Week Four (a bit early!)

Above: My brioche

Hi, everyone! I’m playing hooky tomorrow (Friday) and traveling up to Dublin to meet Teo, Eliza, & Conrad. Michael, the Ballymaloe taxi driver, is bringing me to Cork, where I’ll catch a bus to Dublin and then another taxi to our hotel. It hasn’t been long since you last heard from me, but I want to give my friends my full attention in Dublin this weekend and figured it’d be best to write now instead. I’m loving writing these letters every week, so thank you for continuing to indulge me! If you’d like to revisit any previous emails, go to phoebefry.substack.com and enter your email address. From there, you’ll be able to access everything I’ve written thus far for this project.

This week, I was taught by Leo, a Frenchman and an excellent chef. Every day, he tore apart—as kindly as one can tear apart—the dishes I presented him, rearranging them to suit his design sensibility. He has a stellar eye and the food always looked much better once he fussed with it. Every time he altered my dishes, he asked the rhetorical (and fair) question, “Much better, no?” Yes, Leo, much better. We worked well together. I’ll miss him when we change teachers next week! My favorite thing I made with him was brioche—two puffed, golden loaves sprinkled with pearl sugar. Almost everyone in the Pink Cottage made brioche, and we all snuck our loaves home, so now we have a verified mountain of brioche on the counter and are slowly, happily becoming brioche ourselves. There are worse things to be!

When I’m not in the kitchen or the cottage, I’m in the library. It’s a single lofted room and not posh at all; in fact, it’s a bit neglected, with dusty books piled on top of each other in no particular order. I love it there. Whenever I have a spare moment, I sneak off and crouch on the carpet to sift through stacks upon stacks of food-related books. The other day, I climbed the staircase to find Rory O’Connell, Ballymaloe co-founder and Darina’s brother, searching for a book. He surely didn’t and doesn’t know who I am, but I said hello and mentioned that I was looking for a book on bread. As soon as the words left my mouth, he scurried to find “just the thing.” Within a minute, he presented me with Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. He handed it over with such gravitas you’d have thought he was knighting me. It was a great choice, and somehow I’d never read it despite having fawned over Tartine from a distance for years. When I visited San Francisco last year, I had to skip Tartine because I was going through a health crisis that demanded I avoid gluten for a stretch. That problem has thankfully been resolved, which is lucky because when it comes down to it, my favorite food is bread. Good bread. Good butter and good salt for extra credit. Other than Tartine Bread, I’ve been making my way through Diana Henry’s entire collection of cookbooks. Thank you, Larkin, for turning me onto her work when I was first getting interested in food. When I think of which food writer’s style I’d most like mine to resemble, I think of Diana Henry first. Elegant, warm, and reflective of a life full of reading and travel and conversation. That’s the goal.

I feel like this email is an absolute cheesefest every week, but I’ve been so happy this past month I can’t help it. Please forgive my earnestness! As for a Pink Cottage update, we all faced annoying little colds this past week, but it wasn’t so bad since we were all dealing with it together. We made each other lemon ginger tea and toast and sat by the wood stove and went to bed early and it all turned out okay. Izzy and Holly will be in Dublin this weekend visiting their boyfriends, so we’re going to join groups on Saturday night. It’ll be so fun for me to have them all together.

Thank you for reading and please respond if you feel so inclined! I always love to hear from you.

Phoebe