Mary Castel embarked on the porcelain edition six years ago, by founding a fragile house, which revives a long family tradition devoted to gastronomy and the table arts.
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“We cannot appreciate the porcelain, the beautiful plates and the tableware if we do not like to eat. In my family, we have been good living, and this for several generations.
My father was raised in Paris by his grandparents. His grandfather worked in Limoges porcelain, and her grandmother, which held a small art store on the table on rue de Paradis, was a very good cook and a tutelary figure of the family that I had the Chance to know until my adolescence. It is with her that my father learned the values of gastronomy and cooking techniques.
She was piocating her inspirations on the left and right, recorded by hand the recipes in a notebook that my father kept preciously: liver pâté, bird nests, mustard rabbit, hedgehog cake, cabbage perdress, Pike dumplings, bouillabaisse … But above all, pistou soup, which is my Madeleine de Proust.
We are not from the south, even if my great-grandmother had Spanish origins, but every summer we found ourselves in the family house, in Périgord. On August 15, for the Sainte-Marie (my great-grandmother was called Marie-Henriette), we were preparing a gigantic pistou soup.
It was always a great moment, because there are a lot of vegetable cuts and other preparations upstream, everyone was getting there. Everyone had their role: the little ones scored, swelled or pelaged, the greatest cut, chiselled, choped, cripples these times in the kitchen, when we are already gather around a table, are sometimes even more powerful and precious than The moment of the meal itself.
I’m not a big cook, I have no technique, but I know how to manage with a recipe and I love to eat for family and friends, when I have time, during the holidays .
With ancestors in porcelain, a great sommelier at La Tour d’Argent, an uncle at the head of a brewery and a restorer father, I took a long time to come back to the origins. I first wanted to work in art, be auctioneer, have a gallery, then I worked in a communication agency for eighteen years.
When I started to go a lot to the restaurant, I was struck by the fact that, whatever the dish and the number of hours that the teams devoted to it, it always ended up in a large white plate basic. And then, one day, in the street, I saw a card with the “fragile” signage, and I had the idea of creating a fragile house. I set up the project and proposed to my father, retired, and my brother to work with me. Fragile house echoes the family inheritance, but also to my little sister born Trisomique, who died very young. She was fragile, too, and, in our work, we are very committed to disability, to stay a little with her.
On August 15, the whole family finds themselves, even today, around a pistou soup. It’s the dish that always brings us together. “