Laura Calder: French Cook to Domestic Wonder Woman
Laura Calder has built a distinct professional identity for herself over years cooking on TV and writing cookbooks. But as she’s stepped out of the limelight, Calder has begun reinventing her identity to be about something bigger than food alone.
Born and raised on the Kingston Peninsula, Calder went on to study and work in the culinary field in France, the United States and Canada, host her Food Network show French Food at Home, serve as judge on Recipe to Riches, host TV specials and make appearances on Iron Chef America and Top Chef Canada.
Calder says she finds satisfaction now in hosting people in her home. What she is most interested in is what food gives people besides simple sustenance.
“I’ve always loved to feed people and to cook. If you talked to my mother she’d tell you that from the youngest age, I was basically inviting people to eat all the time and the whole time growing up, through university, it was always there,” Calder said.
“Sometimes I don’t really feel that I have made food a profession because I cook for the people I love. I don’t have a restaurant. I don’t develop recipes for a magazine. I have done cookbooks I guess but in a way what interests me and what always has is the social side of it and thinking about what food gives people, beyond just something to eat.”
Calder says that even though we now take pictures for social media of everything we put in our mouths, we’re still not really paying attention to the meaning of food and a proper meal. She believes that an underappreciation of the meaning and effort behind what we eat is partially to blame for the lack of value society puts in domestic roles, traditionally those of women.
“I think a lot of those traditional women’s roles, the value of them gets thrown out, like feeding a family and keeping a house, doing the laundry. We’re so dismissive of those things and yet they have such power outside the things themselves,” Calder said. “When I realized I loved domestic things, it was with enthusiasm but also with shyness that I let myself do it because it’s not really respected.”
Growing up in what she calls a pro-feminist time, when women’s studies programs were first being introduced into universities and people were pushing for women to run corporations and become politicians, Calder feels that if she hadn’t made a career out of her passion for the domestic, her passion would have been seen as meaningless or an indulgence. She believes domestic work is far more important than it’s given credit for.
“I think it gives people a sense of security. If you know you’re coming home to a meal at night and to people, then you can get on with other stuff in the day. You don’t have this underlying anxiety about where the next meal is coming from,” she said. “I think it’s amazing for bringing people together and getting them to share ideas. That’s part of the nourishment and it’s not to be overlooked.”
(Laura’s Instagram is filled with fresh vegetable finds, food she’s been cooking, flowers she’s been arranging and more.)
Calder believes in the healing and nourishing power of hospitality, that setting aside time to eat good food together and socialize with each other keeps people calm, happy, less aggressive and more open. This is why she spends every dinner time sitting down to set table and never eats on the run or out of a box.
“Even when we’re just two people here, there’s always dinner. There’s always a set table. There’s always a candle or two. It doesn’t need to go on for hours but we definitely sit down and eat properly,” she explains. “There’s something psychological when you sit down to a table set and a plate and you eat, you know you’ve eaten. But when you just sort of go through life and grab something and stick it in your mouth as you walk or as you’re driving, your brain doesn’t register ‘I ate.’”
Calder says her favourite thing to put on her table right now is rice. She’s been learning the Persian way to prepare the dish from a friend. She says she’s branching out from French and Maritime food and is enjoying learning about food from the many different cultures that make up Canada.
Settling back in Canada two years ago after living in France has been an adjustment for Calder. She said she had to rethink things because she’d been the “French girl cooking French food” for so long and then experienced an identity shift both personally and professionally. She’s now in the midst of trying to fill the creative void left by what her career had been before.
“I think in a creative life you have spurts. I didn’t want a 9-5 job. I didn’t get a 9-5 job and so I can’t complain but what happens is you get a spurt where things are going really well and then you’re done your creative thing and you’re empty because you’ve given all of yourself to whatever it was,” she said.
“Then you have to refill before you have anything to give out again and while you’re refilling, you have this big, blank space where you get up in the morning and think ‘oh my god, what am I going to do with myself’ and trying to have faith during those black hole periods is very challenging. I think I’m emerging from one of those.”
Calder has recently wrapped up writing a book that’s now in the editing phase. It’s called The Inviting Life and talks about homemaking and hosting people and what it all means. She will also have a brand new column in the Globe and Mail called “Domestic Affairs” starting Sept. 15 where she’ll talk about quality domestic products that really work.
Exploring food as a passion is allowing Calder to have way more fun that cooking as a career ever did. She says there’s a tension between cooking for passion and cooking for profession.
“I think there can be a real danger when you have a passion that you turn into a profession. I’ve actually recently found my passion again because there’s no money involved.”