This Spring, Cookbooks Are Traveling to the Coast of Europe

Rebekah Peppler’s new cookbook Le Sud is a case study in how to capture the feeling of summer — not just any summer, but a slice of Peppler’s summers in the South of France. Despite that old and sometimes trite adage about the power of books to transport us to different places, Le Sud, out now from Chronicle, is truly meant to make the reader feel closer to Provence-Alpes-Côte d‘Azur, a region where Peppler has traveled often since moving to Paris in 2015. The book’s photography — by Joann Pai, with art direction and styling by Peppler — does a great deal to achieve this goal, exuding salty skin, condensation on cool bottles of wine, the refreshing jolt of the ocean, and the hunger after an afternoon of swimming.

Peppler’s pan bagnat, for example, is not shot in a studio, but in situ. Peppler — who isn’t shown in full, but by a bit of her bare shoulder, red lipstick, and wet curls — rests her elbow on her partner Laila Said’s leg as they share the sandwich next to the water. Looking at the photo, you feel like you’re sitting close behind friends at the beach, everyone crowding on too few towels. Other shots offer a similar sense of narrative, implying languid walks through town while visiting a friend’s country house, and long dinners where taper candles drip into nubs. In one photo, Peppler lounges on a balcony, drink in one hand and bare leg resting on a companion’s knee. “I really wanted the book to feel sexy, like the region itself, especially on the coastline,” says Peppler. To that end, she explains, the imagery is full of shadows and bodies.

The idea for Le Sud came around the same time as the feeling of “hopeful travel” returned for some, Peppler says. “I wanted to draw people in and make them feel both that they were in the South of France, experiencing this there, but also that they were able to bring it home. I want to bridge that gap between fantasy and accessibility.”

And oh, is that the fantasy of the moment: On the heels of all those Amalfi Coast summers and the rise of the “old money” French Riviera “aesthetic,” this spring and summer will see the release of a handful of cookbooks, including Le Sud, that set their sights on coastal Europe. Rosa Jackson’s Niçoise, out now from W. W. Norton, draws on her years of living and running a cooking school in Nice, the capital of the French Riviera. Amber Guinness’s Italian Coastal, out now from Thames & Hudson, explores the cuisine along Italy’s western coast, which includes but isn’t limited to Amalfi. Similarly, there was last year’s Food of the Italian Islands by Katie Parla. While buzzwords like “Italian coastal” might pique readers’ attention, playing on the visions that they already have in mind, these cookbooks go further. They capitalize on such preconceptions to add nuance to how readers understand these popular destinations.

The category encompasses books that wander beyond the European coastline: Sydney Bensimon’s The Sea Lover’s Cookbook, out now from Chronicle, is influenced by the author’s childhood summers in Corsica and years working on a charter boat that sailed to Italy, Greece, Croatia, Haiti, and more. There is also Ben Tish’s broader Mediterra, out August 13 from Bloomsbury, which aims to “compare and connect the recipes that run along the shoreline of the Mediterranean.”

These cookbooks are inherently transportive: Above all, their implied goal is to capture a sense of place. Through cookbooks, we, as readers, live out aspirations and long-held travel dreams; place goes hand in hand with the lifestyle we imagine there. At their most ambitious, these cookbooks serve as much as travel brochures as instructions for eating. It’s not enough to show the reader a pretty tablescape; you want a table that implies an old chateau sits just out of frame, or a towel set on a seaside bluff — scenes that carry the fantasy.

“Italian Coastal life sums up everything about the notion of ‘la dolce vita,’ or ‘the sweet life,’” says Amber Guinness. “It’s a fusion of everything that is best about Italy — delicious food, beautiful natural surroundings, a super relaxed atmosphere, and of course, plenty of glamor — which I’m sure appealed to the publisher.”

Rosa Jackson, author of Niçoise, knows firsthand about the growing desire for this kind of cookbook. A decade or so ago, she wanted to write one about the South of France, covering the region from Cannes to Menton. “The idea didn’t sell at that time,” Jackson says. “I was told it was ‘too niche.’”

But in the intervening years, Jackson, whose classes primarily target tourists, noticed more visitors to her city. “Nice has always been popular, but it’s really become extremely popular in the last few years,” she says. By the end of 2023, business at Nice’s airport had returned to 2019 levels; the city is France’s second-most visited. A cookbook focused on Nice became an easier sell.

“I’ve noticed that there are more books now that are about specific regions, and people are getting more well-traveled,” Jackson says. As a result, “people are ready: They know that French cooking isn’t just one thing.” She’s always been drawn to the “micro cuisines” along the coast of France — the food of Nice, for example, offers more of an Italian influence. A feeling that people didn’t know Niçoise cuisine, apart from its eponymous salad, provided her with further motivation.

That kind of specificity is a key ingredient in all of these cookbooks. “My book is by no means a definitive account of the food of the Italian coast,” says Guinness. Italy has nearly 5,000 miles of coastline, after all. “In fact it only focuses [on] quite a specific area, which is the west side of Italy, which abuts what is known as the Tyrrhenian Sea, or Mar Tirreno.”

La Maremma, the coastal southern region of Tuscany, is one example that Guinness cites. When her family made the hour-and-a-half drive there from their Tuscan home, she says, “I was always acutely aware of how different everything was, not least of all the food.” Aside from the hot spots of Amalfi, Capri, Naples, and Positano, Guinness wanted to explore areas she felt were overlooked, like the southern coast of Lazio, the Aeolian Islands, and the Tuscan archipelago.

Even The Sea Lover’s Cookbook and Mediterra, which both span multiple countries, limit their inspiration to a very particular terroir: what is eaten on the deck of a boat (and maybe cooked in a small galley kitchen), or in seaside locales. In Mediterra’s introduction, Tish writes that while geography and cultures differ, what unites the cuisines he includes in his book are “hot summers and dry winters, coastal briny winds, alfresco eating, vibrant street foods, hectic food markets, a relaxed way of life where mealtimes are sacrosanct.”

Le Sud is Peppler’s third French-centric cookbook. She published Apéritif, which focused on a French approach to cocktails, in 2018 and À Table, which took a broad look at the French table, in 2021. This “hyperfocus” on Provence-Alpes-Côte d‘Azur felt like a “really natural third step” in her journey, Peppler says: To push herself as a writer, she wanted a research-heavy, immersive project. It would have been easier and more cost-effective, she notes, if she’d written another book from Paris.

Peppler sees this focus on both place and approach as something that only her previous books made possible; she’s skeptical that she would have been able to sell Le Sud as a first-time author. “It’s so travel-driven, so image-driven, and queer — the voice is very specific and I don’t compromise on much,” she says.

There are other cookbooks about Provence, of course. But for Peppler, much of the motivation for writing her book now was to provide a modern picture of the region that wasn’t limited by history and tradition. “I wasn’t seeing a book on Provence-Alpes-Côte d‘Azur that felt modern and cool and young and sexy and of place today,” she says. To her, the gift was getting to share such a specific vision.