The Joys of Binge Reading

French American author Samantha Vérant delivers perfectly seasoned fiction that combines her passions in life – France, food and love. And her latest book, The Spice Master at Bistro Exotique, set in Paris, is a romantic and culinary delight.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and in Binge Reading this week, Samantha talks about moving to France and marrying a sexy French rocket scientist she met in 1989, but ignored for 20 years, and writing about that adventure in bestselling memoirs and three entertaining romcoms accompanied by lots of mouth-watering recipes.

As usual, we’ve got some great giveaways – details for those and all of Samantha’s contact details – she’s happy to answer book club questions if you’re interested – in the show notes for this episode on the website, thejoysofbingereading.com.

And remember, if you like the show, do recommend us to other people. Leave us a review so others will hear about the show too. There’s nothing better than word of mouth recommendations,

This week’s Giveaway

Ten free copies of Poisoned Legacy in Audio to give away to ten lucky readers/listeners

FREE OFFER LIMITED TO FIRST TEN LISTENERS

If audio is your first choice for reading these days, jump in and enjoy a “First” – Book #1 In Of Gold & Blood in Audio, free to download from Bookfunnel

This is a new feature in Bookfunnel and the first time I have used it.

go to poisoned legacy audio book link

If you are one of the lucky winners, then give us your feedback when you’ve listened – we’d love to hear what you think..

Your feedback at jenny@jennywheeler.biz

And here is the link again in case the button isn’t working properly

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/hb6gjajdcf

Links to topics discussed in the show

Michelin Stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide

Dominque Crenn” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Crenn

Her restaurant – Atelier Crenn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atelier_Crenn

Gabrielle Hamilton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Hamilton_(chef)

The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux; http://www.samanthaverant.com/2020/01/the-secret-french-recipes-of-sophie.html

Sophie Valroux’s Paris Stars: http://www.samanthaverant.com/p/sophie-valrouxs-paris-stars.htmlie

Seven Letters From Paris: http://www.samanthaverant.com/2020/01/seven-letters-from-paris.html

How To Make A French Family: http://www.samanthaverant.com/2020/01/how-to-make-french-family.html

Charles’s Coconut Ice Cream Recipes Link http://www.samanthaverant.com/2022/12/happy-holidays-and-easy-recipe-from.html

Marcel Proust and the Madeleine Effect: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/07/more-than-cake-unravelling-the-mysteries-of-proust-s-madeleine

Remembrance Of Things Past Marcel Proust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time

Recipes for Wild boar and Pot Au Feu De La Mer:

http://www.gourmetfly.com/Cookingwildboar.html

https://www-lespommesdeterre-com.translate.goog/recette/pot-au-feu-de-la-mer/?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

Matt Haig The Midnight Library: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52578297-the-midnight-library

Forever Hold Your Peace: Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721248/forever-hold-your-peace-by-liz-fenton-and-lisa-steinke/

A Man Called Ove, Frederik Backman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18774964-a-man-called-ove

Charlotte’s Web, E. B. Wright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte%27s_Web

Phylloxera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera

The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Garden

Roald Dahl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl

The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe, C S Lewis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion,_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe

Namratha Prasant: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tmullen/2020/07/13/how-this-woman-from-india-created-a-french-wine-label/?sh=12610f5a74c5

Where to find Samantha Vérant Online

Website: http://www.samanthaverant.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSamanthaVerant

Instagram: @authorsamanthaverant

Email: slverant@gmail.com

But now here’s our show.

Introducing author Samantha Verant Author Samantha Vérant on The Joys of Binge Reading podcast

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Samantha, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Samantha Vérant: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me. I’m here in France, in southwestern France, and you’re way over there in New Zealand.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right, and we’ve got to be honest, this is our second attempt at this.

We had a disastrous attempt a couple of nights ago where for some reason we got a double recording of our voices. So this time it’s going to be trouble free.

We’re talking today about your latest book, The Spice Master at Bistro Exotique, your most recent fiction.

It’s a fantastic story of a French American chef in Paris, setting up a new restaurant, but all of your books show passion for two things, France and food, and I wondered which came first?

Samantha Vérant: Well, honestly, food came first. When I was nine years old, I was ripping out recipes from Bon Appetite and Gourmet Magazine.

And I think my pièce de résistance came when I was eleven and I made a 20 pound Sundae Pie with chocolate leaves for decoration.

I molded them from actual leaves. It’s a big joke in my family because my father was like, ‘this pie weighs so much,’ but I’ve always been drawn to the kitchen and cooking.

And then when I moved to France! Hello French recipes.

Jenny Wheeler: That sounds gorgeous. Now the fiction that you’ve written, the heroines, are all female chefs.

You write about food and love, but it’s not as if they just fall into men’s arms. You give them very strong individual stories. They’re following their dreams, and in the case of all of your heroines so far, they’re chasing after Michelin stars.

Talk a bit about the Michelin star’s status in the food industry and why it’s so important for women to get them.

Women and Michelin stars…

Samantha Vérant: Well, it’s really important because they’ve been sideswiped by Michelin, and you’ll find many men have the stars and it’s a very competitive, arena for women to fight for. But there are more and more women coming out that, are starred or making their mark in the culinary world.

So it’s really important to get rid of the misogyny in the kitchen and move forward with that.

Jenny Wheeler: Who was the first woman to get a Michelin star?

Samantha Vérant: Ooh, the first woman? Ooh, good question. I’m not sure, but I know chefs like Dominique Crenn. She recently received a star, and she is a wonderful chef. She’s in San Francisco, she’s French.

Jenny Wheeler: Has she got her own restaurant?

Samantha Vérant : Yeah, it’s Atelier Crenn and she’s a very go-for-the-gusto kind of chef. Then there’s Gabrielle Hamilton, and she’s really well known. Little by little women are getting known as female chefs – and they should just be called chefs – they are making their mark, so that’s awesome.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I noticed that in Bistro Exotique, you make a point of giving your heroine, the title Chef, and I gather sometimes it’s difficult for women to get the respect of being called Chef in the kitchen, although it’s readily given to men. Do I understand that right?

Just call her ‘Chef’ if she’s the boss

Samantha Vérant I think any leader in a kitchen, they should be called Chef. ‘Yes, chef. Oui chef.’

It is a sign of respect. She had interns in the kitchen and they looked to the male lead in the book. They were calling him Chef and he said, no, that title’s reserved for Sophie.

And that was a major sign of his respect for her.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. That was a great moment in the book, actually. You have two fiction books before this, and two books of memoir.

We’ll talk about the memoir a little later because that was where you first started, but the first faction was. The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux That was her first one, and then Sophie Valroux’s Paris Stars was the second.

They were, as you would imagine, the same heroine in a continuing story. Sophie begins with a disastrous experience in a New York restaurant, partly set up by this misogyny that you’ve been referring to, and she believes that her cooking career is over, so she escapes to France. Tell us a bit about the background for those stories.

Samantha Vérant: The background for The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux?

Initially I really wanted to write a book that takes place in the area that I live in, which is southwestern France. So the area it takes place in is about an hour away from my home. And the misogyny in the kitchen and there’s always an American, because I’m American who is moving or working, or living in France in my books because it’s something I very much relate to.

The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux

So the brief synopsis is she is set up by an ex-boyfriend.

She’s actually a sous chef at a New York restaurant, and she is blamed for the loss of a Michelin star, which is devastating in the world. She didn’t do it.

Her grandmother has a chateau in Southwestern France, and Sophie arrives to France to lick her wounds and to have a new start in life but what she’s not expecting is the Chateau has two restaurants and she’s expected to lead one of them, after her terrible downfall.

So the story is about her getting her morale back together. She is whiny and cringey in the beginning, but little by little after having such a failure and feeling devastated.

She finds her heart and her way back into the kitchen, mainly through her grandmother’s recipes.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And even in Bistro Exotique you talk about the gaining of self-confidence as well as love through her work. This feeling of having some purpose in life is very important to your main characters, isn’t it?

Samantha Vérant: I think following your dreams is really important. Even when you’re feeling down, you have to persevere, move forward. and not let life slap you down. That’s important.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. You provided a generous number of recipes for readers in all of these books and in Bistro Exotique it’s a fantastic looking ice cream recipe, Charles’s Coconut Ice Cream.

Readers can get the recipe from your website if they want to. We’ll have links for it in the shownotes for this episode.

Do you get a lot of good feedback from people? Do they make some of your suggestions?

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Samantha Vérant : Oh yeah, they do. And I think it’s an added bonus to have recipes in the book, especially since I’m describing the food.

And what if somebody who’s oh my God, that sounds so great, and they want to make it.

And so before writing out the recipes, of course, I test them a lot and I have my two French critics here, or three actually my French family.

And so they eat really well I’m testing.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Yes. You mentioned your French family rather provocatively on your website you say that you quotes married a sexy French rocket scientists that you met in 1989 brackets, (but ignored for 20 years.)

Now you can’t leave a teaser like that without giving us a little bit of background story there

Samantha Vérant: I met my French husband at a cafe in Paris in 1989. I was 19, he was 26, and I was with my best friend Tracy, who is also, it’s in the memoir.

This story’s in Seven Letters From Paris and he wrote me, after our brief rendezvous, he wrote me seven love letters, and I didn’t write him back until 20 years later.

I’m now married to him. our 13th wedding anniversary is May 7th.

Seven Letter From Paris

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic. And when you wrote back, give the readers a little bit of explanation about how you wrote back. You actually were just trying to apologize a little bit, weren’t you?

Samantha Vérant: Yes, it was only supposed to be an apology. I was going through a divorce and packing up my things, and I found his letters, and I said, why didn’t I ever write him back?

So I just wrote him, ‘I’m so sorry. I just wanted to let you know, I’ve always kept your letters and they meant a lot to me at the time, but at the time I was too young to connect with them.’

They were very romantic. He was ready for maybe a relationship and I was finishing up university. I was young. And at first, he didn’t know who I was, he thought Samantha? Could this be a trap to go to a porno site?

So he didn’t respond to me at all. And finally, it clicked in his head and he was like ‘Oh yeah. I remember the American girl,’ and he wrote me back and one thing led to another.

We started emailing. He was going through a divorce as well, and we were emailing and emails turned to Skyping and FaceTiming, and eventually I went to France to meet up with him again.

Jenny Wheeler: Now, as you say, that story is told in Seven Letters From Paris and some of the excerpts, I think almost the total content of the letters, is in the book.

And then you followed it up with How To Make A French family. So you wrote these two memoirs, which related very directly to your life before you started on the fiction.

Did you find that transition from memoir to fiction difficult and did it change your writing process when you did make that change?

Writing proces – from ‘pantser’ to ‘plotter’

Samantha Vérant: I don’t think it really changed the writing process because even with memoir, you need a beginning, a middle, an end.

You need conflict, character growth. But also, I was writing fiction before the memoirs.

I started writing young adult in middle grade and then my story began happening to me. So I actually started writing Seven Letters during this whole process. And the funny thing was I didn’t have the ending yet.

Jenny Wheeler: And with your books, is that the same? Do you know the ending at the beginning?

Samantha Vérant: Now I do because if you’re working with an agent, which I did not have for Seven Letters, I actually sold the book myself to Sourcebooks who accepted unsolicited manuscripts at that time.

I don’t know if they still do. They might, I have no idea, but, For Secret French Recipes, I was what is called ‘pantser.’

I was flying by the seat of my pants. There were many plot points that drastically changed.

And then moving forward for the next book, the follow up book for the proposal, I had to do a full outline for the publisher. So now my writing style has changed from plotter or pantster to plotter and in between.

So I am a ‘planster,’ somebody that plots and flies by the seat of their pants.

How To Make A French Family

Jenny Wheeler: With that second book your two children in the family were probably getting to the age where they’re a little bit sensitive about their public profiles. How did you resolve that? Did you discuss it with them beforehand that you were going to put them in the book? Did you use their real names?

Samantha Vérant: I used their real names and Jen Luc’s real name. So when you Google my husband, I come up. They, no, they just basically request no photos. There are few and far between photos of them online. They didn’t mind being in the book. It’s memoir. There, there were some name changes.

My ex-husband his name is not Chris.

Jenny Wheeler: I noticed that you make yourself willing to record YouTube videos for book clubs around the world because the whole thing of setting up book club interviews across time zones is quite difficult. So you’ve got this great idea they can submit seven questions, which you respond to.

I wondered if you could just give us the details of how you do that. People who might be interested can just go straight online and contact you with it.

Samantha Vérant: That’s actually segued more into, I will create a video and it does work. Sometimes it’s just a, ‘hi, I’m the author. Welcome to Book Club if you have any questions…” because sometimes the questions don’t come prior, but it’s moved to just sending a video to whoever who is hosting that book club segment.

So I can either send it via email, a little video, or uploaded to my Google Drive. Too big of a file and it’s easy to access.

Book clubs questions time

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. And can you tell us what countries have you had responses from? Have you had some say in the States, for example?

Samantha Vérant : The States is big because they do most of the marketing for the books in the US, and India where else? Let me see other countries. I don’t know if I’ve ever done one for Australia in New Zealand, but I’d be more than willing to.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. And is there a question that readers ask you more than any other, is there one popular one that pops up all the time?

Samantha Vérant : Recently The question is there a follow up to Spice Master or, on the flip side, it’s, what are you writing next?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And is there a follow up to the Spice Master?

Samantha Vérant : I was thinking about it, but I think it’s fine for a standalone. I had an idea to tell the story in Garrance’s, perspective because she doesn’t have a love match herself, and she really orchestrated the love match with the spices.

Jenny Wheeler: Perhaps it would be a good idea for people who haven’t yet had a chance to read the book to explain who Garrance was and how the story evolves.

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Samantha Vérant – Food For Love