Laura Calder is one of Canada's leading food celebrities with a third season of the Food Network's 'French Food at Home' coming to air this fall. But the broadcaster began as a teacher and author with a singular and serious mission: teach North Americans how to enjoy food like the French. I caught up with Calder at her new home in Toronto, where she has relocated after a decade of living in France and Burgundy, following the recent publication and promotional tour of her second cookbook, French Taste: Elegant Everyday Eating.

The Interview:

Malcolm Jolley: Last time we spoke, we talked about French Food at Home and how excited you were to stick up France's culinary culture.

Laura Calder: I had so much fun writing French Food at Home. I was gleeful and giddy because I wanted to write a cookbook so badly. And you can see in the recipes that I was young, and the recipes leap all over the place. There are some strange recipes in there, right? I think that energy really comes out, but for French Taste, I think I was more like, "OK, now what are we really having for dinner?"

In some ways this is very practical, very doable cooking. If you come for dinner, this is the kind of food I cook. It's very simple and that's what I think people need to hear. You know, the last time French cooking was really popular was the era of Julia Child . And I love her, but when you look at the food it's not what we eat now. It's very heavy - it was the food of the time – that's fair enough. Her recipes were very thorough. One is famously seven pages long. I don't think people can cook like that anymore. It will be interesting to see, with the 'Julie & Julia' movie, whether the books sell again, I'll bet they'll reprint them like crazy. But will people really cook from them? I'll be amazed.

MJ: Julia Child was writing about French cooking from the 50s and 60s. You're much more about what French people eat now.

LC: This book is my decade in France. It's what I took away from there between two covers. It's a punctuation mark for me.

MJ: Then, you're still on a 'civilising mission' to teach us more pleasant aspects of French dining culture.

LC: [Laughs.] Will you please sit down!

MJ: Right. I think there's even a chapter on 'How To Eat', presumably while sitting down. This idea of relaxing and enjoying a meal.

LC: I think the 'How to Eat' chapter is more about not feeling guilty and me feeling really lucky that I had a mother who cared hugely about food. She was obsessed with getting milk from the farmer next door and made her own bread. That wasn't trendy then. She grew up on a farm and that's how she thought you ought to eat and she wasn't going to give her kids this crap from the grocery store. She was fanatical. We had to take these brown bread sandwiches to school - I was so mortified. Though now, of course, that's how I eat.

So 'How TO Eat' is about not feeling guilty about a little bit of fat, eating three meals a day, eating real food, and not fake, processed food. I didn't mean to sound dictatorial, though.

MJ: No, no! That's not what I meant. Just that the 'how' was as important as the 'what'.

LC: Well, maybe I am still tying to civilise every one! When I was little my brothers would do things like not choose the right fork and I used to go ballistic. So, it could be in my nature to try and keep every one under control at the table.

MJ: OK, but to be clear: there are no lessons in manners in this book.

LC: No, there are no manners in the book!

MJ: And in fact, you break rules all the time in your recipes. You'll write, "You're supposed to do this, but it's OK to do that."

LC: Yeah, that's right.

MJ: But are you allowed to? I mean shouldn't things be explained properly?

LC: Well, I was trained by Anne Willan who has written definitive books on French food and is a stickler for classic technique. So, I sometimes wonder if she's gone through all the recipes... And I used to be much more of a stickler too. But, then I thought, OK what's more important? That you actually cook a good dish - and that it tastes like it should - I'm not throwing lemongrass in my coq au vin.

You know I think the ingredients have also changed. This long marinating meat thing? I don't think you need to marinade meat for that long anymore. So, the three day dish of a hundred years ago is easily a one day, cook it and leave it dish now.

MJ: When your first book came out, it got attention because Italian food had dominated the Anglo-American food scene since the 80s. After five years, do you think French food has come back?

LC: Well, I think I'm the only one doing it on TV. But I also don't think that any one is going to go whole hog on any one cuisine anyway. When Julia Child hit the scene every one wanted to cook French food - that's what you did if you were having people over. But now I don't think we want to do that - or we don't have to. I think the recipes in French Taste stand on their won. You can put any dish along side anything else. It doesn't have to be all French. I think Western cuisine can blend more. And the recipes from the Riviera definitely are Italian influenced.

MJ: Your book is more about what French people are actually eating, than an idealised concept of French cuisine.

LC: Right. The recipes are from French home cooking as it is now. So maybe it's not all in the Larousse.

MJ: The reports I've read recently bemoan the state of French home cooking. That people are going to supermarkets, buying frozen food, all those bad habits. Is any of this true?

LC: When you're there, you might start thinking that. But when you're away for any length of time, you think, Oh my God the food is so amazing. The French chicken, even from a grocery store, is so delicious compared to any chicken I've found here - maybe if I go to Cumbrae or somewhere it would be different. But the French attention to ingredients is still very much there – and, I'm sure, in Italy too. Both countries really hold up standards, including the idea of 'how to eat' and learning to sit down at the table. It's that whole approach to food that's so important.

MJ: Back to your mission...

LC: I think the recipes are great - I worked really hard on them, but I really want to get people to care. With the book and the TV show, I want them to see that it matters to eat well.

MJ: Have you got any push back?

LC: I got the snob label put on me pretty fast. Because I don't want to eat frozen dinners, I'm a snob? I don't want to eat a battery raised hen, so I'm a snob? No. I'm afraid of the chemicals. I hate being attacked for wanting to keep standards.

You know, people get up in arms about foie gras and I think, save you're breath on that. Those geese live outdoors and have a very fine life. Worry about the beef that supplies fast food companies - so inhumane. I am not political [in the book]. And I try to keep my mouth shut, because I could get very political. Instead of ranting and raving, I am trying to offer a positive alternative. Maybe people will want to follow it.

MJ: And it tastes better. It's more fun.

LC: From a pleasure point of view I use the example of a carrot. If you took a bite from ten carrots, from artisanal to mass produced, and you could take just one home. Everyone will take the "healthy" carrot home every time because it tastes better. It's a cinch. Or pastry. I'll take homemade pastry every time - the one with the butter in it, and so will every one else. People aren't stupid. I want to say they've forgotten how real things taste, but I'm afraid some have never known.

MJ: You're a public figure now, interacting with a public. Do you get a lot of feedback over stuff like this?

LC: Well, I just came off a book tour, so that a little different. But I actually hadn't. It's only since I moved to Toronto that any of this public stuff has come up. I shoot the show in Halifax, and then I'd go back to Paris. In France no one knows me and if any one in the Maritimes did, they wouldn't say anything any way because that's the way it is.

I worry about the TV thing, though. Because I think you have to prove yourself if you're on TV telling people what to do. With a book it's more like a suggestion: here's what I have to say, and it's just me - no producer, and all that. But I also know that people are buying the book because I am on TV, so what I hope is that when they get in between the covers they might think, aha she actually does have a few thoughts in her head. [Laughs.]

MJ: But it's not like there's a disconnect between French Food at Home the TV show and French Taste the book, is there?

LC: No, not at all. They're both extensions of my point of view. I sent a copy of the book to the American cookbook author Deborah Madison and she sent me back a note saying it was funny: she had many of the same recipes, or versions thereof, but she said it makes you realise it's not the recipe. It's the frame around the recipe, what you have to say about it, what your perspective is about it. That's why cookbooks can keep coming out. It's the point of view. I guess this is my chance to have a point of view.

Malcolm Jolley is the editor of Good Food Revelation.