French actor Gerard Depardieu, who owns vineyards, restaurants and a famously large appetite for the finer things in life, says in a cookbook being released in English this week that he always wanted to be a butcher.
“My eye will roam with equal pleasure over the face of a beautiful woman as it will over the cuts of meat displayed in a butcher’s shop window,” Depardieu writes in “My Cookbook.”
Depardieu, who grew up in the provincial town of Chateauroux, south of Paris, says his parents could only afford meat in the first week of each month — and then it was usually horse meat.
Depardieu’s love of food is legendary. He owns two Paris restaurants with his French actress-girlfriend, Carole Bouquet.
His favorite dish, says the “Green Card” actor, is jellied rabbit with a glass of cold white wine — for breakfast.
Wine lover and foodie“Wine has a soul,” Depardieu writes in the 220-page book, replete with dozens of recipes and photos of the crooked nosed actor working in the kitchen and selecting chickens to cook.
The wine lover bought his first vineyard more than 30 years ago in Burgundy. He was reportedly tipsy when he insulted an unsympathetic critic of the French version of his cookbook on a talk show earlier this year.
“If I have an ambition still unrealized it is to tend the vines, to produce wine and work like a true artisan,” he writes.
Depardieu, 56, has made more than 150 films, and was a leading French actor of the 1980s and 1990s with such hits as “Jean de Florette” and “Cyrano de Bergerac,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
His movie roles have included playing Vatel — the 17th-century chef who, according to legend, killed himself because the fish arrived late when King Louis XIV was coming to dinner.
The ample-girthed actor acknowledges dieting regularly and claims to have lost a total of 661 pounds over the past 10 years. The Depardieu diet involves halving the quantity of food he eats and avoiding bread, but not eating lowfat products. His recipes include plenty of butter and fresh cream, lobster, fish, snails, poultry, calf’s head, ox tail, vegetables and, of course, meat.