Have you ever wanted to bring the world home to dinner? Or wondered how to experience another country when you couldn’t actually go there? Here’s how we do it…
After a recent trip with Ouita to the south of France, once home we set out to recreate some of the dishes we had enjoyed so much; and realized how far and wide one can travel through food.
We snagged the very last of the late summer tomatoes, along with eggplant (albeit tiny), ripe peppers, onions, and garlic to prepare a Provençal meal for our studio class. And while our local farmers market wasn’t nearly as well-stocked as those in southern France (piles of garlic, every variety, even smoked! Eggplant from plum to football-sized!) we still found what we needed.
Which raises another point – that even if a specific dish can’t be duplicated, the how and why of procuring ingredients are just as important as what you make with them. France has distinct designations for regional specialties, traditional preparations, geographically protected products, and foods that meet a certain standard of quality.
It’s a system that honors and codifies both place and craft. And led Ouita to muse, what if we could create protected status for Kentucky bourbon? Or country ham? The possibilities are endless – Owensboro barbecued mutton, Covington goetta, Lexington burgoo, Appalachian shuck beans and apple stack cake!
In the meantime, though, there’s no reason we can’t emulate the focus and intention that our French host and cooking instructor, Gilles Conchy, put into supporting locally raised and produced foodstuffs. Our annual Cassoulet is a perfect example of how to borrow another country’s signature dish and prepare it in the traditional manner with Kentucky-grown ingredients.
In Aix en Provence, the charcuterie shop was just steps away from the open-air market; we bought local sausages and pâté there for our group’s lively apero gatherings. As we plan the Cassoulet at Holly Hill Inn, we’ll buy garlic sausages made especially for us at Avril-Bleh Meats in Cincinnati; and lamb from Jim Mansfield, and E.J. and Tony Ricketts.
So that’s one way to take a culinary journey but there are others. For many years, we wrote menus that took us to far-flung destinations. Winter months found us sitting down to Japanese Kaiseki dinners, Ethiopian injera and doro wat, and Thai curries. In the midst of covid, Honeywood chef Lawrence Weeks organized a pop-up sandwich shop called CurryCurry Katsu, and the Midway Bakery still makes milk bread to this day.
Cookbooks are a wonderful window into foreign cuisines. The best-known, of course, is Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking; you can still find used copies of it (alongside other classics from writers like Marcella Hazan, Diana Kennedy, Elizabeth David and Madhur Jaffrey) at your local library’s bookstore or in other used book shops.
Once you’ve found a cookbook that looks like fun, look up its holiday recipes and adopt a new holiday tradition. Celebrate Christmas Eve with an Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. Bake a King Cake for Mardi Gras or chess pie for Imbolc. Set aside an afternoon to prepare Qabuli Pulao for an Eid dinner.
Resolve to live more like a European – seek out rustic slow-proofed bread at your local bakery, make your next crème Anglaise with cream-top milk out of a real glass bottle, try an odd cut of meat from an authentic butcher shop, grow a little pot of hardy herbs like thyme or rosemary on your windowsill.
Or be like our friend Babz Nartowicz – who learned to make Tibetan momos from exiled monks in the Himalayas – and now fills them with her Nan-Nan’s pimento cheese back in her Maysville hometown. It’s fusion cooking at its best!
Now that we’ve shared a few tips for satisfying your wanderlust on an economy class budget, we hope you’ll try Gilles’s recipe for caramelized garlic tarts – a perfect fall appetizer, especially with a crunchy lettuce salad. And maybe a few toasted walnuts and crisp apple slices, too.
Related Content
Gilles’s Caramelized Garlic Tarts
What can we say about Gilles Conchy? Gilles was our personal guide to Provence's unforgettable open-air markets. He was our most gracious host at his beautiful rural homestead, with an outdoor kitchen on a terrace overlooking the Luberon mountain range. And he was our exacting teacher at the prep tables on that terrace, demonstrating the proper way to trim herbs, or peel garlic, or press pastry into tart pans for these caramelized garlic tarts.
© 2026, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
