Rebekah Peppler Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe magazine.
For today's episode, I'm chatting with Rebekah Peppler, the writer, cookbook author, and food stylist. I know a lot of you dream about moving to Paris. I do too. Well, Rebekah did just that several years ago and changed her life in the process. She's written three beautiful books inspired by her new life, and the latest is called “Le Sud.” It's all about the south of France and it is a gorgeous book. Rebekah is here to tell us all about it and just what it took to make that big life leap. If you're looking to make a big change in your life, this episode might be just what you need today. Stay tuned for my chat with Rebekah.
Today's episode is presented by Kerrygold. Kerrygold is the iconic Irish brand famous for its beautiful cheese and butter made with milk from Irish grass-fed cows. I am a Kerrygold super fan and I had the good fortune to travel to Ireland with the Kerrygold team a few years ago. I met farmers, cheesemakers, the folks who inspect the butter and grade the cheese, and I even met the cows. It was an unforgettable trip and I loved getting to know more about the world of Kerrygold. I learned the differences between the Kerrygold cheeses and I'm going to share some of my favorites with you. There's Kerrygold Aged Cheddar, classic and rich. Kerrygold Reserve Cheddar is sharp and bold thanks to an extra year of aging. Kerrygold Dubliner is a robust aged cow's milk cheese that's nutty, sharp and sweet all at once. Then there's Kerrygold Skellig, which is tangy and crumbly with a butterscotch-like sweetness. And one more to shout out. Kerrygold Cashel Blue Farmhouse Cheese. It's a perfect blue in my book with that signature creaminess and tang. I love it for everything from snacking to salads. I highly recommend visiting Ireland, but you don't need a trip to Ireland to figure out your favorite Kerrygold cheese. Just a trip to your local supermarket, gourmet shop, or cheese shop. Visit kerrygoldusa.com to learn more about Kerrygold's iconic cheese varieties to browse recipes and to find a store near you.
This episode of Radio Cherry Bombe is supported by OpenTable. I'm excited to announce that we'll be back on the road later this spring and summer with OpenTable for our Sit With Us Community Dinner Series, which highlights amazing female chefs and restaurateurs and the Cherry Bombe and OpenTable networks. It's been such a treat meeting so many of you at our dinners across the country. Our next series of Sit With US Dinners will take place in Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans and Portland Oregon. We'll be announcing the restaurants and dates of the Sit With Us Dinners soon. So stay tuned. Keep an eye on our Instagram and make sure you have the OpenTable app downloaded.
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Rebekah Peppler, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Rebekah Peppler:
I'm so happy to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
Congratulations on your book because it is truly beautiful and you can tell how much love went into it.
Rebekah Peppler:
Love and sleepless nights.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell people how you wound up in Paris because this all starts with you moving to Paris.
Rebekah Peppler:
Absolutely, yes. So back in 2018, I was living in New York working as a food stylist and started thinking about splitting time between New York and somewhere else. I really wanted to write more. I was feeling like I was going to get stuck on that path, and I wanted to make sure that I was kind of on the path I always wanted to be on, which was writing books. Paris kind of fell a little bit into my lap. It wasn't really the long-term game plan, and yet here I am, long-term many years later.
But I was having coffee with a friend and I mentioned to her thinking about splitting time between New York and somewhere else, maybe Paris is the place, and she immediately was like, "Oh my gosh, I have a friend that is looking to switch apartments for a summer." I took her up on it and cut to summertime in Paris, and to be honest, I didn't love it.
I didn't speak the language. I didn't have any friends. I was just trying to sort my life and figure out how to become a writer. A couple weeks in, I was like, "Something switched." I felt this connection with the city that I hadn't felt before and I thought maybe this is the moment that I can dig in and maybe start splitting time between New York and Paris. I'll go back to New York, get the Visa stuff in order. I love a list, so I'll do all the things that check off all the items on the list and then I'll come back to Paris in a year.
A week after that, I walked into a perfume shop in the Marais and fell in love with a woman for the first time. That sped up my move to France, went back to New York about a week or so after that and booked a one-way ticket to Paris and started splitting time between Paris and New York. She's wonderful. She's actually the illustrator of the book and is pictured in the book. We are not together anymore. We have a very fun getting together and falling apart romantically story.
Kerry Diamond:
When you spoke of Jubilee, you used the most beautiful French term to describe what happened when you first met her.
Rebekah Peppler:
I like to shorten the version of the story, but I'll give you a little bit of a longer one. So basically I walked into this perfume shop in the Marais and saw this beautiful woman behind the counter and they call it in French like “coup de coeur,” like a hit to the heart really. And it was just this immediate realization that something had changed or something had come to light that I knew nothing about myself before.
Kerry Diamond:
So romantic.
Rebekah Peppler:
Very romantic. Our story was very romantic in all the ways good and bad.
Kerry Diamond:
You're going back and forth at this point.
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes. So basically I get a one-way ticket. I start splitting my time. I'm working towards my visa at the same time, which is not necessarily the way you should be doing it, but here we are.
Kerry Diamond:
How should you be doing it? Because I know there are going to be some people who are like, "Oh, I want to move to Paris. I want to hear how Rebekah did it."
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, it's actually a question that I can't answer because it's so unique to each person. I was on one visa and then I switched to another visa and now I'm on a third visa, passport talent visa.
Kerry Diamond:
Are they hard to get?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. That one is the hardest to get. It's pretty exclusive. It's the one that I went for when I first started applying for the Visa, got all the way through the process, got it. Then showed up in Paris with it, ready to get let in, went to my appointment at the prefecture and they were like, "Oh, this isn't valid. We don't have this visa for your class anymore. You have to go back to New York, restart your process and apply for this other visa." I cried a lot in the first year and a half to three years of moving there because that's how long it takes really. It depends.
When my partner came in, she came out on a visitor visa and it was really easy to get, but it's also because I had learned the hard way and we hired a guy. Now, I hire people to do that work. I did everything on my own. I messed up a ton of stuff, really got myself into holes and then had to dredge myself out of them.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you not hire the guy because you didn't know you could hire a guy?
Rebekah Peppler:
I knew I could hire a guy, but I also didn't have a lot of money at that point in time and I'm a pretty stubborn person and I like to do everything myself, so it takes a lot of mistakes for me to get to the point where I realize that somebody with skills and knowledge, and experience doing the thing should probably be doing the thing.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you confident you could make a living?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes. I am a freelancer, so I don't think that the move to France was necessarily a fear of mine that I was going to have to start a French company and be working in a French office. That was never the goal. The goal has always been to work for myself and I still work for myself. Haven't had to step into a French office yet. The French office is my dining room table. I think I was more fearful less of making a living because I was already on a career path in New York, more so of switching careers into writing full-time, which is always a scary step when you're switching over from one thing to the other, but I think even scarier when you're doing it in a different country and also do something you really, really love. It's wonderful and terrifying. You don't want to mess it up. You don't want to have to go back and do something you love less. That was more the fear, but fortunately it worked out.
Kerry Diamond:
In New York, you were a food stylist. How did you become a food stylist?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. That's a fun story too. I went to university in Wisconsin and really wanted to write about food. I studied journalism news editorial, and I knew that hard news was not my thing. So I knew I wanted to write about food, but I didn't know how necessarily to get into the publications that I wanted to write for. So I decided I needed some knowledge and I applied for pastry school at the French Culinary Institute, which is now ICE.
In Soho, I did night school. I worked during the day. I worked at Dean and Deluca. The program had these lovely internship programs and I got slotted into food television show. I was working on the production side of things, but the food stylist was always nearby and whenever I had a moment, I tiptoed in to see what that job was all about because at that point no one was really talking about food styling as a career, so I did that.
I worked a little bit in the kitchen, the EP on the show, and then when I graduated, Lauren Dean, the executive producer on that show, hired me to work with her and launch two shows for what was just launching, “Cooking Channel.” So I worked with Lauren for quite a bit. We were at the CBS offices. Two shows for “Cooking Channel” and she called me into our office one day. I was a researcher and she said, "Rebekah, I don't have the budget for it, but I need a food stylist. I think you'd be really good at this job. I know you don't know anything about it, so you can make mistakes and I will take them with a grain of salt."
Kerry Diamond:
Be indulgent.
Rebekah Peppler:
Exactly. You can ask me questions. You can learn.
Kerry Diamond:
Were there things from your childhood or high school where you were creative in that way?
Rebekah Peppler:
Absolutely. I always had a creative eye. I was always taking photos, never became a photographer, but I think especially with food styling, knowing what the food looks like from behind the camera when I'm looking at it so I don't have to step behind the camera or look at the screen has been really helpful for me, especially when I was starting out. But there's a through line that you don't see when you're in it, muddling through hoping for the best and working hard and making mistakes along the way, but I think often the mistakes you make lead you to the thing you're supposed to be doing.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you art direct all your books?
Rebekah Peppler:
I do. Yes. I haven't lost the control angle. I work with Joann Pai as the photographer for all three books, and she's phenomenal. I love working with her. She's a dear friend, excellent collaborator. She has a lot of ideas too, and she's also very open to collaboration and discussion, and allows me to get in there and dictate what I'm seeing and then she'll take it and run with it. One of the shots, the one with two backs, it's right opposite the dedication page. That's actually my partner and my first girlfriend, Eris, the woman I saw in the perfume shop.
That was the first photo I thought of when I thought of the suit even before I wrote a single word on the page, that image is what I wanted to create. Cut to years later, Joanne and I in the rocks of Marseilles under noon, sun sweating, and I'm on a rock 50 feet away and she's trying to shout to me in the wind and we're getting all of these shots together and we're trying to call each other to hear each other and make it work. The inspiration often looks a lot easier than the process to get to it.
Kerry Diamond:
It looks so effortless.
Rebekah Peppler:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
And beautiful and timeless.
Rebekah Peppler:
Thank you. A lot of effort goes into that effortlessness.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us why food. You're a creative person you wanted to write. You could have drifted in any number of directions.
Rebekah Peppler:
I could have. There's so many why food moments, but I think the root of it is my mom is a librarian. We had books on books, on books, on books in our house and I would say quite a good portion of them were cookbooks and I was taught, you hear people say, "I read cookbooks like books. I didn't really differentiate them when I was younger." And so that's what I hope for with my books too is that they are able to be sat down and read. But for me, food is just a lens to get the story on the page.
Especially for Le Sud, when I wanted to tell this kind of story of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in a larger way. I love food. It's my favorite part of the day, multiple times a day. It's what I talk about while I'm eating to get to the next one. I know I'm talking to someone that does the exact same thing.
Kerry Diamond:
And it's probably why Paris was at the top of your list.
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. Well, actually Paris was at the top of the list because I went to French pastry school and I was deciding between the French Culinary Institute in New York and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and I chose New York first.
Kerry Diamond:
All right. So you're in Paris. At what point do you think I can do a cookbook slash lifestyle book? Because your books aren't pure cookbooks.
Rebekah Peppler:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
But they're sort of lifestyle cookbooks. What made you think, "Oh, I could do a book based on this experience?"
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. Well, so I moved to Paris. Eris and I broke up pretty quickly after I moved to Paris. It's a spectacular fun story, which I'll tell at a later date. I'm trying to write it down as all writers are trying to write down the big moments in their life, but I'm living in Paris and I am trying to meet friends and I realize that there's this aperitif culture of meeting for a drink before dinner, after work, separating the workday and the evening.
That also has this component to it so you can do it quickly and then go on with the rest of your night or you can continue and linger and have that become your evening. For me, as an introvert, that was very seductive that I could go in, I could meet somebody new and have a drink, have a snack, and then say I had a dinner and then go home and recover.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you have friends in Paris?
Rebekah Peppler:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
So you really went over there, didn't know anybody? Didn't know the language?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. Yes, I did. When I think back to the person that I was when I did that, I am very proud of her. I hope I would be able to do it now, but it was a very perfect moment in my life to be able to do that.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what you were drinking and eating during these quick little get-togethers?
Rebekah Peppler:
Exactly. Basically, the concept of Aperol is you can come in and you can have often low alcohol by a volume drink, so a glass of wine, a Kir Royale, which is going to be crème de cassis and champagne or sparkling wine, any one of these really classic aperitif spirits and bottles, sous, Lillet, Pernod Ricard, Pastis. Depending on the season, you're going to have Pastis in the summer.
A beer. There's this beautiful bottle called Biere Picon, which is like a bitter orange liqueur that you can actually add to beer. So there's all these kind of historic you can have, or you can just have a lovely glass of wine and usually a little bite, potato chips, olives, salpicon, something little that's not going to stop your appetite, but rather open it up.
Kerry Diamond:
I was in Paris last June. I was shocked how many people were at the cafes outside drinking beer? How many young people?
Rebekah Peppler:
You can have half beer, half lemonade. You can have Biere Picon. You can have any of these options, but I will say that in the last few years, the kind of craft beer scene has really exploded in Paris too. So there's a lot more options.
Kerry Diamond:
So that's the inspiration for “Apéritif,” your first book?
Rebekah Peppler:
That was the inspiration for “Apéritif,” yes, the first book. I'm having these experiences and it's opening up both friendships and also the culture of France in a way that I just hadn't really experienced as an American. I realized at this time I'm there to start writing more. So my brain is already kind of in that mode of what can I write about, what feels authentic and what do I want to write about and what do I want to learn more about?
Kerry Diamond:
Were you scared because French culture is so specific and if you look at TikTok and Instagram right now, it's filled with... Well, probably because my algorithm, I love French things in Paris. It's all like, "Don't say this in French. Don't do this in France. Do this in Paris and not this."
Rebekah Peppler:
No, I wasn't afraid. I think I was just really open to learning, and so I emailed my agent. I'm not seeing this book anywhere. I think the most recent book on French apéritif had been written 10 years prior to that. I wanted to do a modern kind of young person's take on what Aperol in French looks like right now. The history has to come into it, but what does it also look like today?
Kerry Diamond:
Had you done a lot of recipe development at that point?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes. So I was a freelancer food stylist, but I was also freelance writing and recipe development and testing and going into test kitchens. I was at BA, I was at Food & Wine. I was kind of all over the place and had my kind of fingers in all of these different pots. I do “Apéritif.” It goes well. The next book becomes “À Table” which basically takes the entire French table from Aperol all the way to digestif, so I get to add desserts in there, which is still my thing, but I get to do the full table. It's not just drinks and snacks. It's drinks and snacks and mains and sides and dessert and drinks at the end.
Kerry Diamond:
I love that you say the full table. “À Table” is a gorgeous book.
Rebekah Peppler:
Thank you. I love that book. I will say too, “Apéritif” definitely is a cookbook, but it's smaller. We decided to do it as a bar cart size. You can kind of slip it onto your bar cart, put it by your bottles. It doesn't take up too much space. So “À Table” is the same size as Le Sud. So it felt for me at least, the first real cookbook that I wrote, and it's very special. We shot a lot of it in Paris.
We did shoot actually some of it in the south of France and then some of it in Burgundy as well. Same with “Apéritif.” We shot up in Normandy kind of all over the city. I'm not a studio stylist. I love to be out. I love to make life harder for myself, but I also think that it adds this transportive evocative quality.
Kerry Diamond:
Why do you think people had such a big reaction to “À Table?”
Rebekah Peppler:
The book came out in 2021, so it was cusp pandemic. I didn't do a in-person tour for that book like for Le Sud and like I did for “Apéritif.” It was all online, which worked out well for me. I was still very sick with long COVID so I wouldn't have been able to kind of handle it energetically. But I think people connected to “À Table” because it was this cusp moment where we were all so ready to start gathering around a table again and start cooking for other people.
The book is so centered around the home and the table that it felt like the right time for it to come out, even though at the time felt really hard.
Kerry Diamond:
How are you doing now? How's your health?
Rebekah Peppler:
It's better. Maybe not a hundred percent, but it's not the same. I definitely have a different body coming out of it than I went into it with and have had to learn that body anew, which has been challenging and also really gratifying. But I can do so much more now. I fly here to New York. I can have this conversation with you. I'll be able to go out to dinner tonight. I'm going to be tired, but at least I'm not going to be wrecked for two days after. I can't imagine doing this even a year and a half, two years ago.
Kerry Diamond:
How did the experience change you?
Rebekah Peppler:
The positive things that came out of it, were learning, still learning this, but learning how to rest, truly rest and truly recover because at that point in time, setting boundaries became a really big thing. Also, “Le Sud” came into my life, the south of France, not the book, came into my life in a deeper way during that time. I got sick in March 2020, so it was the early pandemic. Right at the beginning I was in Paris. I think I had maybe six steps a day.
I would just lay in bed, crawl to the bathroom and crawl back to bed. There was no walking possible. And I was alone too, so there wasn't a lot of cooking happening. Right? Months and months later, I'm still really sick. I'm really weak. I have all these health problems, heart palpitations and pain and fatigue at a level that I had never experienced in my life. All my doctors were saying, "Your tests are coming back clean. Your lungs look fine."
At that point, I couldn't even take a deep breath. It's anxiety. I got all of that gaslighting to the point where I finally was like, "Okay. There's not enough research that's been done yet. I'm the only one that can be in my body and I'm the only one I can trust at this point to heal myself." And so what heals me. And the answer for me has been and always is the sea. So I made a game plan. I was like, "I'm going to take myself to all the seas I can get to in France. I'm going to go first to Provence and then I was going to go to Biarritz, and then I was... If that didn't work, I was going to go up to Normandy and Brittany."
I went down to a city called La Ciota which is this lovely little port town, and I set myself up. It was a seven-minute walk from the beach. I saved all my energy, walked to the beach once a day, sat at the beach, until I had enough energy to walk back, and that was my entire day. I wasn't able to work. I couldn't really look at my phone or at screens. And then at that moment in time, the other really wonderful thing that the pandemic brought me came into my life, which is my partner now.
She and I started talking while I was in the south. I ended up flying to Los Angeles a couple months later and bringing her back to Paris, and she moved probably I think eight months after that.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh. I have so many follow-up questions.
Rebekah Peppler:
I know.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Where do I start? When you were having these conversations with the doctors, were there any moments where you doubted yourself?
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh, absolutely. Often, especially in the beginning, because this is something I had never experienced before. I was the only one in my life that was experiencing it. There weren't online communities that were really... There were a few that had been started, but they were terrifying to read. You'd go on and it was just like... I mean, it was real. It was terrifying to write also, but I was just hearing really scary stuff and it wasn't helping me heal. It was bringing me into a darker, scarier, more alone place.
And so I had to stay away from those at the time and go inside and see what worked for my healing. I don't know how other people experienced COVID, but I felt the virus move through my body, and so I would change symptoms every week or every two weeks. Sometimes they would only last a couple days. And I think the scariest moment was maybe six weeks in, had what they called COVID toe, which turns out was just stabbing pain in your toes that I had no idea where it was coming from at the time.
And I had all these things. But then I started to feel it move from my brain, part of my body down into my chest, and you could feel like a weight on your chest. This crazy fizzy feeling in my body. I could actually feel the virus moving onto the next part. And that was the part that was scariest to me because I could feel it moving into my lungs, and that was when basically my doctor was like, "Do not go to the hospital unless you have to. It is triage. You don't want to be there unless you need to be there."
And so she was videoing with me and basically showed me how I had to breathe in order to call an ambulance to go to the hospital. And that was the moment when I started to feel it kind of settle in my chest and it felt like something was kind of sitting on me.
Kerry Diamond:
When did the idea for “Le Sud” come to you?
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh, there were so many moments. So Sarah, my agent and I were talking around the time when À Table was being released and she was like, what's next? You have any thoughts, any ideas? And my books come out in pretty short order. I like to have a project, and so I usually am already thinking about what the next one. Sometimes to my detriment, I probably should rest a little bit more, but I love having a big thing to sink my teeth into and really start researching again. What gets you excited? What are you interested in? Is it France? Are you thinking of expanding outside of France?
I started going to the south of France when I first moved to Paris at 18. And so I got that kind of early on Vacance energy of the South, which is so special. But then I started making friends and I had friends move to the south of France and open restaurants all across the south. So I started going at different times of the year to visit them, and then I started to holiday at different times of the year because really a magical place.
Kerry Diamond:
People must be like, how does she have so much time? How can you afford to go there? It's a lot easier to travel around France than here.
Rebekah Peppler:
It's so much easier.
Kerry Diamond:
And you have a lot more vacation time.
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, I work for myself, so I am in charge of my vacation time. The flip side is that is you never stop working when you're a freelancer, so you go on vacation and you're just always on. The train from my house in Paris to Marseilles is a three-hour train. I think it's probably three and a half hours door to door. It's just really easy to get there. The things that I like to do in France are quite affordable, right? Eating and drinking, the produce, the wine, the spirits, the lemonade, everything is just, it's easier to live a really beautiful life.
Kerry Diamond:
Are you shocked by the prices here in America?
Rebekah Peppler:
It's, very, yes, wild.
Kerry Diamond:
Compared to Paris and the rest of France?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. It's crazy to look at a menu and see a glass at the same price as a bottle and probably the same bottle that you can get in France. So I drink a lot less wine here than I do when I'm at home. And we do bring a couple special bottles with us each time to share the bottles that you can't get in the States to some dear friends. The other thing we bring is butter because-
Kerry Diamond:
Wait, you bring butter from France?
Rebekah Peppler:
We do bring.
Kerry Diamond:
We have good butter here.
Rebekah Peppler:
We do, but you have not had the butter that I bring. It's like a culture.
Kerry Diamond:
Are you allowed to bring butter here?
Rebekah Peppler:
You are.
Kerry Diamond:
You are?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. So cheese is a different category with their adjacent, and so butterwise, I go to my place, they vacuum seal it for me, which is new, and I'm really into it. I throw it in my freezer for a couple nights and then I put it in a bag and hope for the best.
Kerry Diamond:
We’ll be right back with today's guest. Some of you know this, but Cherry Bombe is more than a podcast. We also have a beautiful print magazine that's dedicated to all things women and food. It's thick and printed on lush paper and filled with gorgeous photos, recipes, and stories. I'm the editor of the magazine and truly love working on every issue. If you are not a subscriber, I would love for you to subscribe. Subscribers get all four annual issues as well as free shipping. Head to cherrybombe.com to snag your subscription. If you already subscribe, thank you. That means a lot to me. You can also purchase back issues on our website or pick up a copy of Cherry Bombe at your favorite magazine shop, newsstand or culinary store. Check out our list of stockists on cherrybombe.com.
Let's talk about this book.
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you decide what recipes would go in “Le Sud?”
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh, it was hard. What I wanted for “Le Sud” for the recipes was to tell the whole story of the region, because Le Sud Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur extends all the way from the border of Italy all the way through the Camargue region. There's pasta on this side and rice on the other side, and then a slew of other things in the middle to very oversimplify this.
I wanted the recipes to be indicative of the region to tell that story, but also then tell the story of the region now and my experience personally in the region. So there's a lot of personal anecdotes, a lot of storytelling coming through that has that personal lens to it in addition to the history and the food culture.
Choosing the recipes was like putting a puzzle together of really classics. You have to have Ratatouille, which happens to be one of my favorite recipes in the world. So that was not hard to include. And then you want to have a roast chicken, but I want it to be my roast chicken, bring something that felt very indicative of the area and indicative of the life that I've lived in that area.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about your Ratatouille.
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, my Ratatouille is quite traditional. I am a strong believer in cooking all the vegetables separately in just copious amounts of olive oil and then bringing them together. When I was working on Apéritif, the first book, my partner at the time, and I had spent an entire summer cooking versions of Ratatouille for each other and grading each other basically on it. It's very competitive. And she won. She absolutely won and she changed my mind about how Ratatouille should be cooked.
But when you cook it all together in one pan, even if all the vegetables are cut perfectly and they're all really peak season produce, they lose a bit of themselves. The eggplant is a little bit less eggplant like and they submerge.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm listening to say this and I'm like, "That makes all the sense in the world." And I've always cooked them all together.
Rebekah Peppler:
And when you cook them separately, it takes a lot more time.
Kerry Diamond:
A lot more dishes to wash.
Rebekah Peppler:
A lot more dishes. But-
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have them all going at the same time?
Rebekah Peppler:
I don't because I don't like washing dishes and I don't have a dishwasher and my sink is small. So I do one pan at a time, and if I'm lucky enough to be on a stove top that has room for two pans at a time, then I'll do two pans at a time.
Kerry Diamond:
So this is a very indulgent, I'm going to say it like you say it, very indulgent Ratatouille... I feel like I say it all in one syllable.
Rebekah Peppler:
I mean, my French accent is also terrible, so any native French speakers are going to correct me.
Kerry Diamond:
Ratatouille.
Rebekah Peppler:
I say Ratatouille.
Kerry Diamond:
Ratatouille. I should be able to say it because it's also my favorite movie.
Rebekah Peppler:
When you pay attention to each vegetable separately and give it its due time, you cook it to the place where it needs to be and then you can combine them all together. It creates this layered experience. And so while it takes more time, it's worth it. And also Ratatouille is one of those dishes that you should make a day in advance. I like to make it the day before I'm having people over bang it out in that day. And then I have the beginning of the entire day that I'm actually having people in my house to do anything else that I want or make anything I want to make.
Kerry Diamond:
What else would you include if you were serving Ratatouille to people. What else would be part of the menu?
Rebekah Peppler:
So Ratatouille is a really interesting dish because you can serve it for a lot of different occasions. You can have it for lunch with a side salad and maybe some baguette, or you can have it as a starter and then move on to your main course, your meats, your fish, etc. I personally like to serve it as the main course. I am not a vegetarian, but I eat very vegetable heavy. It is one of my favorite dishes in the world.
So if I can put a big green salad on the table, start with a beautiful Aperol and maybe some extra snacks to start so you're not going in crazy, crazy hungry, and then a gorgeous baguette. My technique is that I slice it on the bias, but I don't slice all the way through. So you get all the slices, but you keep the baguette as its long form and then people can rip off their pieces. There's this luxurious feeling of ripping off the end of a baguette, but then you're like grabbing the baguette and you're manhandling-
Kerry Diamond:
Manhandling.
Rebekah Peppler:
... Everybody else's portion of the baguette. And then you're ripping off too much or too little and you never kind of get it right. And that evens out the playing field for everyone. And then you can have a beautiful dessert to end and no one has filled up on one thing. And that's my favorite way to eat.
Kerry Diamond:
Roast chicken.
Rebekah Peppler:
Roast chicken.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about your roast chicken.
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, so there are a couple roast chicken recipes in the book. I don't have a favorite. So there's a market day roast chicken, which is kind of the classic. When you go to the market, you see the spinning Poulet Roti. It's a magical experience.
Kerry Diamond:
Dripping on the potatoes.
Rebekah Peppler:
Dripping on the potatoes. So what I did was spatchcock my chicken and put the potatoes underneath and cooked it together. And so you're not getting that rotation, but you are getting all of that fat going right into where you want it, which is into your mouth. But then I also have a recipe for pastis chicken. I didn't really have much expectation for it. I like using spirits in my dishes as well, especially you buy a whole bottle of pastis.
There's a gorgeous cocktail recipe at the start of the book, which uses pastis. And if you're a pastis drinker, that's great because then you can keep drinking it. And so I wanted to be able to use it in other ways.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you invent pastis chicken?
Rebekah Peppler:
I have not had pastis chicken before, though I cannot claim to have invented. I'm sure someone else has done it. I had not seen it before.
Kerry Diamond:
And tell folks about pastis. Some might be new to pastis.
Rebekah Peppler:
So pastis is the drink that you drink at the beginning of a meal. It's got a really anise kind of fennel flavor depending on the pastis that you buy. Different marks have different flavor profiles and different things that kind of come forward, but it's traditionally drunk in Marseilles by the sea in the summertime. It's a drink that you pour along and you sip for longer and you can keep diluting it with water.
So basically, it's this clear liquid that comes in the bottle, and then there's this really fun chemical interaction that happens when you add water to it where it becomes this cloudy, thicker drink. Some people would say you should never serve it over ice. Some people say you always serve it over ice. A lot of contradictions in the French language and in French food culture, I personally like to add ice later on.
I like my first glass with just really chilled cold water. But pastis is meant to linger, and you're meant to linger over it. And if you're lingering over something in the summertime, what happens? It becomes the temperature it is outside. And so I like to have a little bit of ice to add as I'm going. Same with rosé. So pastis chicken is chicken thighs and then you're going to combine this with fennel bulb. So I basically took the inspiration from pastis, which has this anise fennel flavor, and I just added as much fennel as possible into the dish.
Kerry Diamond:
I love fennel.
Rebekah Peppler:
I love fennel too. There's a fennel salad in the book.
Kerry Diamond:
A cooked fennel.
Rebekah Peppler:
I know. So there are two different things. So the fennel salad in the book is this crunchy, bright, fresh, beautiful thing to eat alongside other things. And then when you cook fennel, it becomes sweet and caramelized and soft and almost saucy in itself. Clearly I'm a fennel lover, but this dish I was really happy with the result because you get all of this sweet soft fennel, these crispy chicken thighs that you can throw on the table and absolutely keep a bread on the table with it and start dipping.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you marinate the chicken?
Rebekah Peppler:
You don't marinate the chicken thighs, but I do pat them dry and season them with salt and pepper. And if you can do that the night before, that's even better because that really allows the seasoning to get all the way through.
Kerry Diamond:
At what point do you introduce the pastis?
Rebekah Peppler:
During the cooking. It acts to get that fond off the bottom of the brown pieces that you want back in your dish.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's talk about the pasta dishes in there because I love the names of the dishes.
Rebekah Peppler:
Pasta in Provence, it's not something that you necessarily think of. Italy's thing, right? But Italy and France share a border and there's a lot of overlap. When you go to Menton, the end city of France, right before Italy starts, you get first of all citrus, and then you get this pasta Verona to the side. There's really just a lot of crossing over. Two of the pasta recipes in the book, there are four, one of them is the pasta I crave every time. I'm near the sea. And the other is the pasta to make when you're not.
Kerry Diamond:
What's the difference between the two?
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, fresh seafood and tinned seafood. And if you know me at all, you know how much I love tins and I always kind of have them in the pantry. I'll start with a fresh seafood, which is this gorgeous clam pasta that I make with marinated lemons, thinly sliced lemons.
Kerry Diamond:
A marinated lemon. You're just putting it in olive oil?
Rebekah Peppler:
You're putting it in olive oil. I add garlic.
Kerry Diamond:
For how long?
Rebekah Peppler:
I basically warm it up. So I get the garlic golden, warm the oil up, and then I pour it on top of the lemon. So you're like almost flash cooking them, but they're just getting soft-
Kerry Diamond:
Changing my life with every piece of advice here.
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh my gosh.
Kerry Diamond:
Between the Ratatouille and the marinated lemons, I'm all about this.
Rebekah Peppler:
And you can leave them in the fridge for a month. They're a real game changer. They sit right next to my preserved lemons in the same fridge. So the pasta, it's got shallots, it's got garlic, it's got these lemons, it has fresh lemon zest. I use a little pinch of saffron in there and then small clams with it. And so it has this pasta alle vongle vibe to it.
Kerry Diamond:
And you had some breadcrumbs, if I remember correctly?
Rebekah Peppler:
I had breadcrumbs.
Kerry Diamond:
Why the breadcrumbs?
Rebekah Peppler:
It was less a inspiration from south of France and more just texture on top of texture, on top of flavor, on top of flavor. And when you flavor these breadcrumbs, I think it just adds all these layers. The way to make a recipe that is easy to make feel it's a little more complex is to add those layers in. It's a great pasta. I've had it without it. It's delicious. But that extra little like je ne sais quoi is like just a thing.
Kerry Diamond:
I was just going to say something, something. But je ne sais quoi makes that sound so much nicer.
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. So the pasta you make when you're not by the sea.
Rebekah Peppler:
So I live in Paris. Sadly, I just live in the south of France, although it's a topic of conversation in our house, very regular. When I'm not near the sea, this is the one that I make. So this one, it has anchovies, it has tin sardines. We found these beautiful tins while we were in the south of smoke sardines that I hadn't seen a lot of, but this is actually my partner's favorite dish in the book, I feel like. She asks for it regularly and she's very specific about her pasta, so it's a win for me.
Kerry Diamond:
And this is a very pantry friendly pasta?
Rebekah Peppler:
Very much so. Yep, absolutely. I mean, you're going to want to have fresh lemons in the house, but I think you should always have fresh lemons in the house. So that feels like a pantry item to me already.
Kerry Diamond:
Because you also preserved lemon in this.
Rebekah Peppler:
Yes, absolutely. I do preserve lemons.
Kerry Diamond:
That's double lemon.
Rebekah Peppler:
Double lemon. I have a preserved lemon recipe in the book. It's for preserved Meyer lemons if you have them. I like preserved Meyer lemons more than the standard Eureka lemon, simply because the skins are so thin and you get just a different texture and a sweeter flavor. But you can use regular lemons in that recipe as well. And then you use fresh lemons juice as well. So it's adding those layers of flavor. You're getting acidity in a bunch of different ways. You're getting salt in a bunch of different ways. Try not to salt the dish until after you've added all the anchovies and the preserved lemons.
Kerry Diamond:
You have capers.
Rebekah Peppler:
And capers.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Do you salt the pasta water a little less?
Rebekah Peppler:
No. I wouldn't go heavy-handed on the salt for your pasta water, but you still want to get that flavor into the pasta itself, but I wouldn't salt the dish at all until you taste it. I am a big believer in having salt on every table. I think everyone has a different kind of tolerance for salt, and mine is very high.
Kerry Diamond:
What is the herb situation?
Rebekah Peppler:
It's parsley. It's parsley.
Kerry Diamond:
Just parsley?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah. This one is just parsley. There's a lot of recipes with herbs in the book, including an herb salad there, which is wonderful. But I wanted to make this really pantry friendly parsley is that go-to herb. You either have a pot on your windowsill or out in your garden, or you can easily get it at any store.
Kerry Diamond:
And it lasts longer in your fridge.
Rebekah Peppler:
Absolutely.
Kerry Diamond:
You've given us so many amazing ideas for things to make, and I think we're all profiling you. It's like if you want to get to Rebekah's heart, butter, fennel.
Rebekah Peppler:
Tin fish.
Kerry Diamond:
Tin fish.
Rebekah Peppler:
Exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
And the ocean.
Rebekah Peppler:
Maybe some wine in there too.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Let's do a little speed round. What was your favorite childhood snack?
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh, oh my gosh. So I wasn't a lettuce eater as a child, as some children aren't, but I love carrots. We would shred carrots and cheddar cheese and mix them together. Turns out excellent. I think about it all the time. There's a really classic French carrot frappe salad, which is just shredded carrots with a vinaigrette, and every time I eat it, I'm taken back to my childhood and then missing the cheese component of it.
Kerry Diamond:
Shredded carrot and shredded cheddar?
Rebekah Peppler:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
How interesting.
Rebekah Peppler:
Just like grated on a box grater or whatever you have, and it's like-
Kerry Diamond:
And just straight up?
Rebekah Peppler:
It was just my mom's way of getting me to eat my vegetables.
Kerry Diamond:
I feel like there's some fun recipe, you can do some kind of souffle or some kind of carrot cheddar bake.
Rebekah Peppler:
Carrot souffle, yes.
Kerry Diamond:
I felt like that just needed to be baked somehow or cooked somehow.
Rebekah Peppler:
Right?
Kerry Diamond:
Interesting. Okay.
Rebekah Peppler:
Every once in a while when I have a rapé, I'll put goat cheese on it and it gets us closer to it.
Kerry Diamond:
What's your favorite food film?
Rebekah Peppler:
I mean to talk about storytelling within a story, within a story and getting these little vignettes and having it all weave together sexy and fun and beautiful and weird and all the things.
Kerry Diamond:
We didn't get to talk about your travels through Asia recently. But what's left on your travel list? Where would you like to go next?
Rebekah Peppler:
Well, yes, so we were just in Korea and Japan for two weeks right before book tour, which I don't know if I would recommend doing right before you go on a two and a half month book tour, but definitely right back at the top of my list. Japan had always been on there. I fell deeply in love with Seoul, and I'm really excited to go back.
Kerry Diamond:
Are you streaming anything right now? You've been traveling so much, maybe not.
Rebekah Peppler:
I have been traveling so much. I rewatched “Killing Eve” because my partner hadn't seen it and I kind of forced that on her, and then we got really into it.
Kerry Diamond:
What's your favorite kitchen implement?
Rebekah Peppler:
Oh, my scale. Truly, I think a scale is the thing you need in your kitchen more than anything else. I'm coming at it from a pastry chef's perspective. I use it every day.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you have a motto or a mantra that you live by?
Rebekah Peppler:
I don't have one that I necessarily live by, but I do have one that I'm trying to implement into my life right now, which is to let go. I hold onto things. I focus sometimes too much on one thing. Been slowly practicing the art of letting go.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. Last question. If you had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why?
Rebekah Peppler:
I think about this question a lot, and I feel very lucky that my answer is actually someone I know and love and it's Melissa Clark. She's such a dear friend and I would love to be stuck on a desert island with her. And there's so few people in my life that I trust fully to cook for me.
Kerry Diamond:
I think we'd all love that reality show, right? You and Melissa Clark on a desert island.
Rebekah Peppler:
Me too. If she's cooking for me, all I have to do is sit there, sign me up.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, Rebekah, congratulations on your third beautiful book.
Rebekah Peppler:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and leave a rating and review. Let me know what you think about the show and who you'd like me to interview on a future episode. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Elizabeth Vogt. Our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu, and our content operations manager is Londyn Crenshaw. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.