LAURA CALDER: A Place At My Table

Articles

A Dispatch from Paris, with Laura (and Peter, too)

1 week ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

It’s been ages since Peter and I did a video together, so I thought it was high time we drop in to say hello. (Click the play button above to watch.) Don’t worry, this won’t be a one-off. We can finally get back on track with these regular video chats, because after a year of rarely being in the same place at the same time for longer than a blink, Peter and I are side by side again, living the same life in the same spot with the same focus. Whew.
Notes from a Country Kitchen

2 weeks ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

I’m always slightly conflicted about whether I prefer country life or city life. Obviously, for convenience, the city is better. That’s where my social life is, and it’s easier to stay fit, because you can walk everywhere instead of always having to climb into a car. But, for quiet, peace, and getting in touch with nature, the country can’t be beat. You don’t realize until you get out there how much you’d actually been craving it. LAURA CALDER: A Place At My Table is a reader-supported publication.
A Petite Postcard from Outside Paris

2 weeks ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

Just what the doctor ordered: a weekend in Burgundy at my friend Camille’s house. It’s the first time I’ve felt lighthearted in as long I can remember.
Letter from Laura (April, 2025)

3 weeks ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

Now, where was I? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself for days. I arrived back in Paris with the thud of someone who’d just come through a time machine. After 10 unmoored days spent entirely in airports and a hospital ward – two places where the light never changes, time ceases to exist, the food is inedible, and where in every crowd you’re just another anonymous face – I was so completely disoriented that nothing seemed familiar anymore.
Notes from the “Departure Lounge”

4 weeks ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

My paternal grandfather, as a young man in the 1930s, went West one summer to work in a coal mine. One day, leading a pit pony hitched to a cart through the mine shaft, the pony stopped dead in its tracks and refused to budge. A lesser man, or a denser one, would have whipped the animal and forced it forward. Not my grandfather. Seeing rocks starting to crumble from the ceiling above them, he quickly unhitched the pony.
A Long Way West of Paris

1 month ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

It was 34 hours door to door, the first door being that of our third-floor Paris apartment and the second being that of room 66 in the palliative care unit of a hospital far, far away. I arrived two hours ago and went straight into my father’s loving arms.
Zen in Paris...

1 month ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

Funny how things can sometimes appear right when you need them. In my case, it was an out-of-the-blue memory of a book I’d read 20 years ago when it first came out, L’art de la simplicité (The Art of Simplicity). I didn’t have any recollection of what exactly was between the covers, I only remembered that it really spoke to me at the time, and a voice in my head was prodding me to find it and read it again.
A Petite Sunday Postcard from Paris

1 month ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

The other day on a café terrace, we ordered two glasses of Champagne and a cornet de frites, and, when they landed on the table, so did a pepper grinder. Peter said, “Very Montreal,” (which is where he’s from). “We always used to consider ourselves great sophisticates for putting pepper on our fries.”In the above photo, we were at a place that didn’t bring us a peppermill, but rather a shaker. (The fries, by the way, were hand-cut only once we’d ordered them.
My New Paris Kitchen

1 month ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

People love to say, “No matter where you go, there you are,” but it’s not entirely true. There is no question that just as certain people bring out the best in us, and others draw out our very worst (sometimes even by their presence alone), places also affect who and how we are. For that matter, so does the weather, so do our clothes, so do our houses, and on and on.
Letter from Laura (March, 2025)

1 month ago | lauracalder.substack.com | Laura Calder

One way to recover from a stressful house move in the dead of winter is to get on a plane with its nose pointed towards Paris. Whatever magic potion this city has laced through its air immediately lifts a weight off your shoulders, and, boy, did I need it.