As a cookbook author, food and travel journalist, educator and entrepreneur, Georgeanne Brennan is everything you can think of. She grew up in Southern California and got her college education from San Diego State University, the University of Aix-Marseille in Provence and the University of California, San Diego, where she earned her Masters in History.
In 1970, Brennan returned to Southern France with her husband and daughter and bought an old farmhouse where they made and sold goat cheese and raised solder feeder pigs for two years. Both of them eventually took teaching jobs and returned to France once a year after that. Despite the change in career, Brennan was always passionate about food, specifically the growing organic market. In 1982, Georgeanne and a partner, Charlotte Glenn, started a new venture called Le MarchA Seeds, a national mail-order specialty vegetable seed company. Le Marche soon became a huge phenomenon in the US. With customers from all over the country, Le Marche soon got featured in magazines such as Family Circle, Metropolitan Home, Organic Gardening and Vogue, and in the food and garden sections of many newspapers.
Cookbooks and Awards
Her involvement in these activities soon got her to write her first book, The New American Vegetable Cookbook, co-authored by Isaac Cronin and Charlotte Glen. Since then, Brennan has embarked on a journey where she has written numerous books, some of the most popular being Fresh Garden Cooking in the French Style, POTAGER, The Glass Pantry; Preserving Flavors, The Food and Flavors of Haute Provence, among many others. She simultaneously also got nominated for and won the prestigious James Beard Award. She then began making her own French farmhouse-style aperitif wines and, in 1997, wrote the cookbook Aperitif; Recipes for Simple Pleasures in the French Style, which won a Julia Child Award. On top of that, Savoring France, the series, got the Versailles International Cookbook award.
Her highly praised memoir, A Pig in Provence, recounts her memories of living in France with her family when she bought a farmhouse, giving the readers a glimpse of her simple life and her in-garden fresh cooking.
Other Ventures
In addition to the books, Brennan also writes regular features for The San Francisco Chronicles newspaper’s food section and has contributed to Fine Cooking, Bon Appetit, Cooking Pleasures, The New York Times, Garden Design, Metropolitan Home, Horticulture and Organic Gardening.
In 2009, after spending years in the food industry, Brennan opened her cooking vacation school in a restored 17th-century convent in a medieval village in Haute Provence. This week-long experience is designed for small groups where they gather and cook from the kitchen garden, time-honored cuisine du postager, and spend time shopping in the village markets and preparing other equally cherished cuisines. This program was featured in Gourmet Magazine twice.
Brennan is working on a book about cheese, a sequel to Pig in Provence. This book is said to be heavily inspired by her work as a principal in a consulting firm where she worked extensively with school lunch programs, providing professional development from kitchen staff, marketing and promotional opportunities.
Undoubtedly, Brenna Georgeanne is a woman in full. She had never worked or owned a restaurant before opening L’Apero les Trios. Her main claim to fame is her cookbooks, that too more than thirty of them. Today, as she owns her own restaurant, has several books under her name, and has numerous features in magazines, Brenna shows no sign of slowing down. At 80, when most people retire, Brenna Georgeanne is planning what big thing to do next!