Bdfil: Guillaume Long Cuisine as well as she draws

ThoseThe meeting around bdfil –Guillaume Long Cuisine Better than he wants to draw it

Bdfil’s guest of honor became known thanks to his series “to drink and eat”, where he stages himself in the stove and delivers his recipes. Interview.

Posted today at 1:08 p.m.

• The author of comics Guillaume Long celebrates the success of his culinary series “to drink and eat”.
• Long deliberately simplifies the kitchen to encourage its readers to prepare their own meals.
• Its collection of 600 sardine boxes testifies to an authentic passion for gastronomy.
• The artist is preparing a watercolor book on his mother, a source of his culinary inspiration.

Your successful series “to drink and eat” (Abam for friends), whose volume 5 has just appeared at Gallimard editions, has made you the benchmark for culinary comics. Where did this idea come from?

When friends asked me to give them the recipe I had made to them, I used to give them in the form of a drawing. Then, I told myself that I was going to compile them and publish a 1000 -page book with leather cover and my name in golden letters, type “Encyclopædia Universalis” of the kitchen. Obviously, I did not do it. And my boyfriend Martin Vidberg, who was “news in potatoes” for lemonde.frtold me that they were looking for bloggers on gastronomy. This is where “drinking and eating” was born in 2009 (Editor’s note: until January 2024). I arrived a year before “Top Chef” put the cooking in fashion, I was, I think, the only one to do that.

We see you there with difficulty all kinds of recipes, often in the reprobator eyes of other characters. Are you really so bad in the kitchen?

No, I’m not in the kitchen! If I depreciate myself, it is to uninhibit the reader. In fact, there are two axes in my approach: “the best way to eat well is to eat yourself” and “if I get there, everyone can get there”. I discovered this when I left my parents (Editor’s note: he grew up in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois) And my mother’s very good cuisine: it was either the canteen or learn to do. For the same price, the second solution was much better.

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The recipes are classified into three levels of difficulty, but are mostly quite simple.

Yes, apart from those of Degree 3, which I do not know how to do but which I still want to talk about, I tested them all and it’s easy. In the drawing also I want to get away from these cooking books where the text is incomprehensible and the photos so perfect that it seems impossible to reproduce. Me, what I cook, it looks like a heap! But it’s good. François-Régis Gaudry, who signs the preface to the first volume, talks about family cuisine, every day, without wanting to oppose it to large cuisine. That’s what it is about.

Are there anyway cooking books that you like?

I am quite amazed by Ottolenghi’s proposals or those in five ingredients by Jamie Oliver. But the kitchen book that I prefer is undoubtedly the “collection of regional Italian cuisine” (ed. The Martinière 2006), of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, which lists recipes from all over the country, often oral, without proportions or photos, transmitted by an old grandmother in the village.

The decor of your comics is often your real kitchen, your real woman (Claire Geraghty, who signs the colors of the last albums) and your children. We also talk a lot about your garlic mill, sardines and your aversion to the beets. What is the share of reality in this self -fiction?

I really like to put personal references, but also literary or cinematographic in my boards. And it’s great when readers spot them! My garlic mill, I must have used it for a month, when I was a fan of culinary gadgets, but the product was out of stock a week after I speak, by chance, so it became a mythical object, a legend, almost a relic! For sardines, it is true that I like it and that I collect the boxes, I have 600. But the only absolute truth is the chard. It disgusts me! At the start of my Abam blog, people thought I was a journalist, so I took the opportunity to get messages across, claiming that this vegetable was toxic, even deadly. Many have asked themselves questions, and even found scientific articles that went in my opinion. I denied years later: my goal was really to rot its reputation and make it disappear!

And “the best lemon meringue pie in the world”, does it exist?

Yes! With my clear wife, who is pastry chef, we made it every month for a year to reach the best in the world (Editor’s note: Recipe in volume 5). It is the only dessert that interests me. We will also redo it both Live to Bdfil And people will be able to taste it (Editor’s note: May 10, from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.).

“To drink and eat” is a slightly false title: the only drink that comes up regularly is Saint-Joseph’s wine …

I liked the expression, but it’s true, I don’t know anything at all in wines or beers at all. I don’t feel qualified at all to talk about it. To tell a food or a recipe, you need a story. And there, they would only be drinking!

History is therefore more important than drawing?

With us, there were 1000 Franco-Belgian comics, which my father collected before my birth. But it was rather the novels that he made me read that made me want to tell stories. Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake’s illustrations marked me. And, to another extent, “rhinoceros” of Ionesco, which my parents had made me see in the theater and that I read on the train at 7 years old to fart it. I had not understood anything about the theme of the rise of totalitarianisms, but I was fascinated by these people who turned into rhinos … There were also these codes printed and connected to each other that my mother brought me HUG where she worked and on the back of which I drew long sagas that finished in explosion. Then at the Beaux-Arts, where I studied video and cinema, there were the storyboard. These are always stories that brought me to comics.

In the next volume of Abam, it is the story of your mother that you will tell. For what?

My mother, who often appears in Abam, died two years ago. But I’ve been thinking about devoting a book for him for ten years, which would be entirely produced in watercolor. It is undoubtedly her Mediterranean cuisine – she comes from Drôme – who made me want to put myself in the stove. I have around thirty emails from her with recipes from my childhood. It is a story of transmission.

An exhibition is devoted to the author (visit guided by him on May 11 and 18 at 4 p.m.) and many other activities to find on bdfil.ch/guest/guillaume-long

1. The Chou-Rave holds the last volume of “drinking and eating” in his hands. 2. The author’s initials are drawn on the facade of the tower, thanks to the open or closed blinds. 3. There are seven gulls in the sky, like the seven editions of Bdfil in which he participated.