No one who knew Dorie Greenspan as a kid would have pegged her for a career in food, especially after she burned down her parents’ kitchen when she was in middle school — a misunderstanding involving a pot of boiling oil and a box of frozen French fries. Banned from the kitchen, she didn’t dare turn on a stove again until she got married and had no choice: She had to figure out a way to make dinner and keep herself and her husband in the sweets they craved but couldn’t afford on their just-starting-out budget. That’s when she discovered that she loved baking and loved sharing what she baked.
Not that she instantaneously went from back-of-the-bag cookies to five James Beard Awards and a few New York Times bestsellers … in between there was graduate work in gerontology and a job baking in the basement of a Greenwich Village restaurant, a job she was fired from when she changed the signature cake and didn’t tell anyone. She’s been playing around with recipes ever since.
Happily, no one fires you when you fiddle with formulas for cookbooks, and Dorie has written fifteen cookbooks, among them Baking with Dorie, Dorie’s Cookies, Around My French Table, Baking from My Home to Yours and Dorie’s Anytime Cakes, her latest. Tucked among them are the books she’s written with people she admires: Baking with Julia, was written to accompany Julia Child’s PBS series of that name (in addition to being a celebrated book, it was a chance for Dorie to work with more than two dozen of American’s outstanding pastry chefs and Julia, who became a lifelong friend); The Café Boulud Cookbook was written with the extraordinarily talented French chef, Daniel Boulud; and Desserts by Pierre Hermé and Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé were written with France’s most famous pastry chef.
Much of Dorie’s work connects America and France. She’s been a part-time Parisian for almost 30 years and was awarded the Mérite d’Agricole from the French government for her writing on the culture and cuisine of that country.
Dorie is best known for her baking books and the way she writes recipes — accessible, easy-going and encouraging. Her style tilts to the simple, but because she is crazy about home baking and its magic, and because she wants everyone to get as much joy from being in the kitchen as she does, she crafts her recipes to be doable for everyday bakers and cooks, even first-timers. A former columnist for The New York Times and The Washington Post, Dorie publishes the weekly xoxo Dorie newsletter on Substack.
