Ep. 2246 Steve Hoffman, A Season for That | Book Club with Richard Hough

As outsiders, it's very easy for us to be skeptical of American cuisine and American culture more generally, but I think you're doing a great job, Steve, of representing that culture and showing it about depth and the history that lies behind it? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, unfortunately, what we're known for is what we've gotten very good at, and that is, making food very cheap and very bad for the human body and very profitable. But there is an enormous amount of really beautiful energy in American food right now, and it's almost all coming from cultures that we would consider, you know, from non from non European cultures. Hello, and welcome to book club with the Italian wine podcast. I'm your host, Richard Hoff, and I'm delighted that you're joining us as we get between the vines with some of the best wine writing out there. So sit back, pour yourself a glass, and enjoy the show with the Italian Wine Podcast. Hello, and welcome to book club with the Italian Wine Podcast. This month, our guest is Steve Hoffman. Sorry. Our guest is Steve Hoffman. I should know how to pronounce that given my name. Steve is from, Turtle Lake in Shoreview, Minnesota, and he is the author of A Season for That, Lost and Found in the Other Southern France. He is also one of the Italian Wine Podcast's top five wine books of 2024 as selected by Tamlin Curran in the last episode of Book Club. So if you haven't already listened to that episode, I'd urge you to do so. There's some really great, wine books in that selection, and Tamzin was a lot of fun to talk to. So, Steve, hi. How are you? Congratulations on on being selected as one of the top five Harry Monde books. Thank you. I'm, a little bit intimidated to be following on the heels of Tamlin Curran, the legendary Tamlin Curran, but I'll do my best to to to hold up my end of this. Okay. No pressure. Before we talk about your book, I'd like to explore a bit about your background and your interest in food and wine more generally. But I understand from your biography that you are a tax preparer as well as a food writer. And I'm sure you've been asked this before, but it seems like quite an unlikely partnership. So could you tell us a bit about how you manage those two professional interests as a tax preparer and how you balance that with your work as a wine writer? Absolutely. Yes. I'm a strange hybrid. I'm an industry of one. The the reason that I have a tax preparer is indirectly related to the fact that I studied, French, English, and ancient Greek in college, which, qualified me for almost no positions that would actually pay anything. So over the course of my my wandering professional career, I kind of moved from, being first of all, being a stay at home dad for a while with our daughter, eventually, doing some work in real estate, and then finally inheriting a tax business from my mother-in-law. So when I I I sort of my my my food writing career really began in 2012 during a trip to Southern France that is the subject of this book. I I kept an extensive journal. I ended up submitting some pieces that evolved from that journal to our local newspaper. Those were published and then won, a national food writing award in The US. And but so it it came a little bit out of nowhere. It can seem as if my food writing career came out of nowhere, but really what that was was a return to my early love of books, language, literature. And the intervening years of, you know, having to do whatever I could to, to, you know, to pay all the bills by the end of the year was in some sense an anomaly. However, in an interesting way, they really work well together. The tax preparation in The United States is very intensely seasonal. There's a very short, very intense season between about the January and about the April. And so the way that my industry is set up, I end up making really the vast majority of our family's income in the first half of the year, and that buys me a kind of, freedom in the second half of the year to write extensively, to take a lot of time to write and to write about, you know, what I love rather than simply chasing assignments that will pay. So it's a it's an odd hybrid, but but in in some in some sense, it it works quite well. And do you do you do Italian tax returns by chance, Charlotte? I don't. I don't. I I don't. I I get asked that a lot because my clients know that I spent a lot of time abroad, but I, have no interest in wading into the the the troubled waters of international taxation. Yeah. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. You you mentioned this, experience where you went to to France in in 2012, but that that wasn't your first formative experience in France. Was it you had this experience as a as an intern, when you were younger? Can you tell us something about that, your first trip to to Paris? Yes. Absolutely. I so I'd taken French, really starting in about sixth grade. So from the end of elementary school all the way through high school and into college, I had taken French. I'd been a competent French student, not re really because I worked that hard at it or was particularly talented other than I had a good accent, and that was something that I couldn't take any credit for it. It was just, something I seem to be born with. So so I was I was, you know, I took French because I thought it was more beautiful than, you know, the German I probably should have taken with the last name of Hoffman. And with no not much more thought than that, I ended up just sort of sticking with it. But then, I took the junior year off, the third year off of, you know, what was my college career and went to Paris, sort of had this flash insight that if I was ever gonna actually speak French, I needed to go there, and I probably needed to not go on a school sponsored trip where I would be surrounded by my classmates, American classmates who would be mostly still speaking English even if we were in Aix En Provence. So I went to Paris. I spent nine months there. I, was an intern at the Little Brothers of the Poor. Their business model, they for for lack of a better term, was to try to relieve the loneliness of elderly people in the city. The the French state more or less took care of their physical, and medical needs, but, there were a lot of alone, lonely, elderly people in Paris. And my job was to spend five afternoons a week visiting them in their apartments and just talking with them for an hour or so and then moving on to the next. So I had this, first of all, crash course in French conversation, But I also had a kind of transformation personally in that trip where I went from being this, you know, I consider myself a not particularly interesting late adolescent or, yeah, early young man, from suburban, Minnesota. And suddenly, I was in Paris, functioning adequately as a citizen of a world capital in a foreign language. And it was this new it presented a version of myself that I just became intoxicated with. And it had me fall in love with France, both because I did fall in love with Paris as a city, but even almost more so I fell in love with this new version of myself that I I that that I had would never have believed was possible before that trip. And that really led to an entire adulthood, full of, you know, frank, Francophilia. I became fascinated with Paris, with France, with French culture, French literature, and tried to get back as often as I could. Excellent. Such an unusual internship experience to to spend your your internship with lonely French pensioners, but I can I get how that could also be completely rewarding and and in some ways life changing as well? You know, it was emotionally rewarding for sure. Then as I said, additionally, it was just, you know, it was the sink or swim version of learning a language. You know? I I had to I had to sit there and make the best of things. And I I made a hash of it for a lot of those months as I was feeling my way into the language and the subtleties of speaking it a