Aleksandra Crapanzano on Her Dual Passions For Cooking and Writing

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing.

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From the interview:

Aleksandra Crapanzano: A lot of people felt totally in love with baking over the pandemic. And then I think there was a point where we all reached a kind of maximum capacity with cooking and needed a little bit of a break. And now I feel that we’re kind of coming back and realizing, hey, we actually really do know how to feed ourselves well. And I think whether we’re approaching a recession or already in a recession, certainly with inflation, there is a desire to turn back and open up the pantry and realize, wow, I have the five ingredients needed to make something that actually is a treat. So that’s a kind of a reward at the end of the day.

To listen to more of Aleksandra Crapanzano and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Aleksandra Crapanzano is a James Beard-winning writer and dessert columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of The London Cookbook and Eat. Cook. LA., and her work has been widely anthologized, most notably in Best American Food Writing. She has been a frequent contributor to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Food52, Saveur, Town & Country, Elle, The Daily Beast, Departures, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine. She has years of experience in the film world, consults in the food space, and serves on several boards with a focus on sustainability. Aleksandra grew up in New York and Paris, received her BA from Harvard and her MFA from NYU, where she has also taught writing. She is married to the writer John Burnham Schwartz, and they live in New York with their son, Garrick, and Bouvier des Flandres, Griffin.