How a Joke About Ricardo at Montreal's Salon du Livre Became a Cookbook — With Explicit Stories

By M. De La Croix

It Started With a Conversation

I've been to Montreal's Salon du Livre a few times over the years. It's one of the largest French-language book fairs in the world — thousands of book lovers, authors, publishers, all packed into one space with that particular energy of lines snaking around tables and readers waiting for a signature from someone whose work has meant something to them.

One name consistently commands the longest lines there: Ricardo.

If you're not from Quebec, let me paint the picture. Ricardo Larrivée is an institution. Chef, television personality, cookbook author, founder of a magazine, a product line, and a brand that has expanded across every platform imaginable. His cookbooks are perennial bestsellers. His face is on everything. And at book fairs? The women waiting for his autograph line up like he's a rock star — because to many of them, he is.

Master and I were talking about this one day — not at the fair, just in conversation, the Salon du Livre coming up as a reference point. The lines. The fans. The particular energy of a room full of women holding cookbooks, waiting patiently to stand in front of a man they clearly adore.

"They don't just want his recipes," Master said. "They want him."

We laughed. And then Master said something that stopped the conversation cold.

"What if Ricardo did a cookbook with sexy stories mixed in?"

The Idea That Wouldn't Let Go

It was a joke. Sort of.

But the more we sat with it, the more obvious it became that it wasn't a joke at all — it was an insight. Because why do people buy celebrity chef cookbooks from someone they're already following online, where the recipes are free? It's not purely about the food. It's about connection. Aspiration. A kind of intimacy-by-proxy with someone whose lifestyle, sensibility, and presence you find compelling.

Those women lining up for Ricardo weren't just there for the Swedish meatball recipe. They were there because food and desire have always been tangled together, and cookbooks — at their best — are as much about longing as they are about technique.

The title came to Master almost immediately: Everyone Needs to Eat.

It's a double meaning, and it works on both levels. You need to eat every day. Multiple times. It is non-negotiable, universal, relentless. And intimacy — real intimacy, the kind that builds a life between two people — is the same way. Not optional. Not occasional. A daily need.

So why do we pretend these two things belong in separate books?

How I Wrote It

At the time, I was already deep in the French translation of Why Submissive Women Are Happier — a project that required a completely different kind of focus. But the cookbook idea kept surfacing. One afternoon I just decided: I'm going to write it.

The process was surprisingly natural. I started with recipes that Master and I actually make — dishes that have their own memories attached to them. A Swedish meatball recipe that exists because of a particular evening in a Stockholm Airbnb. A Pad Thai that, I'll be honest, never quite made it to the table that night.

For each recipe, I wrote a story. Not a polite suggestion of romance. An explicit story about a couple making that dish — and what happened in the kitchen, and after. Because that's the truth of cooking together when you're in a real relationship. It's tactile, it's warm, it's often funny, it's sometimes clumsy, and if the chemistry is right, it goes somewhere.

Fifty recipes. Fifty stories. Chapters organized by meal type — breakfasts, small plates, mains, desserts — each one a complete recipe you'll actually want to make, paired with a story that captures what the kitchen really feels like when two people are in it together.

The book flowed. I think it's because it was never a creative exercise. It was documentation, in a sense. Real experiences, real desire, real dynamic between two people — just given a narrative shape.

Why AI Can't Write This Book

AI can write recipes. Feed it enough cookbooks and it will produce competent, accurate, even creative recipes. AI can write erotica, too — there's no shortage of it online, and language models have ingested all of it.

But Everyone Needs to Eat exists because Master and I have a real relationship — a real D/s dynamic — with real meals and real memories accumulated over time. The Pad Thai chapter isn't about Pad Thai. It's about a specific kind of playfulness, a specific power exchange, a specific night. The recipe is real because the memory is real.

An AI girlfriend doesn't eat. She doesn't cook. She doesn't stand at a stove while something bubbles behind her, distracted because someone's hands are on her waist. She doesn't create the kind of memory that later becomes a story worth telling.

There's a particular irony in the current moment: men are increasingly choosing AI companions who require nothing — no meals, no kitchen, no shared Sunday mornings with coffee and whatever needs to be used up before it goes bad. And meanwhile, the most intimate thing two people can do on an ordinary Tuesday is figure out dinner together. Share the mental load of it. Stand in the same small space and make something.

That's what this book is about. Not despite the explicit content — because of it. The domesticity and the desire aren't separate. They're the same thing.

What's Inside

50 Recipes from Around the World — organized across breakfast, small plates, mains, and desserts. These are real recipes. Tested, doable, the kind of thing you'll bookmark and actually return to. Swedish meatballs. Thai Pad Thai. Dishes from a dozen different countries, each carrying the particular texture of the place and moment they came from.

50 Explicit Stories — one per recipe, featuring diverse couples across different relationship styles. These aren't afterthoughts. They're the point. Full stories about real dynamics, real desire, what actually happens when two people cook together and the cooking stops mattering.

A Real Double Meaning Throughout — the book never lets you forget that feeding yourself and feeding a relationship require the same things: attention, effort, showing up daily, sharing the work.

Where It Fits

Everyone Needs to Eat sits between two other projects. Why Submissive Women Are Happier is getting a sequel — Book 2 is in progress. This cookbook is the in-between book. Lighter in tone, explicitly playful, but rooted in the same honest examination of what real relationships actually look like from the inside.

If you've read Why Submissive Women Are Happier, you know the voice. This one is that same voice in an apron.

A Note on Reviews

The book is available now on Kindle, rated 18+ on Amazon. If you've read it and haven't left a review, consider it. Reviews are how other readers find the book. Even a sentence or two makes a real difference.

This isn't a big publisher with a marketing budget. It's two people who had a conversation about Ricardo at a book fair and followed it somewhere unexpected.

Everyone Needs to Eat: Satisfy Your Hunger is available now on Amazon Kindle.
👉 Get it here

Rated 18+ — explicit content. For adults who cook, who love, and who understand that both are daily acts of survival.

M. De La Croix is the author of Why Submissive Women Are Happier and Everyone Needs to Eat: Satisfy Your Hunger.