Claude Monet's Cookbook

Claude Monet kept cooking journals. Alongside his sketchbooks and his obsessively

documented garden diaries, the painter at Giverny maintained detailed records of what he ate, with whom he shared his meals, and exactly how each dish should be prepared. His culinary ambition was as precise as his eye for light.

The yellow dining room at Giverny, painted the specific shade Monet chose himself, was

where he entertained Renoir, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and Clemenceau. But

when his guests arrived, the conversation rarely turned to painting. It turned to food.

Claude Monet in his dinning room in Giverny

Monet's kitchen grew vegetables, herbs and fruit he had sourced from across France and beyond, he brought back zucchini seeds from Italy and imported bananas for Christmas ice cream. The bouillabaisse recipe came from Cézanne. The bread rolls were made to a recipe by Jean Millet.

His culinary journals, later assembled into Monet's Table by Claire Joyes, with recipes

tested by Joël Robuchon himself, reveal a man who approached cooking with the same

rigor he brought to capturing the light on water.

For Monet, the table and the garden were extensions of the same creative act. The Nymphéas were painted a few hundred metres from the kitchen. Both were works of total absorption.

Les Carnets de Cuisine de Monet, Edition Chêne, by Claire Joyes