Sweet & Tart: In the La Gonette Kitchen with Harriet Davidson

Sweet & Tart: In the La Gonette Kitchen with Harriet Davidson

For cook and writer, Harriet Davidson, food is about far more than feeding.

Food is nourishment and nurturing. 

Food is community and connection, celebration conviviality; it’s collaboration and it’s creativity. 

Food is climatic and environmental, it’s cultural and it’s political; it’s about history and it’s about traditions.

Food is fun, frivolous, flirtatious and it’s friendship; it’s pleasure, it’s beauty, it’s joy and it’s romance. 

And cooking for others is a unique moment to create that community and connection; it’s through beauty, pleasure, joy and romance that you have the chance to connect people to each other and to the place you’re in. That, for Harriet, is what food (and life) is all about. 

In this workshop, Harriet shares the art of creating this connection at your table with three simple recipes; recipes to carry with you, from year to year, season to season, table to table, place to place; recipes for you to make your own using produce you love and ingredients you have. 

There will be warm, brown butter madeleines, that Harriet will (strongly) encourage you to dip into olive oil that’s grown and pressed locally by artist and grower, Manon Monge.

There will be Harriet’s vinaigrette that she makes almost daily — perhaps the recipe that she’s most often asked about. Not to be overlooked, a good vinaigrette is a powerful thing — use it to dress perky greens for the perfect simple green salad that might be the side to grilled fish for a summer’s lunch or the palate cleanser to Cassoulet for a cosy winter’s night in; or use the vinaigrette to dress thick slices of tomatoes for a simple lunch, served with bread and butter, Chablis and chèvre, to have alone or with friends that have just dropped in. 

There will be a flaky tart pastry for all of your tart pursuits — from pissalidère; to that late-summer tomato tart or that autumnal roast pumpkin and chèvre tart; to an elegant dessert of a slice of fig and frangipane tart, served with crème fraîche, always. 

It’s with these recipes that Harriet will give you the guidance and confidence to create convivial tables, long lunches, effortless dinners, or a romantic dinner for yourself, in your own home. The morning will include an interactive demonstration of each of these recipes followed by a sit-down lunch on the La Gonette terrace. Harriet will encourage you to pay attention, to use your hands, to taste and to take a moment to relish in the romance of cooking. Joy.

About the Facilitator

Harriet Davidson lives in the space of food and creating — this oscillates between cooking and kitchens to writing and books. Food, for Harriet, is a way of living and a way of story telling, and her days are spent eating and cooking food or writing and reading about food, or likely, a mix of it all.

For Harriet, it began with Australia’s food and travel magazine, Gourmet Traveller. After writing and styling within the publishing world, Harriet moved on to join the world of restaurants in Sydney diners before combining these two worlds of publishing and cooking. Harriet now works with chefs editing their cookbooks, contributes regularly to columns, edits her own popular journal, A Journal, and cooks to create intimate experiences driven by produce and people. These days, you’ll likely find her perched at a counter, briny oyster in one hand and a glass of cold white in the other; at her desk writing with a little plate of cheese and a few plump prunes; in the vegetable garden fondling ripe tomatoes; or at the kitchen sink gently washing fresh salad greens. 

Harriet’s passion for food, in every form, comes back to connection, to people and to place. She’s inspired by the produce and the people of the place she’s in, by simplicity and sensuality and by food literature. Harriet now resides in Paris, though the South of France has her heart so she’s often on a train heading down towards the Mediterranean.