Harriet Davidson’s Yummy Christmas Guide
Harriet is a food writer and editor, and a cook, with a strong interest in food being the vehicle for change, community, connection, collaboration and conviviality. Starting out in the food world through Australian magazine Gourmet Traveller, she followed her curiosities into the kitchen and started cooking in restaurants before moving to France to continue working in food through writing, cooking and editing cookbooks, whilst also deepening her understanding of the beautiful but complex world of food at every stage, from working with the growers, to the cooks, to the publishers.
Harriet is currently working freelance as a writer and editor, largely with cookbooks, and is based between Paris and Sydney, and their respective countryside’s or seasides, but has the tendency to frolic. She is also one of three women running restaurant and café-association Aux Bons Vivres, just south of Paris, where she cooks and works to help build a community around mindful food via events and exhibitions.
*Photo by Lean Timms
You can follow Harriet on Instagram @harriet.olive or follow along at harrietolive.substack.com
Words by Harriet Davidson
Produce and people, my two great loves in life; my gift ideas are centred around food. It all comes back to cooking and eating mindfully, to savouring small moments of joy, to community and to connection; to food being about something far greater than beauty and pleasure, as important as those are to a good life. It's no surprise that almost all of the items on my list come from the minds and hands of brilliant women. Here’s to a holiday season full of beauty, pleasure and community.
A book that’s close to my heart. I spent much of this first year living in France editing this beautiful book by Australian-based chef, Danielle Alvarez, and France-based writer, Libby Travers from the seaside city of Marseille, and the countryside of South-West France.
It’s a book about home cooking, largely centred around the Italian concept of cucina povera – making do with what you have, but further to that, making something beautiful out of very little. Between Danielle’s way with food that’s a culmination of her time in fabulous restaurants, including Chez Panisse and Sydney’s Fred’s, and her passion and deep understanding for well-grown food, and Libby’s extensive knowledge and passion for food in the context of place, people and history, and of food literature, it’s one magical collaboration.
It's a book that will teach you a whole lot without you really realising, whether that be about how to salt or the history of salt. It’s a book that is sure to become a staple, one splattered with garlicky tomato sauce, and one to read by the fire or by the sea. My number one recommendation for a gift this holiday season, and all the holiday seasons to follow.
Now, this tart bag, it would be a perfect gift to go alongside Danielle and Libby’s book, to transport the pissaladière you won’t be able to resist making, or perhaps the fig and hazelnut frangipane tart. Maybe it’s to your beach picnic, maybe it’s to your sister-in-law’s New Year’s Eve party, an item you didn’t know you needed, but that will change your life.
I first came across Johanna when she was cooking in Marseille – her way with food instantly captured me. I then came to learn that she worked with food in a more permanent way too, through painting. Her artwork captures moments in food, usually around the kitchen table or of the season’s latest produce. Johanna studied textile design and had a career in fashion for 10 years before becoming chef so she has always painted. “Today I find the same creative process in cooking, which is also a craftwork. I find a strong bond between my cooking and my paintings, which are scenes of life around a table and moments shared in the kitchen.” Her paintings invoke a sense of calm and nostalgia for the simple moments, and the colours she uses have a certain warmth to them. I suppose similar to her Med-inspired food. Johanna is also offering prints of a selection of her paintings. A website is on the way, but in the meantime, get in touch via Instagram at @johannasolal. Paintings start from €170 and posters from €30.
Sarah is a Marseille-based embroider who started her label by collecting heirloom French linen from estates and brocantes around France and giving them a new life through hand-embroidering them. The outlines of cabbages, radishes, sea creatures or perhaps cutlery get carefully stitched onto these linen tablecloths and napkins that are custom-made to suit your table size and number of people who usually fill it. I love her work for many reasons – it encourages a slower-paced life, one where time at the table is important, it carries on the tradition of embroidery and well-produced linen, it reminds us that even the mundane things like setting a table can be a moment for beauty. I always feel the act of setting the table is part of a language of care for those you are cooking for, and that’s taken to another level when the table is set using napery that’s had the hands of brilliant women carefully creating it from an atelier in wonderful Marseille.
Tan leather clogs
For the kitchen and for the vegetable garden, these are my favourite shoes. With a pair of scrummy woollen socks in the winter, and just as is in the summer. The ones I’m wearing most at the moment are a pair from Maison Empeurer in Marseille, a Swedish style clog in beige, but I also adore the France, Nantes-based brand Bosabo – a family run business of five generations.
The best of the best when it comes to mandolins. It’s not unusual for me to travel with mine … It’s a game-changer in the kitchen – making food go further and bringing textures you simply cannot nail with a knife. Thinly shaved fennel to mix through a green salad perhaps, or long slices of courgette for a quick flash in the oven before you douse them in olive oil, garlic, lemon and Parmesan. It’ll make holiday feasting even better. Just include a little ‘be careful, stay safe’ note on your card to avoid any mishaps with the sharp blade.
I was wildly lucky to be gifted one of these silk scarves earlier this year at Ruth’s wonderful creative Storytelling retreat in Provence, and I’ve worn it almost every day since. I find a lovely scarf in the kitchen a very useful thing, whether it’s to wear around your hair to keep it out of your way or to tie around your neck for that little bit of extra warmth, and a touch of kitchen beauty. Also, brilliant when you’re travelling. These are designed and made in the UK, and there’s a great selection of tones and patterns to choose from.
These classic Catalan knives are the ones we use in the restaurant-association I’ve spent much of this past summer working in, both as a cheese knife or as a knife for heartier dishes, but you also see them in kitchens all over France used as a paring knife. Quite the staple. Buy one for a friend and gift it with your favourite cheese perhaps, or do as my father did and buy a set of eight to use as family steak knives. Hand-made in Spain with carbon steel blades and boxwood handle knives, they’ll last for years to come.
Kaïa is an olive oil brand that was founded by Parisian born Sarah Bre after spending the summer of 2020 in Tunisia, where her father is from, and reconnecting with her family’s tradition of producing olive oil. The olive oil is produced with handpicked olives from her fifth-generation family-owned estate, and with great thought behind the production, with over 50 women working during the harvest using knowledge that has been passed down through generations. It’s olive oil heaven, of course, but it’s about more than that – Sarah hopes to use the brand to, “spotlight a widely overlooked terroir, encourage a more holistic approach to life, explore the ongoing role of food and farming as resistance and create a better world where our stories can live on.”
From Sydney-based ceramicist, Kattleya Silang, comes Studio Tasa, her recently launched line of ceramics handmade from her studio. “Our work isn’t precious, but it should be used to create moments that are.” I’ve been lucky to be eating and serving from Kattleya’s pieces for over five years now, and they’re still some of my favourite. Made with a wild amount of care, they’re timeless pieces that you hang onto forever. And they’re pieces that elevate your daily life. Kattleya’s range currently includes bowls, vases and candle holders, but she also loves working on collaborations and custom commissions (hint: my Kattleya Silang fruit bowl and large serving plate are two pieces I can’t imagine life without). To find out more, and to place an order, get in touch with Kattleya via Instagram at @studiotasa, or via e-mail at hello@studiotasa.com.
My go-to, a vermouth is the ultimate beverage – either it’s a perfect not-too-strong apéro option, served over ice with a slice of orange or lemon, or it’s festive in an ice-cold martini. The staple of any bar cart. This is an Australian label made using organic Australian grapes and native Aboriginal herbs and spices. My favourites are Lively White for those in the Southern Hemisphere, to sit and sip on from the balcony with a bowl of cold prawns or Bold Red for those in the Northern Hemisphere, to sit and sip on by the fire, perhaps with a piece of your mother’s Grand Marnier-drenched fruitcake.
I’ve swooned over Anne-Claire’s photographs for many years now. Her work focuses on capturing France’s dynamic food world, from agriculture to gastronomic restaurants, always with strong consideration for the environment. Whether it be a farmer out in their fields, a chef foraging for their menu or a sheep waiting to be milked, Anne-Claire’s work captures our food system at all stages through soft light and sacred moments that we’re so rarely privy to as eaters and diners. Anne-Claire is also the founder of Aux Bons Vivres, the very special restaurant association I’m now working with her on. Get in touch with Anne-Claire through Instagram at @anneclaire.heraud or via e-mail at anneclaireheraud@gmail.com – she’s offering your choice of her photographs as unframed prints on matt fine art paper for the holiday season, starting from €120, plus postage.
I first met Maddy, the woman behind Nonna’s Grocer, at a pop-up dinner she was holding in her uncle’s antique storage warehouse – her and a friend cleared the packed room to fit long tables into the space and the two of them cooked for 40 of us. It was incredible. She’s since launched a line of candles mimicking fruit and vegetables as an ode to her grandfather’s fruit shop, which she hand-makes from her studio on the South Coast of New South Wales in Australia. My faves are the tomato and the plum, but also the butter. Drool. The detail of each piece is astounding. Such fun. Give a set of them, or perhaps pop one in the stockings of each of your loved ones.
Another kitchen game-changer, and perhaps a nice little bundle with a mandolin. Again, one thing I usually travel with when I’m going on long trips because it instantly elevates a dish – nutmeg on porridge, grated parmesan as light as snow to shower your spaghetti alla Nerano with, ginger for a soy dressing or garlic in your French vinaigrette. One of those things that becomes your best friend in the kitchen, that you can’t imagine life without once you’ve had a taste of it. I suggest the red one.
Two Towns in Provence by M.F.K Fisher
I always love a book as a gift over the holidays to curl up by the fire with, or to lay in the sunshine by the sea with, and this is one of my all-time favourites. M.F.K. Fisher was one of the world’s greatest writers on food, or writers full stop. A woman whose strength, confidence and gumption are wildly inspiring. In this book, Two Towns in Provence, she captures two of France’s most special cities, Aix en Provence and Marseille. Two places that I fell hard and fast for over this past year. I love the NYT review of this book, reading, “Mrs. Fisher loves ships, docks and harbors. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of gastronomy has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating.” I find Fisher’s style can take a moment to warm to, but a perfect gift for anyone who loves food, travel and good writing.
