(This piece was first published in the writers' blog, Writer Unboxed, www.writerunboxed.com, and then in my collection of short pieces on writing, By the Book: Tips of the Trade for writers. I'm re-publishing it here as a bit of a retrospective on this blog.)
Food For Thought
In an idle moment a
couple of years ago, when I was between novels and feeling at
something of a loose end, I finally got around to doing something
I'd been thinking about for a while: start my own blog on food and
all sorts of culinary matters, with a French-Australian slant. I
wanted it to be much more than a mere collection of recipes or
restaurant reviews or anything like that. This was to be a space for
memoir, for musings, for dipping into literary culinary classics, for
showcasing the seasons in our very productive vegetable garden and
orchard, for culinary travel, for giving tips, shortcuts, and yes,
recipes, my own, my family's, and those I'd gleaned from all kinds of
weird and wonderful sources. And so A la mode frangourou was born.
Being from a French
background, I imbibed with my mother's milk the notion that food was
not only necessary to life, but an expression of culture, a sensual
pleasure, and a real art. For centuries, great cooks and chefs have
been ennobled by French kings and fêted by
French society, and great writers have written about it, but it's not
just an upper-class thing. The whole culture of food, from the
growing of it to the preparation and partaking of meals is part of
the glue that holds French society together. One of the reasons why
French food is so good is that just about everyone cares, from rich
to poor and in between, peasant to nobleman, factory worker to
banker, people consider it a serious matter worthy of the highest
respect. And the amazing regional diversity of the country makes for
a gloriously diverse cuisine as well. But my other country is
Australia, the country that has become my home, and though in the
past Australian cuisine left a lot to be desired, today it's vibrant,
exciting, imaginative and fresh. There's still a good long way to go
as regards some things, especially the quality of vegetables
available in supermarkets which in contrast to French supermarkets
focus on size and unbruisability rather than taste. But thanks not
only to the injection of immigrant cultures such as Greek, Italian,
Lebanese and Asian, but also such programs as Master Chef and so on,
Australians of all backgrounds have discovered the joys of good food
in greater and greater numbers. And that's also spurred on a bigger
and bigger interest in food writing as well, and now the shelves are
groaning with cookbooks and musings on food, newspapers and magazines
have regular columns on it, and of course there's been a huge
proliferation of food blogs.
I'd written food
pieces myself before I started the blog. In fact my very first
professional published piece of work ever was on Basque cooking in
the now-defunct Vogue Living magazine, published when I was 22. My
mother's family is part Basque and many's the summer we'd spent in
the Basque country, so my piece was part memoir, part travel, part
recipes. After that whilst writing short stories and novels(most of
which featured at least some descriptions of meals, much as I'd
carefully noted down my childhood meals in my diary since I was
little!) I also dashed off articles for newspapers on various aspects
of French food, on markets, on regional cooking of all sorts, and I
sold some of my own original recipes to women's magazines. So writing
about it wasn't new to me, and it seemed a natural step to create the
blog. And why 'a la mode frangourou'? Well, 'a la mode' can mean both
'in the style of' and 'fashionable' in French, and 'frangourou' (or
'frangaroo' if you're leaning more to English) is my own coined word
for the hybrid I am, a mixture of French and Australian, evoking
Australia's most well-known animal.
It's been a lot of
fun, and a learning process too. One thing I learned was that you get
a lot more traction from a food blog than any other kind I've ever
created for myself(Writer Unboxed is different!) Though my blog
doesn't have a lot of official 'followers', the stat counter I
installed showed me that this is multiplied sometimes up to ten-fold
or more when you're looking at the number of visitors to the site.
And what's more, even though of course I'm writing the blog for free,
within just a few months, thanks directly to the blog, I scored a
dream gig: I was asked to be one of the paid reviewers for an annual
restaurant guidebook published by one of Australia's biggest media
organisations. Pretty cool!
I'd like to pass on
a few tips here if you're thinking of creating your own food/cooking
blog:
1/Have a definite
and original focus. Of course this is so in all blogging, but it is
especially so with a food blog. What is it about your cooking or
outlook on food that really sets it apart from other people's? It
doesn't have to be rooted in a cultural thing, like mine, but should
be personally quirky in some way.
2/Range widely
within your focus but don't get too distracted
3/Don't blog too
often: once or twice a week is enough(I did heaps more at the
beginning, but have now learned my lesson.) People need time to
digest what you've written, as it were, and to try out your tips and
recipes
4/Make sure your
recipes work! I only ever write up ones I've tried myself and know
are goers.
5/Think about the
beauty of your words and images as well. Your food blog should be a
feast for the eyes and ears and the imagination as well as the
salivary glands!
