After the success of his first work, Laurent Occelli is back at it… green, with The Feast of the Four Seasons. A book that still combines gathering and cooking wild plants.
“It’s really the little brother of the first,” says Laurent Occelli. The storyteller and presenter, at the Ruynes ecomuseum or with the Pays d’art et d’histoire de Saint-Flour co, released, exactly two years ago, On walks, I pick my… edible wild plants. A very rare work, mixing botanism and cooking recipes. To learn to recognize the treasures of nature and appreciate them on the plate.
From harvest to plate with the first book by Cantalien Laurent Occelli
90 recipes
A great success for an out-of-print book, now reprinted… and accompanied by a second volume, The Feast of the Four Seasons. Identical in spirit and design, it offers 90 new recipes based on 35 edible wild plants which are just as edible… with one exception. Because “I put the nettle back, for me it would have been inconceivable that it wasn’t there. » In the same way, each plant is entitled to a botanical presentation, a photo to clearly recognize it, and several recipes invented by Laurent Occelli and tested as a family.
Varied
For the rest, he varied the pleasures “by adding more Mediterranean plants. For the first, which I had prepared during confinement, I had been limited to local plants, I wanted to go out a little. » The Mediterranean, a reminder of his origins, we also find it in the recipes, like Italy or Asia, so many influences which summarize his life journey. But he also stepped out of his comfort zone by offering desserts “even though I’m not fond of them. But readers have asked me for it. »
The opportunity to discover plants and flavors
often different, atypical, which we are not used to, a little astringent sometimes. And it is also an opportunity to pass on a timeless, innate heritage, since we are basically hunter-gatherers.
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The Feast of the Four Seasons. By Laurent Occelli, published by Borée. 144 pp. €15.50.
Yann Bayssat
