Find the Work You Love Doing and Look Forward to Coming to it Every Day, says Dorie Greenspan
The five-time James Beard winner and author of 15 cookbooks has lots to say about perfectionism, inspiration, and how to make hard work fun.
I keep hearing about what “Dorie” thinks about food writing topics and recipe writing conventions. Apparently, many us feel we don’t need her last name. And Dorie Greenspan doesn’t mind at all.
“That makes me so happy,” she told me on a video call. “It even makes me like my name, which I didn’t for a million years. When I first started baking, Maida Heatter’s books were bibles to me, and I always referred to her as Maida. So that’s lovely.”
If you don’t know Dorie Greenspan, she’s the author of 15 cookbooks, plus the forthcoming Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, arriving in October. Take a look at her accomplishments:
She has five James Beard Awards (one for journalism; one for her book, Baking with Julia; one for Baking From My Home to Yours; one for Dorie’s Cookies; and one for being voted into the Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.
She has won the Cookbook of the Year Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) twice, once for Desserts by Pierre Hermé and once for Around My French Table.
She has been on The New York Times Bestseller List three times, once for Around My French Table, once for Baking Chez Moi and again for Baking with Dorie.
At age 77 with all those accomplishments behind her, Dorie isn’t slowing down. She’s still just as passionate about baking and pastry, as well as French food and culture. After all, she learned from the best. Since the 1990s, she has worked with Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Pierre Hermé. She collaborated on four cookbooks, with Baking with Julia as the most successful partnership, plus two with Pierre Hermé and one with Daniel Boloud.
Dorie has a Substack newsletter called XOXO Dorie, with close to 90,000 subscribers, and divides her time between New York City, Westbrook, CT; and Paris.
Q. The most successful of your 15 cookbooks came after your collaborations?
A. Yes. Baking From My Home to Yours, published in 2006. It was a big book, the start of something. David Black, my agent, said, ‘I think you need to write a big book.’ I proposed something short but it kept going. I worked on that book for four years.
Q. Which cookbook was the most prestigious?
A. Collaborations meant a lot to me. I learned a tremendous amount. It was extraordinary to work with Julia Child. Having written Baking with Julia in 1996 put me in another category of writer, maybe professionally.
Q. Do you think you’ll do any more cookbook collaborations with chefs?
A. I don’t know. I have crushes on chefs, and I tell my husband Michael, and he just rolls his eyes. I love talented people. I would do it because I would learn something.
Q. Tell me about these communities that bake your recipes.
A. I started a private Facebook group, Bake and Tell. It’s free to join. I don’t give them recipes. I pop in and comment on what they’re doing. If the world could be like the Bake and Tellers, the world would be a wonderful place.
Q. You had some earlier community groups also, created by fans, right? There was Tuesdays with Dorie and French Fridays with Dorie.
A. Around 2007, Laurie Woodward said she wanted to bake every recipe in my book with two others, and she wanted to post them on her blog. From three bloggers, it grew. Now it’s tiny but it’s being going for 18 years. We also had French Fridays with Dorie.
These groups make me so happy, because it’s people who might not bake otherwise or they’re learning as they’re doing it.
Q. What did you learn from launching a retail shop with your son Joshua that eventually closed?
A. I became a much better baker and a more clever baker.
I’m a slow writer, a slow baker, a daydreamer, and this business taught me focus and to let go just a smidge on the perfectionism. There were 500 cookies, and I’d say, ‘The chocolate chip is just hanging off that one, we can’t sell it,’ or ‘That one’s not pretty enough.’ But I let a few cookies that weren’t perfectly round get sold.
Q. Let’s talk about perfection. How do you deal with it?