A New Brunswick man has found the perfect ingredients for a top-selling cookbook on Amazon while also sharing his Acadian culture and recipes.
“It’s overwhelming it is a little bit surprising,” said Brian Cormier, the author of the cookbook called Acadian Recipes and More.
At the end of February, Cormier released the Acadian recipe book 45 years to the day of his grandmother’s passing, who appears on the front cover proudly cooking up her infamous poutine rapeé.
The idea, Cormier said, was prompted by the 20,000 members of his Acadian Poutine Rapeé Facebook Group launched in honour of the popular Acadian dish.
“I have been mostly number one since it was released in the Canadian cooking category,” even beating out some celebrity chefs said Cormier. “People are buying it all over North America 20 per cent of the sales of from the United States,” he said.
Over three years, Cormier said he gathered up recipes from his sources and from ones that were submitted to him and have preserved them in a paperback.
He has sold 600 copies in only three weeks and now plans to release two more volumes, “The next one is coming out in June which will be volume two of the book and then I have a holiday one coming out in September,” said Cormier.
The director and curator of the Acadian Museum of the University of Moncton Jeanne Mance Cormier said, like most cultures, family recipes were passed down through the generations, but many lost over the years.
“There is not a lot of those Acadian recipes around, so it is quite unique with that cookbook to bring forward many other kinds of recipes is important,” she said.
She says the book written in English is helping to preserve those secret ingredients and share the Acadian culture with the world.
She agrees that nostalgia is wrapped up in the book’s success, “it’s the taste and the memories.”