French foodie’s Web site is international hit
November 21, 2004 - The Chicago Tribune
PARIS—In her native France, they call her Clotilde. In the U.S., however, we would just call her a hot ticket.
Clotilde Dusoulier is the brains and curiosity behind Chocolate & Zucchini, chocolateandzucchini.com, the English-language blog for foodies that pulls in some 100,000 visitors per month.
Google “chocolate” alone and her site shows up on the first page (above Ghirardelli); type “zucchini” and guess who holds the No. 1 spot?
For those who feel that nine times out of ... nine blogs are rants by self-appointed talking heads, fear not. C&Z is an exception to the rule.
Where Julia Child mastered French cooking, then showed us how to do it, C&Z takes us along for the ride as Dusoulier discovers food in France.
Though comparing the two culinary divas may be a bit premature, Dusoulier, 25, is certainly blazing her trail in the right direction.
Dusoulier’s entries appear roughly every other day in an English that uses fun phrases like “fire, king of all elements,” while grammar errors are scarce. Whether it’s divulging how she made a watercress and fresh sage soup, or singing the glories of a walnut jam she found on a road trip, her subjects seem limited only by what she finds interesting at the moment.
Growing fame
Over the past year, C&Z has received Web site awards from Yahoo! and Feedster, and even the French press is starting to report on her. She is busy working on an American book deal, basing her book on recipes from her site, and is getting invitations to speak at food industry events.
David Leite, food journalist and head of Leite’s Culinaria (leitesculinaria.com), one of the few food sites with more awards and readers than Dusoulier’s, is a big fan and doesn’t hold back on his praise.
“What’s not to like about Mademoiselle Dusoulier’s site, Chocolate & Zucchini? It’s a delicious but unpretentious indulgence. The blog represents a life that foodies around the world crave,” Leite said. “I feel like an interloper—a culinary voyeur, if you will—when I read her site. It makes me want to visit Paris now.”
At the recent chocolate-and-zucchini-themed birthday dinner, cooked by chef Nicolas Vagnon of La Table de Lucullus, it becomes clear why her readers are fans.
Dusoulier mingled among 30-odd international invitees who knew one another by their online handles—“candy,” “clover” and “dimsumdolly” among them—before they learn each other’s real names.
“She’s my age, and it’s like having someone explore Paris for me,” said one-time Chicagoan Elizabeth Fourmont, 24. “I have no kitchen, so I live vicariously through her.”
“She cares about food so much, and she’s willing to go all over Paris to find the perfect ingredient,” agreed Frenchman Charles Masson, 25, who reads his compatriot’s site in English. “It’s a case of education and generosity.”
California eating
Dusoulier’s story started in Silicon Valley. Yes, Silicon Valley.
Fresh out of college, Dusoulier and her boyfriend Maxence, who makes regular cameos on C&Z, hopped on a plane for California just as the Internet boom began. Their timing couldn’t have been better. She started out with an internship, but soon began making what she calls an “indecent” amount of money.
Le probleme? “I stopped smoking and put on 10 pounds,” she said, quite matter-of-factly.
Far from home, with no mom to cook for her or school cafeteria to eat at, she found herself with no kitchen skills to speak of, but was willing to learn.
Her remedy was to dive into California’s healthy cuisine scene, taking advantage of her salary to get a taste of the good stuff, while holding a special place in her heart for her native country’s food.
“California is a great place to get interested in food because of all the cheap places to eat, plus a lot of people are into it,” she said.
“Before I got there, I used to hate cheese,” she said, but thanks to what she calls the “rarity thing,” one of her favorite activities in California soon became taking trips to her favorite food merchant and taking out the cheese on the bottom shelf of his dairy fridge—the stuff no one else would touch. “Things [from France] that were hard to find made them more valuable in my mind.”
Back in Paris in 2001, she found work with an Internet technology company where, as in Silicon Valley, she describes her job as “knowing how to program things and how to explain them to people who don’t.”
However, “software development doesn’t make my heart flutter,” she said, so she used her computer skills to start C&Z just over a year ago, documenting her return to culinary Mecca.
“The world of food writing has been fascinating,” she said, comparing her two jobs out loud. “It has been a great excuse to knock on doors and meet people I’ve always wanted to meet.”
