelette peppers cling to plants that are rapidly turning brown. Then there are the zukes: “Last year, we had 150 consecutive meals with zucchini,”
de Mélogue said with a Heirloom tomatoes chuckle. This year, his 11-year-old son insisted that he grow fewer squash plants. Most days, de Mélogue serves up restaurantworthy midday meals for his family. His wife, Lisa, an executive assistant for a tech company, leaves her home office at lunchtime to dine on an array of salads, thin chickpea-flour pancakes known as socca and whatever else her husband has dreamed up. After she returns to work, de Mélogue might spend the afternoon developing recipes and editing photographs. Spending time in de Mélogue’s airy kitchen, watching him stand at a spacious rolling island shelling just-harvested cranberry beans and chopping tomatoes for soupe au pistou, is like being in the audience at a reading. His stories, threaded with pithy phrases, have a practiced quality, and his delight in them is evident.
Orating as he wields a chef knife — a family heirloom, he said, not of particularly high quality — de Mélogue discussed his appreciation for French recipes. But he doesn’t think less of any other cuisine. “Food is perfect. There is no such thing as imperfection,” he declared. “If it tastes good, it tastes good.”
That’s a tenet he learned from his mother, a native of Marseille.
Born in Chicago to French immigrants in 1964, de Mélogue grew up assisting his mother in the pursuit of fine ingredients. She would put him on her bicycle and ride
FAT OF THE LAND » P.42
