Swerve magazine food columnist wins prestigious cookbook illustration prize

Pierre Lamielle, a food columnist for Calgary's Swerve magazine, has won the 2009 Gourmand Awards in Paris, France for his cookbook Kitchen Scraps: A Humorous Illustrated Cookbook. He was competing against 19 other cookbooks from 17 countries, according to a Canadian Press report.

The Gourmand Awards were founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau to honour excellence in cookbook presentation. 

"Edouard Cointreau made me deliver the acceptance speech in French," said Lamielle, an adamant anglophone who was raised in North Vancouver and now lives in Calgary. 

As he said in a release from Whitecap Books, his publisher, "I'm not all that French. I just fake it to sound cool."

As he described it in his blog, he was inspired by his magazine column to do the cookbook.

Like most things, Kitchen Scraps was conceived in the Spring. Swerve Magazine is a weekly listings magazine (but it is so much more than just listings) that comes out every Friday with the Calgary Herald.While I was working at the newspaper as a designer and illustrator, the always innovative and inspiring editor of Swerve, Shelley Youngblut, asked me if I would be interested in writing an illustrated food column for Easter. 

“Just do whatever you like, have a recipe and draw something lurveley… and have [it] ready on Monday.”

 His first pitch for the book was unsuccessful before enrolling at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. When he returned to Canada, he pitched the idea again and landed the deal with Whitecap. 

Some samples of his recipes and accompanying illustrations can be found at http://kitchenscraps.wordpress.com/