A Dish Worth Sharing

Mary Margaret Chappell’s ’86 career has been a long, persistent pursuit of a life centered around

the delight of making and sharing great meals. “Food is sharing,” Chappell says. “As a chef, you provide nourishment, and when you’re cooking, you’re thinking about who you’ll be giving that meal to. It’s exciting to be able to say, ‘Here, I’ve made this for you. Try this.’ There’s something very unique and intimate about that.”

For the last 15 years, Chappell has been living in Cancale, a small town on the English Channel in northwestern France, working as a food editor, freelance writer and cooking instructor (mycancalekitchen.com). To the outsider, the life Chappell fashioned for herself is a dream. But the journey towards reaching a dream is often a labyrinth of doubt. Since Chappell’s time at Collegiate, she has been certain of her love for France, for cuisine and for language. What she was less certain of was how to take these three passions and turn them into a profession.

Chappell took her first trip to France when she was 17, during the summer of her Junior year. It was a revelatory experience that Christine Rimbault, Chappell’s Upper School French Teacher at the time, arranged for her to take. “Until then, I experienced only really bland food, and then I arrived in France, where I lived with this French family, and my mind was blown,” Chappell says. “Everything was delicious. All the ingredients were fresh, and there was great pleasure and diligence taken in the preparation of a meal.”

The family she stayed with that summer taught her how to pick raspberries and make fresh jam. They would walk to the local farmers market to buy fresh zucchini and eggplant to make ratatouille. Each morning began with bread from the boulangerie around the corner layered in butter and that homemade jam. There was an art, she realized, to cooking, a cultivation of a culture presented as a meal. “Cooking is the only essential art,” Chappell says. “You can’t live without eating. There is no other art in the world that we absolutely cannot live without.”

After graduating from the University of Virginia with degrees in English and French Language and Literature, Chappell began studying that essential art in earnest. Instead of spending her Junior year abroad, she returned to France after graduation for an unusual agreement: all the cooking and pastry classes she wanted in exchange for teaching English classes at a vocational culinary school in Grenoble. Alongside the other students preparing to become chefs, she learned there was “no preciousness involved in cooking,” that food was meant to be enjoyed without any arrogance attached to it. That’s been her mantra ever since. She ended up specializing in pastry arts, but at the time only French nationals could be awarded the CAP degrees in cooking and pastry.

After a year back in the US, Chappell returned to France, to Brittany. But she had to switch gears to find work. “At the time, to get work papers in France, you had to prove you could do something better than French people,” she explains. “And it’s tough to do that as a pastry chef!” She began teaching English classes all over Rennes and ultimately became the director of the language department in an engineering school and the cultural attaché for the Franco-American Institute.

Even as she progressed in her career over in France, something gnawed at her. There was an absence that she felt, at this stage of her life’s journey, she could not do without. She returned to pastry, working as an apprentice in a French bakery three afternoons a week. “I was excited,” she says, “because I really missed pastry. It was so much fun to be back in the kitchen rolling croissants and dipping chocolates.” She also began missing her family, missing her friends. So after seven years in Rennes, she moved back to the States.

She landed in New York, where she found work in the pastry kitchen at the River

Café in New York City. Three years and several restaurants later, she applied for a job as a food editor for First for Women Magazine and switched career tracks once more. With a love of literature, she had always found writing appealing. Writing about food seemed a perfect union: Chappell could continue learning about the craft of cooking and simultaneously share that knowledge with a broad audience. Her work as a food editor took her from New York, then back to Virginia and then out to Los Angeles while working for Vegetarian Times.

Yet there was still something missing, something essential she was still searching for. “When you leave New York, when you leave LA, it’s because you’re no longer really happy there,” she says. “I wasn’t having a great time. And it was so strange, because I felt as though I should be enjoying myself. I kept on saying Yes to all these opportunities, but I found I really missed France. So I took a kind of sabbatical. I rented a house in Cancale on the coast of Brittany for a winter and did my freelance work from there.”

Chappell ended up buying a house on the harbor of the seaside town, which is famous for its shellfish. She found joy in walking the rugged, rocky shores searching for oysters and clams. She’s continued to share her culinary knowledge. Today, Chappell has written a book on

the desserts of Brittany, she contributes to the Oxford Food Symposium, is a contributing editor for Forks Over Knives magazine and publishes recipes on her own website.

“It’s taken me a long time to embrace the fact that Cancale is my home,” she says. “Cooking is what I’m passionate about, and I love discovering new recipes and new ways of cooking.

Because when you’re interested in food, you’re into all kinds of food, and my career has embraced that. I’ve loved really learning about what’s local to Cancale and discovering ways to showcase that, because few people, even in France, really know the cuisine in Brittany.”

Possibly Chappell’s favorite way to share the excitements contained within the preparation of a meal is through her in-home cooking classes. When she’s holding these classes, which are by design meant to demystify the more daunting aspects of cooking, she encourages participants to follow their own impulses. They are intimate, small, full of experimentation and laughter. The groups focus on simple recipes with big taste profiles. “I tell people, ‘You don’t have to follow exactly what I say. Trust your palate. Flavor this however you like.’ It’s just part of what I like to do in cooking, which is to demystify the whole process.”

When a group finishes making their meals, they all gather around Chappell’s table. It’s like

any dinner party shared with friends. Chappell feels at home during her cooking classes, everyone gathering around a table to share a meal. “The atmosphere of the class promotes exchange,” Chappell says. “Everyone’s talking, excited to try each other’s creations. We’re each saying, ‘Here, try this. Try mine.’”