Joe Ray

February 2, 2005 - The Santa Fe New Mexican

PARIS—She’s someone the French would call dans le vent or “in the wind.” In English, however, we’d just call her a hot ticket.

Clotilde Dusoulier is the brains and curiosity behind Chocolate & Zucchini—www.chocolateandzucchini.com—the English-language foodie Weblog that pulls in some 125,000 visitors and 1.5 million page views per month—making it one of the most popular food Web sites on the Internet.

Search for “chocolate” on Google and her site shows up on the first page, above Ghirardelli. Type in “zucchini” and guess who holds the No. 1 spot?

Where Julia Child mastered French cooking then showed us how to do it, C&Z takes us along for the ride as Dusoulier discovers, then writes about, the food of her native France. Though comparing the two culinary divas may be a bit premature, Dusoulier, 25, is certainly blazing her trail in the right direction.

Chocolate & Zucchini is foodie central for Anglophones looking for an inside track to the French food scene. The name “just came to me ... while riding the bus home from work,” says Dusoulier, who has put together a site that’s both slick and pleasing to the eye.

Among other features, it hosts forums where C&Z fans can weigh in on anything from knife sharpening to foie gras. Recent postings offered suggestions for American tourists visiting Paris in February. There’s also a “bloxicon” that translates mysterious French food terms, a twice-monthly newsletter and a RSS streaming-news feed for techies.

Dusoulier has a keen gift for allowing her personality to show through in her writing, an artistic eye and the technical skills to pull it all off.

David Leite, food journalist and head of Leite’s Culinaria, one of the best-known food Web sites in the United States—http://www.leitesculinaria.com—doesn’t hold back his praise for Dusoulier.

“The blog represents a life that foodies around the world crave. I know I certainly do: to live in the heart of Paris, in Montmartre, no less; to have access to some of the freshest ingredients available,” says Leite. “I feel like an interloper—a culinary voyeur, if you will—when I read her site. It makes me want to visit Paris now.”

Leite isn’t the only one to take notice. 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 Dusoulier. She’s generated enough attention that she’s negotiating a book deal with a publisher in New York—but that’s all she’ll say about the book at this time.

Between the attention she and her site are receiving, it seems a given that Dusoulier attended French culinary school. Wrong. Hers is a relatively late-blooming passion, picked up in on the fly in the United States, of all places.

“I was not interested at in food at all until I got to the U.S.,” Dusoulier says in an interview near her Montmartre apartment. “It was the ‘rarity thing,’ ” however, that made her appreciate all things French, she says. “The fact that things were hard to find made them more valuable in my mind.”

Fresh out of college, Dusoulier and her partner Maxence (who makes regular cameos on C&Z) found information-technology work in California’s Silicon Valley in May 2000, where “a five-month internship turned into a two-year stay.”

She and Maxence couldn’t have arrived in Silicon Valley at a better time and, once her internship was over, Dusoulier started making what she called an “indecent” amount of money by “knowing how to program things and being able to explain them to people who don’t.”

“Luckily,” she adds, while sipping her Perrier, “California is a great place to get interested in healthy food.” As she says on her site, “I am very particular about what goes in my mouth.”

Into the local food scene she dove—always holding a special place in her heart for her native country’s products—using some of her salary to sample California’s best restaurants.

“While I was there, I discovered I enjoyed a lot of things I thought I didn’t like,” citing parsnips as an example before launching into her discovery of cheese. “I used to hate cheese,” she says, thumbing her nose at thousands of years of her Gallic heritage. But when nostalgia overtook her, she found a California cheesemonger with the good stuff. “He had a fridge with cheese in it,” she says, “and on the bottom rack was the gooey stuff nobody would touch.”

She and Maxence scooped it out with glee.

Dusoulier’s time in California also capped a lifetime of learning English at home, in school and in the United Kingdom. She learned English so well, in fact, that it’s difficult to spot any grammatical or word-choice errors on her site. It’s often more interesting to figure out where she may have learned certain phrases such as “mighty good,” or “fire, king of all elements.”

Riding the Internet bubble in California until January 2002, Dusoulier returned to Paris in March and launched C&Z in September 2003, stating, as part of her philosophy, “Every meal should be an extraordinary experience in taste and aesthetics, every dish a subtle yet powerful combination of flavors, every bite an explosion of layers of savor.”

After celebrating the site’s first anniversary this past fall, Dusoulier isn’t showing signs of slowing down.

Over a Saturday morning trip to the Batignolles organic food market near her Montmartre apartment, she explains that starting in February, she’ll be taking one day off per week from her day job to devote to C&Z and her other food-related projects.

“Weekends are made for rest, not moonlighting,” she says with a grin, “Everything has been parallel to my full-time job.”

When asked if she’d like Chocolate and Zucchini to be picked up by a larger site, she looks as if someone spat in her soup. Nothing doing.

“I could think of syndicating parts of it,” she concedes, “but there’d still need to be a C&Z that would still be my own thing. It wouldn’t be the same if it were placed under a bigger banner. C&Z stays independent and personal—the blog is what’s taken me here.”

Instead, she hopes to capitalize on other food projects, such as her book, collaborations with chefs and other food events.

In her kitchen, which looks surprisingly similar to most other kitchens, Dusoulier has an easygoing nature that includes the enviable ability of being able to talk and cook at the same time.

If you pay attention, you also pick up a tip or two. Dusoulier cuts the oyster mushrooms into bite-sized pieces and sautees them in olive oil while preparing the rest of the simple, seasonal salad—washing and drying the lettuce; slicing up the apple and setting it in the lemon juice so that it soaks up the zing but doesn’t oxidize; breaking open and chopping a few walnuts, then preparing a simple vinaigrette using the bergamote juice. (She promises to put a more formal recipe on her site in the near future.)

She even finds time to snap a photo or two of some bergamot oranges, which became a subject on C&Z on Jan. 27 (see sidebar, page C-2).

“I don’t want to do something (just) to write about it,” she explains. “I live my life, then I write about it.” If nothing interesting happens, the site remains unchanged.

Recipe

This is the dessert Dusoulier prepared for her New Year’s Eve dinner; to read the complete posting .