Expat journalist Rebekah Peppler has spent the better part of a decade living in Paris and traveling through France as she documents the country’s culinary culture. Through transportive imagery and tantalizing recipes, her books take readers into the heart of French gastronomy. After featuring a recipe from her newest book, Le Sud, in our March/April 2024 issue, we sat down with Peppler to dive deeper into the microcosms of French food and drink and the spirit of connection that underlines a traditional apéro hour.
Imbibe: When did you relocate to Paris? And what jumped out to you as the big differences in eating and drinking culture?
Rebekah Peppler: I started to split time between New York and Paris in late 2016. I was driven by a need for a change and to get out of New York a bit. I didn’t have any connection to Paris other than having gone to a French pastry school in New York. But I took the leap, and I started living here full time here in 2018.
My first book, Apéritif: Cocktail Hour the French Way, dove into one of the biggest cultural differences that I came across, which was the apéro culture. “Low-ABV” was not really the thing at the time that it thankfully is now. So when I moved [to Paris], I started spending time going for an apéritif and meeting new people. It’s an easy way to make friends here, because it’s low investment. It’s an hour or two, and you can extend it if you want. For me, that really helped establish a community here.
[L’heur de l’apéro] felt like a really magical experience that wasn’t quite being translated into American happy hour.—Rebekah Peppler
And along the way I was thinking about what happy hour is to us in the States—the differences between the experience of going for an apéritif and having that be this cultural moment in your day, every day, to sort of mark the end of the work day and the start of the evening. It felt like a really magical experience that wasn’t quite being translated into American happy hour. And so I decided to write Apéritif to bring that magic more into the American consciousness and to bring all these beautiful apéritif spirits, which are often made in France, to the forefront.
When I was writing Apéritif, I did a research trip on vermouth. A lot of the aperitif spirits that are made here are made in Provence, or in the south of France. So I started outside of Marseilles all along the coast to the border of Spain. That was my first dive into the south of France from a journalist’s perspective, and where the research for le SUD really started.
Even within France, how does the gastronomic culture vary between Paris and the south of the country?
France is a small country when related to the U.S. But it has so many differences in food and drink culture wherever you are. It’s city-specific, it’s neighborhood-specific … whether you’re from the north or the south, there are so many layers on top of it. But my interest in diving into it from the Apéritif perspective was to capture the whole of aperitif within France.
Then the goal with my second book was to really dive into the French table from a modern perspective. We tend to think of French food as very high-brow, with lots of complicated technique, lots of cream and butter, and all very rich. And absolutely that exists within the food culture. But there are so many other layers that exist that are not like that. It’s not how everyone is eating every night. So À Table was really interested in looking at how people eat now in France and how that can translate onto your table wherever you live.
With le SUD, while I had spent so much time visiting the south for vacations, or for friends who opened restaurants and hotels, I hadn’t really explored the micro-cultures that are built into the region that is Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. From the border of Italy all the way to the Camargue region, there’s so much variety—the seaside, the countryside, there’s mountains, and rivers, and marshes. All these different microcosms exist within this region. The point of le SUD was to really dive into that, and to have an excuse to go myself and dive into it.
What was the process through which the book came together?
I outlined the region and what I knew well and didn’t know well. One of my trips, for example, was the border between Italy and France where I hadn’t spent a lot of time. There’s Menton, which is the end of the line for France. And I was really interested to see, both on the coast and inland, how Italy has influenced the cuisine within that region. We shot the book all across the south of France to really capture different parts of the region, but also the different seasons. I didn’t want to just go in the summer and get that vibe. The light changes so much, and there is so much beauty in winter and autumn and spring.
I took a bunch of research trips down from Paris. My partner, Laila Said, did her masters in food studies at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy focused on how food impacts culture and how it can lead to change within cultures. So I brought her on board and she helped me research the book.
I spent a month just outside of Grasse at La Pitchoune, which was Julia Child’s former holiday home, researching and writing. So it was essentially me looking at a map and thinking about where I hadn’t spent much time, where I hadn’t eaten enough, where I could ask a friend of a friend who can talk to me about the rice in the Camargue. And the book kind of manifested out of that research. I wanted to write something that excited me and was close to my heart, but that I didn’t know well enough to write sitting at my desk. I wanted to be on the ground and learn.
What does your ideal apéro hour spread look like?
I host people a lot and I have many ideal spreads. But looking at it from a le SUD perspective, it depends on the season. In mid-spring, we are ready for the warm weather and the sun. For me, rosé is such an easy way to get you into that mindset. We can have something light and fresh and easy-drinking, and that’s really what apéro is about. It’s not about getting drunk. It’s about having one or two drinks and easing into the night. So I’d open a really beautiful bottle, maybe a sparkling rosé like a pét-nat. I wrote some cocktail recipes into the book as well. And something like Le Grande Plage [Lillet, amaro, bitters, sparkling wine] is the spritz that I want to be drinking when it’s warm and beautiful out. It really eases you into the season.
And then on the table, from the book there is a recipe for radishes with radish leaf pesto that’s probably one of my sleeper favorites. It’s so good. It’s fresh, it feels very springy, it has mint leaves in it, and you also use the peppery radish leaves. You could put that on the table with some gorgeous, cultured butter, a baguette, olives. I’m very much of a no-cook apéro kind of person. It’s supposed to be easy and casual. The simpler the better. And, of course, potato chips are always on my apéro table.
It’s definitely a very French energy to really prioritize connection around the dinner table or the bar stools or wherever you are eating and drinking. I felt that sometimes that gets lost in the States because you maybe want everything to be perfect and everyone to be happy. But often things will go a lot smoother when you just sit down and enjoy with everyone else.
