SLOW SUMMER: Fanny SingerThe writer on discovering slower routes into family summers.

Fanny Singer was raised in the art of slow living. As a child, she would vacation in the south of France—a place where slow summers are a source of national pride—and growing up, she watched her mother, the chef Alice Waters, pioneer her celebrated and community-driven farm-to-table movement. Now, Singer is finding new ways to carry on these traditions: As a writer, she is the author of the contemplative cookbook and culinary memoir Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories and the Substack recipe newsletter The Green Spoon, and as co-founder of Permanent Collection, she has created a line of hand-crafted objects and homeware that are designed to never need replacing. Here, Singer discusses how, as a mother now herself, she is creating slow, meaningful summers for her own family.

Angie Sijun Lou: What does a slow summer look like to you?

Fanny Singer: As a child, I used to travel with my parents to the south of France. In Europe, there is a total slowdown in August, an abdication of responsibility which is at the etymological core of vacation—to vacate one’s life and occupy a different mental and physical space. 

The closest I’ve come to that in my new life as a mother is by sharing long meals with friends. I will stop by the farmer’s market on Sundays and fix a mid-morning breakfast that lasts into the afternoon, or I will host what I call a “linner,” a late-afternoon dinner that begins at 3:30 and ends before the children’s bedtime. As a new mother, I am still learning how to achieve the decompression that summers used to signify. 

ASL: Where do you look for inspiration?

FS: I live in LA, where the climate is conducive to plants growing with minimal oversight. I have planted 15-20 different varieties of heirloom roses. Our arbor is adorned with beautiful passion fruit flowers and a wide variety of fruits. We have an outdoor cabana that I’ve painted in a Le Corbusier-inspired palette. It reminds me of our garden in Berkeley: My mother used to plant geraniums, sages and flowers that gave this heady, olfactory cocktail that wafted over the house. For my daughter, Cecily, I planted fraises de bois, the wild alpine kind of strawberries, and chocolate cosmos, which smell just like Dutch-processed cocoa. 

ASL: I love that you plant something for someone.

FS: When I became a mother, my axis of attention completely shifted from myself to my daughter. Everyone says you move from selfish to selfless. I would look at my mother in disbelief as she would bite into the perfect peach and then give the rest to me. Only when I became a mother myself did I understand how the desire to give the best bit away becomes instinctively encoded in you. 

ASL: How does your approach to food change with the season? 

FS: I connect with the natural world in order to understand a temporality that is beyond the manufactured hyper-speed we are used to under capitalism. When I visited Japan in 2019, I ate little flower buds that were only available for a two-week window. They were exceedingly bitter. My friends told us that eating them was a way of reminding us of the moment’s ephemerality. 

We aren’t supposed to be able to consume the same foods year-round—a menu should change daily. Will the snap peas you bought at the market maintain their texture after two days of intense heat? These micro-considerations train our reverence for the season. 

ASL: What is a food that captures the essence of summer for you?

FS: I loved eating blackberries from the thicket when I was a child. My birthday falls in mid-August, which is when the blackberries become so ripe that they are almost like jam. There is a beautiful poem by Robert Hass that ends with this line: “There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

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This story was created in partnership with CHANDON as part of Slow Summer—a new series celebrating the simple joy of hosting friends with CHANDON Spritz. Please enjoy responsibly.