Tarte Tatin: More of La Belle Vie on Rue Tatin

Tarte Tatin: More of La Belle Vie on Rue Tatin Susan Loomis Further adventures on life in a small French town from Susan Loomis, cookery book writer and author of ‘On Rue Tatin’.‘On Rue Tatin’ was a delightful discovery, and every reader asked for more. The life on Rue Tatin seemed like a dream fulfilled.Now in ‘Tarte Tatin’, Susan Loomis shares with us how she, her husband and two children settled into life in a small French town, learnt about their neighbours and how to be accepted as inhabitants of the town. With her son going to a French school and her husband finding work in the town, Susan Loomis discovers the joys of the French lifestyle – the markets and the food in particular – but also some of the difficulties, particularly for those who are not born French.The creation of the long dreamt-of cookery school is a story of great appeal – everyone who has ever thought of starting their own small business will enjoy the ups and downs of their enterprise, and long to go to Rue Tatin. TARTE TATIN More of La Belle Vie on rue Tatin SUSAN LOOMIS DEDICATION (#u72d06d9d-ffdd-5486-bfff-1ace8eec78d1) I dedicate this book to our children Joseph and Fiona, whose love, humour, and energy suffuse life with a very special richness. I also dedicate this book to the memory of Andr? Taverne whose jokes and ready smile are missed, to his wife, Marie-Odile, and to his sister-in-law Marie-Claire, for their friendship. CONTENTS Cover (#u1e8ba898-923f-56dc-b39c-fddce1164d8a) Title Page (#ube9b9520-04cf-5727-a119-f8386bee0a60) Dedication (#ucd933086-ae63-5e0f-85a2-58f334788055) The Opening up of On Rue Tatin (#u3c4f6f00-95b7-5c79-bd7f-6adf4a0c9bc8) The Kitchen and the Cooking School (#u2cca79f8-9414-5934-b5a1-abcfba37167e) A French Poodle in the House (#u25d2735f-856c-5996-a267-0850756b4d57) An Ode to the Market in Louviers (#ue8b24f52-4b3a-569f-9057-a5e79f642002) The Florists (#litres_trial_promo) Be Careful of Me, I’m Dangerous (#litres_trial_promo) The Place for a Party (#litres_trial_promo) There’s an ‘Ado’ in Our Midst (#litres_trial_promo) Driving ? La Fran?aise (#litres_trial_promo) Paris (#litres_trial_promo) While Louviers Sleeps (#litres_trial_promo) Shopping and the Cart (#litres_trial_promo) Michael’s Studio and the Gentrification of Louviers (#litres_trial_promo) Bi-Culturalism and Play Ball! (#litres_trial_promo) Cultural Differences/Cultural Sameness (#litres_trial_promo) Home Away from Home – September 11 (#litres_trial_promo) Afterword (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) List of Recipes (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) The Opening up of On Rue Tatin (#ulink_d448da1b-6595-5c23-a1ba-447fcc0f321f) It had been five years since we’d moved to rue Tatin in Louviers, northwest of Paris. The house was habitable, though hearty draughts still tugged at the curtains, and attic rooms remained as they were when we bought the place: dry but in sad repair. We used them to store things, like the dozen or more beautiful antique doors that were in the house when we acquired it, building materials and electrical supplies, as well as the general flotsam and jetsam that collectors such as Michael and I accumulate. We had pretty much adjusted to the schedule of Joe’s school, accepting that – just as we’d feel we were getting into our individual rhythms – it seemed to be time for another vacation. Professional demands dictated that we rarely went on holiday, so we would divide our days in two. Michael would generally be with Joe in the morning while I worked, and I would take Joe in the afternoon while Michael worked. Joe would have friends over now and then, but the French don’t share their children in the way Americans do, so it was less often than either we or Joe liked. We had put Joe in a local school, thinking he’d make friends in the neighbourhood but, as luck would have it, most of his friends lived in other towns, and the few boys his age who lived locally were kept hidden somewhere; we’d see them only on their way to school. Michael and I were settling in with a close group of friends that included Edith and Bernard, Christian and Nadine, Babette and Jean Lou, Chantal and Michel, our neighbour Patrick and Anne-Marie and Patrick. We’d even met two Franco-American families who lived in towns nearby, which provided us with some comic relief when we got together and shared evenings, laughing at each other’s jokes because – for a change – we understood them. We had friends in Paris, too, which occasioned going there regularly for dinner, driving back in the wee hours when the roads were empty. I always say it takes an hour to get to Louviers from Paris, but at 1 a.m. it’s an easy forty-five minute trip. We were, all in all, beginning to understand how things worked in France, and to feel comfortable as the only American family in Louviers. Louviers, and France, were beginning to feel like home. My French Farmhouse Cookbook had been published, and I was currently involved in developing and testing recipes for an important American cookbook that was a collaborative effort by many of my colleagues. I was also doing research and testing for the Italian Farmhouse Cookbook, which for two years took me to Italy for long periods of time. I loved doing both projects, particularly the Italian book, since it gave me an insight into a country, people and culture with which I was unfamiliar. I wanted it to be my last farm book, as I felt I’d said what I could say about farming, and I knew that just writing books would no longer be enough to support our family. I began thinking about what would be next. I wouldn’t stop writing books, because it is something I am made to do. But I wanted to use our home for a business, and the business I’d always imagined operating was a cooking school. Way back when we had lived in Seattle I’d wanted to do the same sort of thing, but the situation there hadn’t been right. This time, it just might be. My inspiration to open up our home came initially from the time Michael lived on a farm in the Dordogne with the Dubois family – nearly twenty years ago. Danie Dubois, in an effort to augment her income and give herself an interest outside their isolated little village, decided she would take in paying guests for meals and the night, and would offer ‘cooking weekends’ using local specialties as ingredients. By the time Michael went to live with them, Danie’s business was prospering. She not only made endless meals to satisfy her guests, but she also offered pig and foie gras weekends. For her ‘weekend de cochon’, she and her guests turned an entire pig into delectable pepper- and salt-cured hams, rillettes, blood sausage, head cheese, roasts, chops and more. For the ‘weekend d’oie’ she transformed geese into untold marvels like confit, stuffed gooseneck, foie gras en terrine and a wonderful local delicacy called ‘demoiselles’: goose carcasses grilled on a wood fire. Everything Danie made was sumptuous: her foie gras was so delicate and buttery that it made any other of little interest; her confit was beguilingly crisp on the outside and mouth-melting inside. The confit went so well with her creamy pumpkin soup, the wonderful dandelion salads, made from leaves picked in the field next door and dressed with her own walnut oil, the crisp country breads, her homemade cheese, the grapey wine her husband Guy made from their own grapes … Danie would grill country bread over the fireplace coals and spread it with fresh foie gras. She served this as an aperitif, and what an aperitif it was. Everything Danie did was first-rate, and every dish she made was better than the one before it. Because of this, her enterprise was enormously successful, her table so sought after that she eventually expanded her dining room and turned it into a restaurant, which is still thriving today. Michael and I loved the ambience that Danie’s business gave to the farm; the flow of appreciative guests from around the world; the sharing of traditions; the way the house and their life encompassed everyone; the seamlessness of it all. I’d always wanted to create that at our own home, and I realized that we had the potential on rue Tatin. We wouldn’t house people – the house isn’t large enough – nor would we grow all our own food. We didn’t need to – local farmers would do that for us. We had one problem, however, and that was the kitchen. It was far from suitable for a cooking school in its present state. We’d planned to build a new one, but Michael was still embroiled in the dining room. When we sat down to discuss the idea of the cooking school we realized that it would be at least two years before we could consider bringing the idea to fruition. How, we wondered aloud, could we make the house work for us now? With our friends Pat and Walter Wells, who were over for lunch one day, we came up with the idea of offering lunches to paying guests, tourists who would like a moment of delicious luxury and an opportunity to get a more intimate view of French culture. We all decided, looking around at the dining room and the view out of the window, that it didn’t matter that the house was half finished, or that our ‘forever’ kitchen wasn’t yet built. All I needed for this idea was a kitchen where I could cook fabulous food. ‘This house, this room, this whole place is gorgeous; people will love it as it is,’ Pat said, and Walter concurred. Once the idea had been articulated, I began to get excited. It could be so perfect. I could easily imagine greeting small groups of friendly Americans with meals made from the best of local and mostly organic ingredients, and delicious wines. I could imagine us discoursing on the local community, agriculture, the state of the European Union, and we could answer their questions about life in France. One of my favourite parts of this plan was that we could justify buying beautiful dishes and glassware (which I love) to make lunches the luxurious experience I imagined. I was scheduled to go on a book-tour in the United States not long after our lunch with the Wellses. I decided to take a stab at marketing the lunches as I went, and to that end brought it up during every interview. I enlisted a friend in the US, Marion Pruitt, to be the contact person, knowing that she was so organized she wouldn’t let one detail fall through the cracks, and that people who called would love her. She’d been to visit, too, so she could speak knowledgeably about us and about our location. Before I knew it, a group of five women had signed up as paying guests. When I returned from my book-tour I looked at the house with fresh eyes, and I wondered if I’d been crazy to think we could have strangers here. The setting and the bones of the house were gorgeous, no doubt about it, but would people mind the stacks of crooked old timbers and stones? Would they be as charmed by the unfinished dining room as we were? Would they think the sheet rock wall in the kitchen that Joe used as an easel as cute and practical as we did? ‘We’ll see,’ I thought. Then I began to plan the menu. The group would come in October, one of my favourite times of year. How to decide what to serve? I put myself in the shoes of the person thinking of Norman cuisine: what would they want to eat? Apples, of course. Duck, for there is nothing like it to whisper ‘Normandy’ on the palate. Shellfish, cream, wonderful cheese. Whenever people come to eat I want to offer them all the good and wonderful things we have available to us, but of course in one meal I can’t. So I use the aperitif to offer a multitude of small tastes and flavours that will give a hint of the meal to come, and of the wealth the region offers, as well as a sense of what is typical. I decided that, in this instance, oysters from the cold waters of the Normandy coast were a must. I personally love them plain: just well chilled and without sauces or condiments. As a compromise, to cater to tastes that might not be so pure, I would serve lemon wedges and a sauce mignonette alongside. Anyone who has ever dined in a French home knows how vital pistachio nuts are to the aperitif hour. I have a source for slender, dark pistachios from Turkey, the kind my father used to bring back from there by the laundry bag full when I was a child. I developed a passion for their crisp, rich nuttiness then, and I still love watching others taste them for the first time. Their eyes widen and pretty soon they are back for more, for these pistachios are so much more flavourful than any other. So, duck, oysters, pistachios. The menu needed work. I make a sweet, salty olive cookie from an old Proven?al recipe, and I added that to the aperitif – no one can resist them. Now, I needed a crisp vegetable to round out the selection, and I decided it would be sticks of fresh fennel. It is the only vegetable aside from celery with a natural saltiness, and it is round, fat and crisp in October. I would serve my homemade orange wine, too: its intense, caramel-orange flavour beguiles everyone who tastes it. I decided on confit tomatoes for the first course, since Normandy tomatoes are rich and sweet in early October. To make these, I cut them in half and bake them long and slowly in olive oil with rosemary, thyme, thinly sliced shallots, whole cloves of garlic and sea salt. When they emerge from the oven they taste and smell like concentrated sun. With the roast duck I would serve autumn turnips glazed with cane sugar. Just thinking about it made me hungry. Salad would come from the garden – arugula and baby beet greens, sorrel and snipped sage leaves. I settled on a trio of Normandy cheeses – Livarot, Camembert and Neufch?tel. I would carefully caramelize apples for a tarte tatin. After all, we live on rue Tatin – how could I plan a meal without it? As good fortune would have it, a visit from my parents would coincide with our first lunch. Friendly, warm and well-travelled, they are the perfect lunch companions any time. For our first lunch they would be our trump card, carrying the conversation while Michael and I attended to the details. This lunch would resemble a theatre performance as we hid the worst of the remodelling messes and created a captivating, luxurious ambience. We began cleaning up the dining room, garden and courtyard three days before our guests were due to arrive. Michael moved and stacked materials; we both worked furiously to get the garden cleaned up. I bought and planted flowers and we trimmed and tidied the window boxes. The exterior had looked pretty good before we started. By the time we were finished it looked magical. As for the interior, we cleaned, polished and dusted, and I put bouquets of flowers everywhere. We didn’t have an official bathroom downstairs, but a toilet hidden behind a wall. I hung a pretty curtain over the door and hoped for the best. Finally, it was market day before the big lunch. Accompanied by my parents and Joe, I went to buy all the ingredients, loading myself down with the best butter and milk, the finest tomatoes and oysters, gorgeous little turnips and even some late-season raspberries that smelt like heaven. I wasn’t sure where they would fit in, but how could I resist? I went home and began to prepare the meal, then was up at 6 a.m. the following morning to continue cooking. With my mother’s help I covered the table with an antique monogrammed white linen sheet, then curled a strand of ivy down the centre. Michael almost killed me when he saw the ivy; he had been at great pains to make our one ivy plant climb up a small section of brick wall near the ancient wooden door in our courtyard, and I had just trimmed off the longest pieces. He needn’t have worried, however, as the ivy on the brick still looked good. I knew his reaction resulted from being as nervous as I about this first lunch. I printed up menus on parchment paper and set one at each place, along with sprigs of bay leaves, which guests could take home with them, silver cutlery, our amber and turquoise water glasses from Portugal, crystal wine glasses. I had recently found a stack of blue and white vintage Sarreguemines plates tucked away in a local brocante, second-hand market, and with these on the table it looked fit for royalty. Our guests arrived at 12:30 p.m., right on time. They came into our courtyard exclaiming over the view, and over the aromas issuing from the front door. ‘We could smell this all the way down the street,’ said one of them. ‘We were hoping it was coming from here!’ The day was perfect: sunny and warm with that lovely autumn coolness that makes it perfect for sitting outside. We had put a lively cloth on our round, wrought-iron table in the garden, and set up the parasols so that we could sit outside for the aperitif. Michael gave each guest a glass of orange wine and we all toasted the day and each other, then our guests asked if I would give them a tour of the garden. Michael had recently completed a low, curved stone wall that enclosed the largest part of my herb garden. It held a border of thyme plants, and behind them a trio of different sages. There was salad burnet and sweet cicely, summer savory, bronze fennel and garlic chives. An old-fashioned climbing rose was in its second stage of blooming, covering the house with its bright red flowers. At its foot was one of its favourite companions, tarragon, which had grown into a lacy bush. Further away from the house was another herb garden. To get there we crossed a narrow brick walkway Michael had made with beautiful old, worn bricks, which divided the gravel and grassy portions of the courtyard. The grass was for Joe to play on and we had had to declare it sacred; otherwise it would have been so easy to keep expanding the herbs and flowers until they covered everything. A small, ancient apple tree stood at one side of the grassy patch and an old pear tree stood at the other. We’d planted a rosemary hedge against the metal fence near the pavement, to afford us some privacy. Under the pear tree I’d planted an antique variety of strawberry that was still white when it was ripe, a handful of lily varieties, an ornamental sage whose tiny, fuchsia flowers bloomed almost all year, and a row of dahlias which lent their colour and spirit from mid-June through to November. We were planning to put in a row of espaliered apple trees as soon as the temperature dropped a bit, and these would shield us from our neighbours next door. A laurel nobilis reigned in the corner of the garden, supplying me with bay leaves to perfume sauces and soups, and I had both red and green sorrel in front of that, along with a rhubarb plant. The very foreground of this patch of garden was devoted to lettuces and tomatoes, and a handful of basil plants that were offering their last. I realized, with this tour of the garden, how I’d gathered all my botanical friends around me in the five years we’d lived in Louviers. The house wasn’t finished – and maybe it never would be – but the garden told me I was home. We sat down to our aperitif and could easily have whiled away the afternoon as we nibbled and sipped, but lunch awaited. I excused myself to prepare the first course and get the turnips cooking, remove the duck from the oven so it could rest, and slice Michael’s loaf of freshly baked bread. Michael opened the St V?ran, a golden and buttery white Burgundy, and my parents ushered our guests into the dining room. That occasioned more oohs and aahs and more photos. Michael and I were bubbling with excitement as we saw the reactions these strangers had to our home. We ate our tomatoes confit, then I presented the whole ducks before returning to the kitchen to carve and arrange them in traditionally symmetrical fashion on a warmed platter. I arranged the golden turnips around them, garnished the plate with sprigs of salad burnet and garlic chives, and presented it. Michael poured the wine, a Sablet from the C?tes du Rh?ne. As I knew they would be, the duck and the turnips were a marvellous success. In fact the lunch, from start to finish, was so friendly and delicious that we were all sorry when it was over. When our guests left, just before 6 p.m., Michael and I and my parents looked at each other with satisfaction, knowing it had been a stunning success. The house worked, the meal had been a real insider’s look at French country cuisine and the wonderful products available, and the conversation hadn’t stopped for a minute. Having people come for lunch as strangers and leave as friends was exactly the right use for our house and our talents. A series of lunches followed, as interest was sparked by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Patty Unterman, who came to test one of our lunches, as well as mentions in other top magazines. Each meal required as much work as the first one, since we stopped our lives to clean and organize both garden and house, but we did it with pleasurable anticipation. We ended up doing a dozen lunches over the next twelve months, for groups as large as twelve and as few as two, as we tried it on for size. One of our favourite groups was made up of three generations of the same family. The grandmother organized the meal as a gift to her children and grandchildren, and she worked with me to make sure it was perfect. She wanted the youngest children in the group – who were about eight – to be occupied in some way, as she suspected they would tire of a long meal. I agreed, and arranged for them to be taken in hand by a young man I knew who babysat, spoke a modicum of English and had a driver’s licence. I called the Louviers p?tanque club and asked if the children could watch a game; very kindly, the president offered to teach them how to play. I arranged a visit to a local farm to end the afternoon. The grandmother was delighted, and wanted to know if Joe would be interested in joining her grandchildren. She thought it might be nice for them to meet an American/French boy. I don’t push Joe into these situations, so I said we would wait and see. When the family arrived and he saw how boisterous and fun the children were, he joined right in. The children sat down with us for the first course of pumpkin soup with freshly baked rolls, then they left with the babysitter and returned in time for dessert some four hours later. The lunch was a success except for the fresh chestnuts I’d carefully peeled and braised which are, to me, as prized as truffles. I was happily enjoying mine when I looked around and noticed that several of the guests hadn’t touched theirs. Maybe they didn’t know what they were, I thought, so I began talking about hunting the local chestnuts, about how to prepare them and how happy I was to have been able to offer them. This helped a bit, but many of the chestnuts were still on the plates when they returned to the kitchen. The grandmother confided to me later that not only did her children know what they were, but that they had always refused to eat them. She’d seen them at least try them today, which for her was a huge victory! I had another lunch scheduled with two delightful women from Seattle. They arrived and we all sat down to lunch. I’d marinated a leg of wild boar for three days in a rich m?lange of red wine and spices, then roasted it. I served slices of this as a first course, drizzled with the marinade that I’d reduced to a syrup, along with a small mound of wild boar rillettes that I’d made as well. Following that was a delectable dish of guinea hen roasted with oranges and lemons, a freshly picked garden salad, and poached pears with honey ice cream. There were other little dishes here and there, and everyone had a wonderful time. Joe was home from school that day and he ate with us, which was an exception. For him, I’d purchased a large slab of p?t? as a first course, since wild boar rillettes weren’t yet among his list of favourite dishes. He tucked into the p?t? with gusto, cutting small chunks to eat on bread, interspersing bites of this with nibbles of tiny cornichons. When one of the women wrote to thank me for their experience later, she said, ‘I loved it all, but what I couldn’t get over was watching that little boy eat that p?t?. An American boy would never have done that.’ It hadn’t occurred to me that it was odd for Joe to like p?t?: it is my sure-fire success dish for him – and now for Fiona too. I had a near-disaster on my hands one day. I’d decided to make pot au feu, a festive, delicious dish that brings people together. I used a recipe from my neighbour, Andr? Taverne, which calls for the finest beef cheeks and oxtail, rump roast and ribs – which I ordered from my favourite butcher – and a host of vegetables including gorgeous leeks, carrots, celery root and onions from the market. When I set out the ingredients on the cutting board it was enough for an army, and I had not one single pot large enough to cook it in. I had allowed myself just enough time to prepare and cook the pot au feu and not one minute more. What had I been thinking? What was I going to do? I considered dividing the ingredients in half and cooking them in two pots, but that wouldn’t really do. I got out every pot I had, including my lightweight couscoussier for making couscous. Nothing was big enough. I knew Edith had a big pot, but she wasn’t at home. Who else did I know who might have something? ‘Aha,’ I thought. My friend Martine at the ferme-auberge. I called, and her husband Patrick assured me they had something. Meanwhile, Michael had called a friend who cooks huge meals for the people who stay at his camping site. Within an hour we had three huge pots sitting in our kitchen, each large enough to hold the pot au feu. I was saved. I continued to schedule lunches that year, with the twelfth one in November, just over a year after our first. We looked back over the year in amazement. We’d actually realized a small part of our dream with very little publicity. True, the lunches were far from a goldmine, but they accomplished a great deal – we met very interesting people and were becoming accustomed to welcoming strangers into our house. I was having the time of my life creating menus and offering the best that I could possibly find, and watching people really enjoy it. And I was setting up a small infrastructure of people who could help me do everything from babysitting to serving at table. I considered it some of the most enjoyable on-the-job training I’d ever done. We offered lunches from spring through to autumn for the next two years, as Michael finished the dining room and moved on to the huge task of building the kitchen. They continued to be interesting and enjoyable and they were leading us where we wanted to go, which was to the cooking school. It was taking on a real dimension. All I needed was a kitchen. OLIVE COOKIES FROM THE DROME Les Scourtins des Vieux Moulins These sweet and salty bites are a very old recipe from Jean-Pierre Autrand, whose family produced olive oil at Les Vieux Moulin in Nyons, an ancient olive mill, until 1952. M. Autrand found this recipe in his family’s archives, updated it, and sells the results at the gift store adjacent to the olive mill. Les Vieux Moulins, 4, Promenade de la Digue, 26110 Nyons, France. 9 tbs (125g) unsalted butter, softened / cup (100g) confectioner’s sugar, sifted 1 tbs extra-virgin olive oil 1 / cups (200g) all purpose flour 1 generous pinch of fine sea salt / cup (100g) cured olives, preferably from Nyons, pitted and coarsely chopped 1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. 2. In a large bowl or the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter until it is soft and pale yellow. Mix in the sugar until blended, then drizzle in the olive oil and mix until combined. Add the flour and sea salt, and mix gently but thoroughly until the dough is smooth, then add the olives and mix until they are thoroughly incorporated into the dough. 3. Place a piece of waxed or parchment paper on a work surface, and place the dough in the middle. Cover it with another piece of waxed or parchment paper and roll out the dough until it is about / -inch thick ( / cm) – (the dough is very sticky, and the paper makes it possible to roll out). Refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes, and up to 24 hours. 4. Cut out 2-inch rounds of dough and place them about / inch (1.3 cm) apart on the prepared baking sheets. Gather the trimmings into a ball and roll it into a 1-inch (2.5 cm) diameter log. Wrap well and refrigerate, and when you are ready to bake, cut off / -inch ( / cm) thick rounds (this avoids over-rolling the dough). 5. Bake until the scourtins are golden, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on wire racks. Yield: about 34 scourtins ORANGE WINE Vin d’Orange This wine is so simple to make, and to enjoy! Be sure to use organic oranges, and make this in the winter when the fruit is at its best. Though this wine is very drinkable after four weeks in the bottle, it mellows with age. I make it one year to serve the next, and suggest you do the same. 10 good-size oranges, preferably organic and well scrubbed 8 cups (2 1) dry white wine, such as Sancerre 2 cups (500 ml) pure fruit alcohol, or vodka 1 vanilla bean 1 tbs arabica coffee beans 2 cups minus 2 tbs (375 g) sugar 1. Peel the oranges right down to the fruit, including the pith. Put the fruit aside for another use. 2. Place the skins with the pith in a large nonreactive pot or bowl. Add the wine, vodka, vanilla bean, coffee beans, and half the sugar. Stir. 3. Caramelize the remaining sugar: place the sugar in a small heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. The sugar will melt and begin to bubble, then gradually liquefy, turning a golden colour. This will take about 7 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling the pan occasionally if it colours unevenly, until the sugar is a deep golden colour, like light molasses, about 5 minutes. 4. Remove the pan from the heat and pour the caramelized sugar into the orange mixture, scraping as much of the sugar as possible from the pan with a wooden spoon. The caramel will sizzle and send up steam, and it will instantly harden. Don’t be concerned – it will gradually dissolve. Loosely cover the bowl and let the mixture ripen in the bowl for two weeks, stirring it occasionally. 5. Strain the orange mixture through a sieve lined with a double layer of dampened cheesecloth or a dampened cotton tea towel. Discard the orange skins, the vanilla bean and the coffee beans and decant the liquid into sterilized bottles. Seal with corks. Let sit for at least 1 month before drinking. About 2 / quarts (2 / 1) The Kitchen and the Cooking School (#ulink_c48b49d5-e64b-5214-9c40-5e7ead3a7f7f) Before Michael started on the kitchen he added a long, narrow room at the back of the house and just off the now-finished dining room. Our friends though he was crazy: he had all this other work to do on the house and now he was adding more? But he knew it made sense, and so did I, for it was a very clever way to get privacy. We weren’t allowed, under the terms of our mortgage, to build any kind of wall between ourselves and the parish house next door, but we were allowed to put an addition onto the house. The addition, then, became our wall. I should explain that our property abuts that of the parish meeting hall, an active spot where parishioners came for catechism, communion classes and evening prayer vigils. All too often we found people peering in through our small-paned windows at what we assumed they thought was an abandoned house. We didn’t understand how they could have thought that, since all the windows were clean, the garden was landscaped and the chimney in active use, but it had been empty for a long time, and presumably they just couldn’t resist being nosy. Their surprise when we caught them at it was amusing – they would stare and ogle, not realizing that we were in there, since it was usually early evening when they were there awaiting their classes or vigils, and the light was quite dim. When their eyes adjusted and they realized they were looking right at us, horror and embarrassment would flit across their faces as they abruptly pulled back, and hastily walked away. We would giggle slyly, knowing that they now felt more uncomfortable than we did. Still, it wasn’t the most pleasant of situations – what if we’d been walking around naked? Or eating off the floor? Or …? The long room, which Michael put up quickly, consisted of an outer timbered wall, a glass ceiling and a floor of bricks laid in sand rather than on a foundation, a long window at one end and a door at the other. It would ultimately be turned into a passageway to the courtyard and I, dreaming of our own little orangerie, wanted to plant lemon trees along the warmest wall, with the glass ceiling acting as solar heating. Home grown citrus fruit would not materialize until years in the future, however. For the duration, this unheated room with its unheated floor would be my temporary kitchen, while Michael socked his way through the building of the permanent kitchen which, we now knew, would be the heart of our cooking school. Michael installed a large, shallow ceramic sink around the corner and at one end of the room, lined the walls with shelving, and once my two small gas stoves, the refrigerator and all my kitchen equipment were installed it was cosy and efficient, like a kitchen on a boat. Everything was out where I could see it and within easy reach, the way I like it, and the blue and ochre timbered walls, the old brick floor and my copper pots hanging above the stove gave it a certain style. The day Michael began work on the kitchen was one of those red-letter moments. I know he dreaded the job because it was massive and would require not only superhuman strength, but super-human patience as he turned a series of sixteenth-century rooms into one, cohesive kitchen. He carefully sealed off the space with plastic, tape and curtains and proceeded to go at it with satisfying hammer-blows as he bashed down walls and the old, crumbling fireplace, pulled up tiles and generally turned the space into a shambles. A wall with two beautiful long windows that had divided the former kitchen from Michael’s workshop disappeared, as did an angled wall at the back and another one to the side. The result was one huge space that stretched from the street to the back courtyard. Destruction, the easy part, took weeks. Once everything was a mound of rubble the real work began as Michael hauled it out, tons of it, dustbin by huge dustbin. He found someone who needed landfill, which helped enormously, as the city dump allows just one visit per person per day. It took months of backbreaking labour to get it all cleaned out. Then Michael ran pipes and wiring through the floor before he poured a concrete pad at the end of the room: this would remain his workshop. With nothing in the space but Michael’s tools it looked large, airy, wonderful. Joe was soon in there on his roller blades, swirling around the obstacles of Michael’s paraphernalia. Michael had completed kitchen plans before he began demolition, and he pored over them at night after working in the space all day, tweaking them as it opened up. The planning stage had been a torturous process for me: I don’t have the gift of being able to visualize space. When I look at plans on paper I see flat drawings on paper. When I look at an empty space I see just that – an empty space. But I do know what I need in a kitchen to work well and efficiently: a big centre island with a butcher block and a sink; my knives handy without being in the way or accessible to small fingers; pots and pans and certain utensils hung where I can reach them; lots of full-extension drawers; enough room to accommodate a crowd. I have ideas about the way I want a kitchen to look, ideas which have to do with colour and warmth and being able to display some of my favourite things like the gorgeous wedding cookies tied with pale blue ribbon that were a gift when I was in Sardinia, the jar of jewel-like candied fruit from Apt, photographs of the children at work in the kitchen, strands of garlic and Espelette peppers, a frothy bunch of pink peppercorns, bay leaves, shallots. I communicated all of this to Michael, who knew it all already, and beyond that I was pretty hopeless. Oh, I read kitchen design books but found most spaces in them cold and impersonal. Flipping through French magazines I found some design elements I loved, and these went into a file for Michael, along with my ideas and observations. He referred to them all when he drew up the plan, going so far as to making a paper ‘maquette’, or model, so that I could see, in three dimensions, what he was talking about. A year of demolition and cleaning up, of concrete-pad pouring and figuring had passed before Michael began the construction phase of the kitchen. He worked on it slowly and steadily, his brow knitted most of the time as he puzzled out the intricate details. It was very slow going, but fortunately one of Michael’s many gifts is persistence. He worked and worked for months, grumbling and cursing, hammering and sawing, measuring and figuring. There was a point where I could see it was getting the better of him and, one night, after Joe was in bed, I suggested we rethink the plans. I’d had my doubts about a bank of cabinets he’d drawn in on each side of the stove in a ziggurat pattern. He was trying to give me maximum storage and light at the same time, but each time I looked at them on paper they seemed top-heavy and complicated. I suggested, gently, that I didn’t need the cabinets, knowing that Michael had spent a lot of time figuring, measuring and planning to fit them in. Surprisingly, he agreed easily, and with a swipe of his eraser the cabinets were gone and the kitchen lightened up. It is very hard to work on a project such as the one we had naively embarked upon – and to live in it as well; to have the husband be the contractor and the crew while the wife is the dreamer and the breadwinner. Anyone who has been through a similar situation will sympathize – it is one of the ultimate tests of marriage. Throw in a foreign country, metric measurements, a toddler and my frequent absences for work, and the situation becomes even more like dry tinder. Michael and I were managing, but it required extreme delicacy on my side and extreme organization on his. He is a master at keeping construction messes separate from our living area through his system of plastic, tape and curtains, so that as little dust and noise as possible escape into our lives. I have always appreciated this about him. I am very good at keeping out of his way, both when he is designing and when he works, something he appreciates about me. Still, there were times when I wanted to scream at the noise and puffs of dust that inevitably escaped, and there were times when he wanted to, I am certain, walk out and close the door behind him. But each time we lost patience we stepped back, took a deep breath and really looked at what was happening. Progress was being made, spaces were changing, the bones of the kitchen were in place and it was all taking shape. Observation like this gave each of us renewed energy. One of the most exciting things about the project was a back porch that Michael had incorporated into the kitchen. To do this, he’d pushed out the back wall and put in glass doors, and pushed up the ceiling then roofed it with glass, which pulled light into the whole room. He’d removed a battered old small-paned metal window that I loved, and painstakingly built two replicas using wood and wavy, antique glass. Michael’s brother David, a frequent visitor, helped finish them, and when they were installed they looked as though they had always been there. Michael rebuilt the fireplace into a cooking fireplace, with a shelf in front wide enough to hold a dinner plate, and a beautifully graceful mantel and chimney. It was a tense job because, even though he’d already remodelled a fireplace that worked, he was building this one from scratch and he didn’t know how to guarantee it would draw. We asked friends who’d had fireplaces installed, and all their suggestions pointed in one direction – make the fireplace itself deep enough to build a fire towards the back so the smoke has nowhere to go but up. A book about chimney-building confirmed this and, using calculations he found there as his compass, Michael constructed an entirely smokeless fireplace. Michael was about to do a final plastering on the fireplace when a friend called to ask if he wanted an old coal stove. Michael went to take a look, only to discover that what he was being offered wasn’t any old stove, it was a vintage Aga cooker in mint condition. Our friend just wanted to get rid of it, and said if Michael would take it off his hands, he could have it. Michael jumped at it. I was in the United States on a book-tour at the time, and when I called that day and Michael told me what he’d just been given I was so excited I could hardly stand it. Both Michael and I had spent significant years of our childhoods in England, where each of us had eaten oatmeal, soups, stews and breads cooked in the oven of an Aga, and heard our mothers extol the virtues of this heavy, cast-iron stove. We’d both wanted one for years. Our friend needed the Aga out of the apartment building and Michael called three friends to help him move it. They took a sturdy dolly that Michael had built, hoisted the heavy stove up on it and pushed it uphill from our friend’s building to the house, a journey of about five blocks. One of them played traffic policeman as they huffed and puffed and somehow shimmied and wrestled it into our courtyard, then into the house. I took a photo of them from my office window as they pushed and guided this ungainly stove up the middle of the street – they were working hard and laughing at the same time, knowing they were a spectacle, and I just hoped they wouldn’t laugh so hard that they would let go of it and send it rolling back down the street. Michael couldn’t install the Aga before he made room for it, which meant that he had to deal with our immensely tall and spindly chimney, which looked as if a strong puff of wind would topple it. Michael had checked it when we moved in and determined it was secure, and the last thing he wanted was to take the time and resources to rebuild it. The addition of the Aga meant he couldn’t avoid it; the oven needed a separate flue. He gritted his teeth, bought the materials and enlisted the help of a Sicilian friend who is a mason. Together, they managed to build an even taller chimney with two flues, one for the Aga and one for the fireplace. This proved providential when an epic windstorm blew through Normandy just months later: the new chimney withstood the storm, whereas the old one wouldn’t have; it would almost certainly have crashed right into the kitchen below it, destroying months of work. The kitchen was about half-built when I was contacted by a restaurant chain with whom I’d done some promotion, who asked if I would design a five-day programme for fourteen of their managers that would include hands-on cooking classes. ‘Of course,’ I said. We’d been serving lunches to paying guests from a temporary kitchen in an unfinished dining room, why shouldn’t we go ahead and let fourteen cooking students come too? Michael and I studied our options, trying to figure out how to make this a reality. We resorted, once again, to theatre. We would transform the now-finished dining room, next to the temporary kitchen, into a ‘laboratory’, where all of the mise-en-place, or recipe preparation, would be carried out. We wouldn’t have water, but the sink wasn’t far. Then, all the cooking would be done in the long, narrow kitchen, which was basically arranged for one person, so I would need to organize the menus carefully to make it work efficiently. We would set up the dining table in our hallway, which is just large enough to hold a long table and has the house’s best view of the church’s main fa?ade. Meanwhile, I became pregnant with Fiona. When I’d agreed to do the class I hadn’t expected this. She was due in February and the class had been scheduled for April. That gave me two good months to recover, which I figured would be plenty. The closer the date for the class got, the more nervous I became. I had organized the week as best I could before Fiona was born so that my mind was at ease, but I still needed to work out the menus and figure out where and how to procure ingredients. I would buy everything I could from local farmers, and rely on Chez Clet, the ?picerie – grocery – next door, for the rest. I have taught many, many cooking classes, but never in my home, never with a two-month old baby, and never a hands-on class for fourteen people with little or no cooking experience. I knew I’d need some help and I turned to Bruno Atmani, a friend and professionally trained chef. He had recently returned to France from Sweden where he’d worked in restaurants for ten years. His English, which he’d perfected by watching English-language movies, was fluent and his humour of such quality that it is hard to look at him without giggling. I’d never worked with him, but I knew he’d be perfect for the job. I also enlisted a young American woman, Allison, who had worked for me previously, to help organize things, take some of the trips with us, and generally keep things in order. With Michael, we formed the heart of the ‘cooking school’! The day before the group arrived Michael and Bruno set up work-stations in the dining room. One of the stations was the butcher’s work-bench we intended to move into the kitchen when it was finished, a beautiful piece of furniture we’d picked up at a brocante for next to nothing. The others were sturdy tables that Michael had quickly built. I set out cutting boards, tea towels and knives, bouquets of herbs and salt and pepper. I lined several dustbins with plastic bags, and set large bowls of water in strategic positions, for rinsing knives and hands. When we were finished we stood back: with the church looming through the windows in the background, it looked incredibly romantic! The group arrived, starstruck with being in France and with coming to our house. The group leaders had prepared them well: each manager had a beautiful little book that described their tour, and included a biography of me. They’d all read my French Farmhouse Cookbook, so they had a sense of the food they would be asked to prepare. I gave them each a long white apron, a toque, or chef’s hat, and a book of the recipes we were going to prepare. They went to settle into their hotel while Bruno, Allison and I set out ingredients and prepared for them to return. I’d planned a simple menu for the first meal, which included tapenade as an appetizer, asparagus with a fresh goat’s cheese and herb sauce, chicken with cream and sorrel sauce, salad and cheese, and lemon cake with fresh strawberries and cream. My first step was to take them through all of the ingredients, to explain what they were and where they had come from. When I got to the chicken there were a few shrieks, for its head was still attached, and one of the students almost fainted. I had been warned that these people weren’t cooks. Despite working for a restaurant chain, they were people-managers and number-crunchers, and it turned out that most of them had almost no hands-on experience with food at all. Their ‘restaurants’ were really bakeries that served food, and they all knew a lot about how to sell breads and cakes, tarts and cookies, how much wood to order for the wood-burning ovens and how to manage the people who actually did the cooking. But they couldn’t navigate their way through a recipe. This made my job that much more interesting and important, and more fun, because I had them captive for a week and could imprint upon them my own standards of quality and freshness! What this group didn’t know about cooking they made up for in willingness to learn and to work, and the experience was more fun than I could have imagined. I was organized down to the last clove of garlic, but considering the variables – not the least among them the fact that I was nursing an infant Fiona – the results of the first session were near miraculous. The temporary kitchen, intended for one cook, at one point had seven people in it laughing, saut?eing, tasting as they went. There was just one French person with the group, a chef employed at the company’s central kitchen, and he had decided that he would go off on his own. He’d run out to the butcher while I was giving my talk about ingredients – being French, he didn’t need to hear it – and bought some lamb brains. As everyone worked and jostled in the kitchen, he’d carved out a little space to prepare the brains, which, I was certain, he would eat all by himself. I could have strangled him, but I held back. In any case, everything went so smoothly that we were all ready to sit down and begin our inaugural meal at 8 p.m., as I’d planned. We had a terrific week going to markets and visiting artisan food producers, farmers, and pottery makers. We even visited an ancient wood-fired bread oven and everyone had a chance to wear the baker’s traditional Norman wooden clogs with their turned-up toes, slide loaves around in the oven, then see them emerge from the oven’s heat, their crusts popping and crackling. The baker opened jars of homemade jam and bottles of cider, and we had an unexpected feast in the small, timbered building. As we left, the baker gave a warm loaf to each person and we rode the bus back to Louviers in a haze of toasty aroma. Our week culminated in a meal that Bruno and I prepared for the group, who had gone on a day-trip to the D-Day landing beaches. They returned just as we were putting the finishing touches to the seafood stew we’d prepared, but before we sat down Michael had some entertainment planned. He called everyone into the kitchen, opened champagne and poured glasses. He was preparing to install the centre island in the kitchen, and that afternoon had poured the small concrete pad where it would sit, which was still soft enough to take an imprint. After a toast to the group and the week, he asked each person to autograph the concrete. ‘You will be immortalized at On Rue Tatin,’ he said, and everyone cheered, then dropped to their knees and covered the concrete with their fanciful signatures. One day, should our house be excavated, the archaeologist will surely scratch her head over the signatures in the concrete pad! The dinner table was set. On it were bottles of C?tes de Blaye and big baskets of Michael’s freshly made bread. Because this group was service-oriented, they jumped right into helping out, insisting that Bruno, Michael, Allison and I be waited on. It was a fitting end to an unbelievably warm, enjoyable week, and it heralded a happy future for a cooking school at On Rue Tatin. After the group had gone, Michael returned to working on the kitchen, and I to writing and recipe testing. Michael installed the butcher’s work-bench, then proceeded to expand on it for the centre island. The butcher block top, which was about five feet long, had fissures in it the size of the Grand Canyon. We had bathed it with water for months, hoping the wood would expand, but the spaces remained. Michael cut the block into three pieces, which he trimmed and evened off, then stuck back together to make a shorter, smoother cutting surface. It still had small cracks in it, which Michael filled with beeswax, a food-friendly, aesthetically pleasing solution. We wanted the front of this graceful piece of furniture, with its two deep, curved drawers, to be what people saw when they entered the kitchen, so Michael put them facing forward. He built a frame that widened the piece and set the butcher block atop it at the back, on the stove side. We hadn’t determined what our counter-tops would be. We’d tried poured concrete for the surfaces in the temporary kitchen, but it hadn’t held up as well as we’d hoped, and we’d also tried tile, which I found an unfriendly work surface, and hard to clean. We were considering all kinds of things when Michael came home from a materials buying trip one afternoon, excited about some end-lots of marble he’d seen. We went to take a look. Here again, a limited budget worked in our favour. We wouldn’t have tried so many surfaces, nor looked so hard if we could have just gone out and purchased what we wanted. Thanks to Michael always looking for ways to make the budget stretch, here was a beautiful solution in the form of huge, polished squares of a marble that was luminous with ochre, dark pink, grey and a tinge of bluish green. With the marble chosen, Michael could continue with the centre island. He first rounded the edges of the squares, then installed them opposite the butcher block. He incorporated a small sink to the right of the butcher block for washing vegetables, and underneath it he built two drawers, one for rubbish and the other for compost. He incorporated other drawers into the island, too, to accommodate all the paraphernalia of a family kitchen, from first-aid kit to napkins and bibs. In the centre of the island, between the wood and the marble, Michael inserted a wooden knife-holder that was flush with the surface. My knives fitted down into it, their blades separated by adjustable wooden pegs. Over the island he installed a beautiful, art deco chandelier we’d purchased several years before, which was, we discovered when we got it home, signed by the Fr?res Mueller from Lun?ville, in Alsace. We wanted to tile the entire twelve-foot-long back wall of the kitchen, as a backdrop for the gas stove. I wanted to use handmade tiles we’d seen in the Marais area of Paris, which came in a beautiful blanc cass?, soft white. We brought two of them home and set them on the counter, more as a tease than anything else, for their price would eat up the whole of the rest of our kitchen budget. Michael came home with many other tile samples, but none of them looked good next to those from the Marais. One day, though, he found some industrially made tiles he liked, and I went with him to take a look. They were nice and irregular, with a good shine and rich colour. We decided to use them, and Michael made the wall look as good as it would have with the tiles from the Marais, by mixing white and off-white to give the wall depth and subtle texture. I wanted my copper pots to hang somewhere in the kitchen, both for the warmth their colour would add and for practicality, but we couldn’t figure out where to put them. I didn’t want them over the butcher block because they would block the view of the stove and the mantel, and our chandelier looked so graceful there. I couldn’t hang them against the tile wall because the counter top was too deep for them to be within easy reach. I stood at the stove and reached up, as though reaching for a pot. I realized that if they hung inside the hood Michael had built, along the sides, they would not only look beautiful but would also be accessible to me yet out of the way. This is where they hang today, a perfect solution. Michael built all the cabinets in the kitchen, which include twenty-two long drawers, each of which slides out to its full length. One of my favourite and most useful drawers is the tall, narrow one that sits next to the stove and is used to store baking sheets and odd-shaped baking pans. In this kitchen I would have the luxury of space and storage that I could only have imagined in kitchens of yore. Michael laid a beautiful floor in half the kitchen that consisted of the ancient tiles he’d pulled up from the original kitchen floor, some old six-sided terracotta tiles called tommettes that had come from the hallway behind the kitchen, and small squares he cut from the marble that covered the counter-tops. The area where I would spend most of my time, between the stove and butcher block, the refrigerator and the sink, was floored with buttery old pine planks he’d lifted from the house’s original sitting room. They would be much kinder than tile or stone to my legs and back. I’d wanted stone sinks like those in old farms and chateaux, but we didn’t find one easily and I wasn’t so devoted to the idea that I would go to any lengths to have one. I’ve always liked stainless steel, so Michael went about looking for a stainless steel sink that fitted the dimensions we wanted, long and wide enough to hold the removable pan under the stove burners, and shallow enough for ease and comfort. Needless to say, such a sink was nowhere to be found or ordered. This was a puzzler. I didn’t want to compromise on the shape of the sink – it had to be practical and easy to use. I didn’t want porcelain because it is fussy to maintain. Michael heard about a place where he could get any size stainless steel sink, and a friend of ours said that he could intervene and get it wholesale. Michael handed in the sink’s dimensions and got a call back the following week with an estimate that sent him through the roof. ‘Five thousand dollars for a stainless steel sink?’ he said, shaking his head. Apparently, the sink would have to be custom-made, which is what made it so costly. Like the handmade tiles, the handmade stainless steel sink would have to go. How would we get around this one? Michael had lined a wall in our downstairs bathroom with zinc, just for fun, and he’d loved working with it. One night I heard him soldering in his workshop and I looked in to see him fashioning a zinc box. ‘It’s a sink,’ he said shortly. The next day he brought it to show me. ‘If this thing holds water, this is what our sinks will look like,’ he said. ‘It should work – zinc lasts forever. Just look at all the zinc bars in French cafes.’ He filled it with water and it was watertight. Our sink problem was solved, sort of. He had to figure out how to put in a plug and how to support it, which he did, and the upshot is that we have three custom-made zinc sinks in our kitchen, which are burnished and lovely, and easy to maintain. With the sinks in place, the drawers all built, the floors laid, Michael could install the yards of marble. He studied all the squares to choose those with the most ochre in them, and the most harmonious patterns. He tried them out on the counters to see how the light fell on them, then carefully rounded their edges before setting them in place. He had fashioned a narrow ledge at the back of the counter-tops on either side of the stove for condiments, timers, knick-knacks, all the little things that clutter a work surface, and he cut small pieces of marble to fit that. When all was installed he had to figure out how to polish and treat it so it would hold up to kitchen use. We both got on the phone to do some research. Mine led me to an Italian family of masons in Paris; they were very generous with information and offered to have Michael come in so they could give him a marble-treating demonstration. Michael’s research led him to the headstone makers in Louviers. Between these sources, he got the information he needed. The results turned the marble smooth and luscious, and made the colours, which are warm and complementary to food, flowers and people, emerge. A visitor, looking at the marble, said, ‘Do you realize people go to school just to learn how to cut and polish marble and he just did it?’ I had heard that marble was hard to maintain and very delicate, and I wondered how it would hold up to the kind of use I would give it. I needn’t have worried, as it has proved to be low maintenance and very forgiving. Even acid, which eats away at its surface leaving a rough white spot, isn’t as much of a problem as I feared, for those rough spots go away with regular wiping. The stoves were installed, the counter-tops finished, the drawers ready to fill. I wanted to move in, or at least to decorate. One night, while Michael was at his weekly sculpture class, I opened up some kitchen boxes, trying to figure out what I could put on the mantel that would surprise him the next day. I stumbled onto teapots and soup terrines; it turned out that over the years I’d amassed a small collection in varied bright colours. These I set on the mantelpiece and said nothing. I knew they would get covered with dust as Michael continued to work, but I wanted to see how they would look and I mostly wanted him to see that I was paying attention. He loved seeing them there the next day, giving truth to the adage that it is the little things that make a difference. I was concerned about hiding in drawers all the many little tools I use a hundred times a day, from measuring spoons to whisks, mixer attachments to fish-bone pullers, because I could see myself getting very frustrated with the time lost opening them, closing them, keeping them orderly. As I stood in the kitchen trying to figure out how I would solve this, my eye hit upon an unmatched pair of brass shelf-supports sitting in the corner, beautiful pieces that Michael had found at our friend Magaly’s second-hand shop. I picked up one and set it on end on the raised shelf at the back of the counter-top, right near the stove. Then I hung measuring spoons, whisks, skewers and tongs on its various levels. I set the other one up on the other side of the stove and did the same. They looked gorgeous without being cluttered. When Michael came in and saw them he said, ‘They’re perfect.’ I’d come up with a schedule for cooking classes, thinking it would be good to hold the first one in June, the beginning of summer when produce is at its most gorgeous, gardens are fresh and growing, markets are taking on their festive summer air. In order to publicize the classes, I did a mailing to all of our lunch guests, to editors I’d worked with over the years, and to various other friends, colleagues and acquaintances who constituted my nascent mailing list. This must have been in February, and I figured that by June I would be well settled in the kitchen, accustomed to where everything was, ready to teach and share. I asked a young American woman who had worked with me before if she would come again for two months to help me settle into the kitchen and do the class. I planned out the schedules. With the weeks planned and the possibility of people actually coming to take classes, I assessed my cooking equipment. I have a great deal of utensils, but I reckoned I would need more knives and more things like vegetable peelers and melon-ball makers, stiff plastic scrapers and wooden spoons, measuring cups and spoons. I would also need more cooking pans and baking sheets and more wine glasses, and I would need to find beautiful aprons and a multitude of tea towels to match. I investigated all of the hotels and a bed and breakfast in the area to determine which were best for my ‘guests’. I settled on four places. My favourite hotel is a rambling place in the country, with charming bedrooms and a lush garden just outside the limits of Louviers, in a village called Le Haye le Comte. The most convenient, however, is a hotel in the town, five minutes on foot from our house. It is very comfortable, and it is where most people choose to stay. I have had to work with the people at this hotel, whose attitude reflects that of shopkeepers I used to meet when I first moved to Paris twenty years ago. Those were the days when you walked into a shop and were greeted with hostility, as though your very presence was an insult, an affront. The people who run the hotel were the same. Though they agreed on a special price for anyone who reserved through me, every additional request – whether it was a reservation for two double rooms, a faxed reservation confirmation, an unlocked front door on Sunday afternoon so guests could get into the hotel, or whatever – was met with almost laughable rudeness and hostility. I suggested to the owner that we meet, thinking that if there was personal contact it would melt the ice, but she brushed me off, telling me that her assistant took care of everything. One would have thought she was the manager of Le Bristol in Paris the way she acted, though I’ve had better luck there. I spoke with the assistant who wasn’t much better. I couldn’t work it out. I sent more than thirty people to them in the first year, all of whom stayed for five days at a time. I knew they were very busy with business groups, but I also knew that they liked having the business I sent their way. I asked a well-placed friend if he knew them, and if he could help me out. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure if I can help. He – the owner – is all right, but his wife, who takes care of the hotel, is awful, just awful.’ When I heard that, I figured there was little hope. I haven’t pursued it any further because there has been a perceptible thaw which, in this case, amounts to enormous progress. I still haven’t had a formal meeting with the owners, but I don’t care if I do. What I care about is that everyone who stays there has a good experience and thankfully, thus far, that has been the case. Sometimes guests choose to stay in a charming bed and breakfast in the village of Heudreville, a ten-minute trip by car. Run by a friendly and energetic woman who takes great pride in fine linens and homemade jams for breakfast, it is a little spot of country finery in the midst of a charming village. Michael and I had discussed the dates of the first classes, thinking it was possible. But May came and he was still working in the kitchen. It looked nearly finished to me, but he said there was a long list of things to finish. By mid-May I knew that it was unrealistic to hold a class, yet I had a small group signed up. What should I do? I tossed and turned over it, then one morning when I opened up my emails I found a message from Marion, who now handled the organization of the school as well as the lunches. ‘They can’t come,’ she wrote. ‘One of them is ill so none of them are coming.’ I was relieved to hear it wasn’t a life-threatening illness, but at any other time this would have been disastrous. In the circumstances, though, and as sorry as I was that they were kept from coming, I heaved a sigh of relief. Someone was watching over me. By this point I was getting impatient to move into the kitchen. My appetite was whetted for more space, functionality, ease. I needed to increase my productivity, too, as I had deadlines looming. How could I speed the process along? I offered to help, suggested we hire someone to help, said I didn’t mind if all the details weren’t finished. Michael resisted and calmly went about his work. One day I walked into the kitchen to find him on his knees, calmly, carefully polishing the twenty-two brass drawer-handles we’d gone to great lengths to order. I stood there watching, realizing this was, in part, keeping me from moving into the kitchen. I asked him why he was polishing them. ‘Because they’re too shiny, they’ll look too new and the rest of the kitchen is burnished and comfortable looking,’ he said. I left him to his polishing, and went and cried. I was convinced, then, that I would never move into the kitchen; the cooking school would never happen; Michael would always have one more detail to attend to, calmly, as if nothing but time stretched out before him. Michael finished the series of drawer-handles, and we never said another word about them until many years later, when we could laugh about it. I had learnt, through the process of creating the kitchen, that Michael becomes so intensely involved in projects that he forgets real life is going on around him. I had seen his sense of aesthetics and perfection dictate that all drawer-handles be burnished in exactly the same way. He is right about them in one way – it’s a tiny detail that makes a difference. But the alternative would have been all right, too. After all, life is a series of compromises, isn’t it? Michael finally pronounced the kitchen ready. I was so excited, and so nervous too. Michael had given two years of his life to creating this beautiful kitchen; we’d made many compromises, we’d argued about it, we’d changed it many times on its way to completion. When it was finished it had to work, and I had to love it. The pressure was enormous. It’s interesting how one’s basic self is challenged by something so insignificant as a kitchen remodel. I feared having to change my cooking habits, having to put things in drawers instead of on shelves or on the walls, yet I had agreed upon a ‘tidier’, more elegant kitchen. The idea of change made me very anxious, as I’ve based a lifetime of cooking and a career on my swift, sure movements in kitchens where everything is out and accessible. Then I stopped myself. I vowed to loosen up. I put off the actual move until the American woman I’d hired joined us. She was going to be helping me test recipes and I wanted her to know from the start where everything was stored. After she’d settled in we got to work hauling boxes and filling drawers and shelves, in a process that took two days. Unbelievably, there wasn’t enough storage for every single thing, and it was then I realized how much kitchen equipment I had. If this kitchen couldn’t accommodate it all, no kitchen ever would. It was a good excuse to weed out things I didn’t use. With most things in place, I prepared to cook our first meal in the kitchen, which we would all eat at the central island. It was exciting, wonderful, completely disconcerting. I grated raw beets and tossed them with a vinaigrette, then made a simple, herb-rich potage with leeks, carrots and potatoes, garnished with minced parsley and garlic from the garden. It took me twice as long as usual because I couldn’t put my hands on anything quickly, but how luxurious it felt to work in a place where I could stretch out my arms and not touch the wall, where the sink was handy and there was ample counter space, where the wood floor was easy on my legs and back, and where I didn’t have to use any of the economy of motion I’d mastered in my other kitchen. Here, everyone in the neighbourhood could come and cook and we’d all have our own spot. I served the salad on my side of the island as Michael, Joe, Fiona and Paige, the American woman, sat and watched from the other side. It was wonderful to be so easily together in such a huge space with a gorgeous stove to cook on. Michael and I looked at each other. It had been a long and difficult process for both of us to get to this point. We’d left our country with, on my part, a dream to live in France and raise our children, write books, even open up a cooking school, and on Michael’s part a willingness to put his career aside for the time it took to make it happen. We’d had several kitchens in our life together, most of them either designed and built by Michael or remodelled by him, but this was our first that was intended for teaching, and included every detail that we could possibly have thought of to make that efficient, comfortable, pleasant. The struggle to get this kitchen built was still fresh in our minds, but we both knew that it would fade and that we were in for some wonderful times and delicious meals. I, who love the kitchen more than any spot on earth, knew I was in for some exhilarating moments, which, I hoped, I would be able to share not just with my family and friends, but with people eager to learn the secrets of French cooking. Here we were, unbelievably, all of us together, in the heart of our beautiful new kitchen. I had decided to give myself about six months in the new kitchen before teaching any classes, because I figured it would take me that long to become accustomed to working in it. I couldn’t risk any fumbles for the classes – I had to be smooth, at ease and professional. So I established the dates for two classes the following spring, and I sent out another mailing to publicize them. I also investigated getting a website, but I found the venture beyond my budget. Besides, I was sceptical about websites. Internet access in France was problematic, and every single thing took so much time that I didn’t have the patience for it: sitting and staring into a screen has never been my fort?. I supposed that most people were like me, and that websites were a ‘must have’ because of their novelty, not their real usefulness. My ideas were changed by two wonderful lunch guests who came, ate, and fell in love – with the house, with the food, with what we were trying to do, and with baby Fiona. Both high-level professionals, they were alight with ideas on how to market the school, and both were adamant that it, and I, needed a website. I told them my opinions. They disagreed, vehemently. Glo, one of the women, fixed me with a gaze as stern as that of an owl and said, ‘Susan, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t have “.com” after your name in the States you are nothing.’ I flinched, told her thank you, and said I still didn’t think I needed a website. She badgered me about it for a while, then let the subject drop for the remainder of our lunch together. On her return to the United States she started sending me emails. ‘Susan, you need a website, you’ve got to have one, you are no one without one,’ she would write, along with her cheery messages filled with news and jokes. She was a great person and I appreciated her enthusiasm and concern, but I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t have the wherewithal to develop a website, and I didn’t think I needed one. If that made me a nobody, so be it. Then one day I opened my email messages to find the following from Glo. ‘Susan, since you are so stubborn, I’m doing a website for you. My friend Geoff will design the site. He charges $4000 and he says he’ll trade you for cooking classes. I will too. We don’t care if you don’t want it, we’re doin’ it.’ I was flabbergasted. I read on. She explained how it would go, how she would help design it and write the copy. She would pass everything to me for approval before it went ‘live’. Glo had pinned me to the floor. I capitulated, succumbing to the force of her energy. I ended up spending a month working on the website with Glo and Geoff, answering a million questions, writing and rewriting, choosing photographs and graphic styles. It was exciting, like writing and publishing a book, with all the attendant satisfaction and anticipation. By the end of the process the three of us were fast friends, and I had a gorgeous, user-friendly website. I couldn’t imagine who would go there, but now at least I could put a ‘.com’ after my name. I was somebody! I now had a key marketing tool in place to test with the restaurant group, who had asked if I would host more of their managers. Naturally I agreed, and when they came back to me with questions about myself, my work, the school, where they could stay (I had posted photographs and information about my chosen four places on the site), I sent them to susanloomis.com. The response was miraculous; I didn’t have to spend any more time answering questions, and when they arrived they were fully informed about my work, the cooking school and me. I felt extremely fortunate to be trying out the new kitchen on these restaurant managers who would, I was sure, be as open and easy-going as the first group had been. That group had loved working in the makeshift kitchen; this group would have all the advantage of working in the finished kitchen. If there were a few stumbles or some head-scratching about where to find this or that, it wouldn’t matter. By the time they arrived I’d augmented my equipment. A friend of mine, Barbara Tropp, a wonderful Chinese cook who lived in San Francisco, sent me a dozen great, lightweight chef’s knives. I found some very good quality copper pans at a shop near Louviers for ridiculously low prices, and purchased multiples of the most useful sizes. I’d augmented my utensils and cutting boards, and I’d found beautiful long white aprons as well. I was all ready to go. There were sixteen managers and I paired them up to cook. I couldn’t believe how well we all fitted in the kitchen: there was room to work, room for me to circulate among the couples and guide them, room to arrange the cheese tray off in a corner, to roll out pastry, to open wine. Not only was there room, but the lighting Michael had installed could be modulated to fit the occasion. We went from laboratory bright while preparing the meal to cosy intimate while we stood around the tidied-up island with our aperitifs, a fire roaring in the background. From cooking in the new kitchen to eating in the dining room, everything worked so well, so smoothly and so effortlessly. No one could possibly know all the planning, dreaming, and plain hard work that had gone into the smooth flow of food from kitchen to table. I was so proud of Michael, and I knew that our cooking school was going to be a well-organized and luxuriously comfortable success, thanks to the setting he had provided. Filled with confidence, I scheduled a class for the following spring, and hoped it would fill. I knew I had to do some marketing, so I had a brochure printed up that explained the school, and sent it out to friends, colleagues and the editors I’d worked for over the years, hoping they would all get behind the project and spread the word. I announced the opening of the school on the website, then I crossed my fingers. Meanwhile, we had to celebrate the kitchen and ‘pendre la cr?maill?re’, or ‘hang the soup pot’, the French expression for a house-warming. Everyone we knew had become intimately acquainted with this massive project, and they all wanted to experience the results. I invited our friends, our neighbours, Fiona’s various babysitters, Joe’s friends and their parents, who had kept an eye on progress while they dropped off or picked up their children, until we had at least fifty people on the guest list. The party was to be casual, and I wanted it to be a surprise for Michael. I made lots of appetizers, among them a favourite of Michael’s: wild boar rillettes. My vegetarian friend Babette had offered to come cook with me, and when Michael saw her in the kitchen helping me with the rillettes he began to suspect that something was afoot, but he said nothing. Babette and I also made tapenade, anchovy toasts and strips of air-cured ham wrapped around chunks of feta and fresh sage. Because this wasn’t a sit-down affair, I decided I would make thin crusted pizza with many different toppings, from olive oil, sea salt, rosemary and garlic, to Sicilian tomato sauce with capers, and onions with bacon and cream. For dessert I slathered dough with cr?me fra?che and sprinkled it generously with brown sugar and cinnamon. Our neighbour, Patrick Merlin, diverted Michael with an invitation for a drink at his house. Joe was in charge of lighting the hundred candles out front in the courtyard, and as our friends arrived I set them to other tasks – making sure the music was organized, arranging platters, putting away coats. Some washed dishes and put things away. I’d asked everyone to bring something sparkling, without being specific. Had this been the States, I suspect that offerings would have ranged from boxes of glitter to sparkling items of clothing, but here in France it meant one thing and one thing only: champagne. I assigned five men to open bottles, and instructed them that the minute Michael and Patrick came in the front gate they were to pop the corks. I’d told Patrick to bring Michael at 8.30 p.m., and by then all our friends were assembled and everything was ready, but there was no Michael nor Patrick. I called Patrick. He’d forgotten about the party because he and Michael were having such a good time drinking whiskey, listening to music, talking. Fortunately he lived three minutes away and, much chagrined, said they would leave immediately. I alerted everyone and it went just as planned: the minute Michael walked in the door, corks popped and flew, and he was as surprised as if someone had put ice cubes down his shirt. It was a terrific party, one of our best. I had a group signed up for a class in May 2001, and it would be my first, official class. By this time I had a terrific assistant, Kerrie Luzum, who has degrees in cooking and nutrition, as well as years of restaurant experience. She lives in Paris and comes out two days a week to help in the office and the kitchen. I planned that first week over and over and over, with Kerrie making phone calls to set up farm visits and wine tastings, restaurant meals and visits to artisans. Establishing the mix of recipes that we would all make during the six hands-on classes was the most difficult part of planning, and the most important. I take my role as cooking teacher very seriously, and I want people to leave my classes not only with a reinvigorated passion for cooking and a sheaf of recipes they can’t wait to make at home, but with confidence in their technique and a keen understanding of how to balance flavours. To that end I was up at all hours tweaking the menus, changing recipes, testing details until I came up with a perfect mix which incorporated the right blend of techniques, methods and ingredients. When the recipes were finally printed and bound, I realized why it had felt like so much work – I’d produced a small book. I look forward to the classes as a whole, but the Sunday evening when guests tap gently on the old, wavy glass of the front door for the first time is almost the best part, for it is like a reunion. We’ve never met anyone before they arrive, but the communication and arrangements that have gone into making this moment a reality mean that we are, on some level, already acquainted. I’ve thought, planned, and cooked my way to this first meal with each guest in mind, sparing no detail so it will be perfect. Like all the recipes and meals that we encounter during our time together, this first is based on what is best and freshest at the market. It’s a f?te, too, because Michael and I – and the others who help out at On Rue Tatin – are just as excited as anyone that our five days together are beginning. We greet each other, we share the meal I’ve prepared, we linger over dessert, then the participants leave with their recipes in hand. They return to our home the next morning, put on their monogrammed On Rue Tatin aprons, and cook their way up to lunch. After the first evening, the weeks speed by in a blur of cooking classes and meals at home, visits to artisans and restaurants, wine tastings, cheese tastings and drinks outside in our courtyard, in the shadow of N?tre Dame in Louviers. I can never believe, when the last meal rolls around, that another week is ended: it always goes by so quickly. Yet it has been long enough to bond with great people, to get involved; not only to instruct but to learn and share. I imagined many things when we decided to go ahead with lunches, then with a cooking school, but what I didn’t anticipate was the friends we would make. We’ve had the most special people cross our threshold, from the wonderful New Yorker who presented me with an apron her grandmother had embroidered with the name On Rue Tatin, and which I treasure (she also sent us her special Christmas cookies after the week she spent with us), to the duo of dentists who kept us laughing from Sunday night through to Friday noon, then gave both kids a quick dental examination and advice, followed up by packages of fluoride in the mail; from the school librarian who made a list of ‘must read’ books for Joe, to the retired university professor who keeps me up to date with all manner of interesting food items. Nor will I ever forget our first Australian guest, who kept saying, as she fastened her apron and picked up her knife, ‘I didn’t know we were going to cook!’ All of this, and we’ve only just begun! My goal with this cooking school is simple, aside from providing an income for us all. I want everyone who comes to On Rue Tatin not only to gain a practical knowledge of French culinary techniques but also to get a real, authentic flavour of France, to experience the rare relationship people here have with food producers and artisans, and to taste the difference in food that is grown locally with care, and eaten within just a few miles of where it was grown. I want them to leave On Rue Tatin with a sense that they ‘know’ France through all of us, and I want them to go home and share what they have learned. CORN LOAF Pain de Ma?s This rustic bread is a delight with any meal, though I particularly like it with roast pork. Make sure you keep some for breakfast, to toast, for it is sublime with a touch of salted butter and a drizzle of honey! 3 cups (750ml) lukewarm milk 2 tsp active dry yeast 1 / tsp sugar 4 cups (535g) fine cornmeal (or semolina), preferably yellow 1 tbs sea salt 5 to 6 cups (705g) unbleached, all-purpose flour 1. Place the warm milk in a large bowl or the bowl of an electric mixer. Stir in the yeast and sugar, then the cornmeal (or semolina), 1 cup at a time. Stir in the salt, then add the flour, 1 cup at a time, until you have a soft dough. Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and knead it several times, adding a bit of additional flour if necessary so it doesn’t stick to your fingers. 2. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes on the work surface, then knead it until it is smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes, adding more flour if necessary to keep it from sticking to your hands. Don’t use more than 6 cups of flour – the dough should be soft and slightly wet, not firm. 3. Place the dough in a bowl, cover with a damp towel and let it rise in a warm spot until it has doubled in bulk, about 1– / hours. Punch it down, and divide it in half. 4. Sprinkle two 9 / -inch (23.5cm) pie plates with cornmeal (or semolina). Shape each half of the dough into a round and place them, seam-side down, in the prepared pie plates. Press down on the rounds so they fill the pie plates, cover loosely with a towel and let them rise in a warm spot until they are nearly doubled in bulk, about 30 minutes. 5. Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C). 6. Using a very sharp knife, cut a large spiral in the top of each loaf, then bake in the centre of the oven until the loaves are golden and sound hollow when tapped, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn out of the pie plates and let cool to room temperature on wire racks. Two large loaves RAW BEET SALAD Salade de Betteraves Crues I love beets any way I can get them, though this salad is a favourite. I make it often at home, and serve it as a little extra during cooking school weeks, so that everyone has a chance to sample beets at their crunchy finest! I serve very small portions of this, as its flavour is intense. It looks beautiful in the centre of a small plate garnished with a sprig of green! 1 tsp sherry vinegar Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 2 tbs extra-virgin olive oil / tsp cumin seeds 1 shallot, peeled and cut into paper-thin slices 4 medium beets, trimmed, peeled, and finely grated Small bunch of chervil, flat-leaf parsley, or arugula 1. Whisk the vinegar with salt and pepper to taste in a large bowl. Add the olive oil in a thin stream, whisking constantly. Taste for seasoning; then stir in the cumin seeds and the shallot. Add the beets and toss so they are thoroughly coated with the dressing. Let the beets rest for at least 15 minutes before serving. Just before serving, mound the beets in the centre of 6 small plates, and garnish them with the parsley or the arugula leaves. Serve immediately 6 servings A French Poodle in the House (#ulink_e0bd92aa-8f83-503d-82e8-6bc8378b84ed) Every day for three years, while Joe and I were walking to school in the early mornings, he used to ask me if he could have a little sister, as though this was something we would buy at the charcuterie we passed each morning. The first time the request came up I didn’t know what to say. Joe didn’t know that Michael and I wanted another child – boy or girl – and had been trying to have one for several years. It wouldn’t mean a thing to him if I said, ‘We’re trying, Joe, we’re trying, we don’t want you to be an only child any more than you do.’ So, I put him off by saying, ‘Well, maybe you will one day,’ sheepishly knowing this probably wasn’t true. Michael and I weren’t desperate to have another child, but we thought it would be great for Joe to have a sibling, and for our family to be one person bigger. We assumed I would get pregnant, but two years had passed and I hadn’t. I decided I would take the first steps to check into adoption, to see how serious we wanted to get. I didn’t get far in my research before I learned that there are few if any babies available for adoption in France: pregnant woman of any age and situation are encouraged to keep their babies, and financial assistance from the state makes it very possible for them to do so. This explains the number of babies wheeling around babies; some of the mothers I see look no older than thirteen and, for all I know, they may be. The only couples I knew in France who had adopted babies had gone to South America or China to find them, and I knew that we wouldn’t go that far. We didn’t want to, nor could we afford to purchase a child. Secondly, our passion for a child didn’t go to those lengths. Maybe we were selfish – we wanted our own baby, and if our own baby wasn’t going to happen, we’d stay a happy little family of three. Finally we did what any sensible couple whose son wants a sibling would do. We considered getting a dog. Joe wanted a dog. Michael wanted a dog. I’m not much of an animal-lover, but I figured I could live with a dog. I’d grown up with a dachshund and loved her, but she was a yippy little attack dog who would go after crawling babies if she couldn’t find the moles she was bred to chase, so I didn’t think we wanted that sort. Michael had grown up with and loved golden labradors, but they needed lots of space and exercise, and our house and garden weren’t appropriate. What we really needed was a robotic dog that acted like a real dog and needed no space (or maintenance). Joe’s plaintive request for a sister continued. One of his favourite stories was The Little Match Girl and he would get so sad at the plight of the little girl. He wanted to bring her home and make a little bed for her in his room so he could protect her. He was obviously ready for the care and feeding of a living creature. We continued to mull over the dog idea until we finally decided that was what we would do. It would be Joe’s ‘little match girl’, his sibling. Joe was ecstatic and promised to do his share of taking care of the dog. I was clear from the start that, while I would go along with the idea, I wouldn’t take care of it full-time. We all agreed the dog would be a family project. Knowing that the best way to find a great dog was de bouche ? oreille, by word of mouth, I mentioned it to our neighbours the florists. The very next day there was a knock on the door. Michael opened it to a rotund boy of about eleven with the thickest, most lush crew-cut I’d ever seen. ‘Bonjour Monsieur, Madame,’ he said, politely. ‘I believe that you are looking for a dog. The florists sent me over here.’ That was fast, I thought. He went on to explain, in very adult language, about a dog he had found and that he loved, but that his father, a fireman, insisted he get rid of because their apartment was too small. Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘I love this dog,’ he admitted, hiccuping a sob back into his throat. ‘My mother loves it, too, but my father says no, we must not keep it.’ He closed his eyes and two little tears popped out. We were taken in by the drama, and told him we would think about his offer and call him. We were only vaguely interested, though, since we didn’t want a fully grown dog with someone else’s bad training habits. The boy, whose name was Anthony, turned away, shoulders sagging, and slowly walked out through the courtyard door. Not two hours later he was back, dog and mother in tow. This time, when Michael answered the door, Joe was right behind him. ‘Monsieur, – dame,’ he said brightly. ‘You seem like such nice people, I just had to bring this little dog over to meet you.’ The dog turned out to be an abricot caniche, a mid-sized, full-grown, fuzzy poodle the colour of dirty reddish straw, or unripe apricots. A male, his eyes were invisible under his unruly curls, and he wiggled all over, obviously delighted to be around people. Anthony, the boy, was holding him by a leash. ‘He is so adorable I know you’ll love him immediately,’ he said artlessly, and with a slight quaver in his voice. ‘Oh brother,’ I thought. Deciding to get a dog was one thing. Being presented with a warm and full-grown one that wiggled was another. We had never imagined getting a poodle – they are reputed to be as silly as they look. To prove our point the dog, held firmly by the strong Anthony, began little arcing jumps to nowhere, nearly choking himself and pulling over Anthony simultaneously. He wanted to get away, to move, to be free. He finally arced so hard that Anthony let go of the leash and he bounded into our front yard as though shot out of a cannon. He ran stupidly around the apple tree a couple of times, then back through the gravel, spraying pieces everywhere, until he stopped right at Joe’s feet. Well, he sort of stopped. He actually bashed right into Joe’s leg, startling Joe, and hurting his own nose. Michael bent down and beckoned, and the dog plastered himself against Michael’s leg. Joe, who likes dogs in theory but is afraid of them, stood behind Michael and bent over to stroke the dog’s back. He and Michael had turned into pools of melted butter in the face of this dog. Like a horse-whisperer with horses, Michael knows just how to get a dog to respond, where to scratch, pat, tickle and rub. This dog responded by lying flat on his back on the bricks, and shaking all over. Joe crouched over him. I stood by, watching the scene. Anthony and his mother were in a half-embrace, tears running down their faces. Joe and Michael were rapt. Moli?re couldn’t have written a better farce. I was lukewarm about the dog. He was a little messy for me, a little too rambunctious, a little too – well – dog-like. I’d imagined something smaller, cuter, calmer; something that resembled a stuffed dog a little more. The more Michael teased him, the more the dog slobbered all over him and the closer Joe got to him. I knew he would soon be moving in. Michael released the dog. Anthony called him, and the dog responded. We formed a family huddle while Anthony and his mother mooned over the dog. ‘Oh mama and papa, he’s so cute,’ Joe said. ‘He really is cute,’ Michael said. ‘And he seems really nice and not too wild.’ We agreed to give the dog a try, but on a trial basis. If the dog turned out to be awful, we’d return it to Anthony and his mother. We looked at Joe. ‘Does this make sense to you?’ we asked him. He nodded, eyeing the dog with desire. ‘OK,’ Michael repeated. ‘We take the dog on a trial basis. If he’s perfect, we keep him. If he’s not, out he goes.’ I looked at Michael, the animal-lover. I don’t think he’s ever met an animal he doesn’t like, and he has infinite patience with them. I doubted that if the dog got into our home and life it would ever leave. We told Anthony and his mother our conditions, and they just stared at us. ‘Oh monsieur, – dame, and you, little boy, you will love this dog so much you’ll never want to get rid of him,’ Anthony said. ‘The one thing I do ask you is that I be able to visit him once in a while. The transition will be hard on him, and I will miss him so.’ Who was this boy who spoke like a French politician? We agreed, of course, to regular visits for as long as he liked, and he handed over the leash to Joe. He turned to kiss the dog, but as far as the dog was concerned, Anthony and his mother were history. Of much more interest was our garden, our apple tree, our dahlias. Anthony began crying his eyes out and he and his mother, who held him around the shoulders, sobbed their way out through the door. I was exhausted by all the emotion. I looked at Michael, who shrugged. ‘We’ll see,’ was all he said. The dog bounded over to us and Joe leapt out of the way. Michael scratched the dog’s ears and he lay down, calmed. Joe eased in; I patted him, too. He was awfully cute, and he seemed very sweet, just like Anthony and his mother had said. They had assured us he was house-trained, had no bad habits, didn’t sleep in their beds – one thing I deplore – and that he was very calm. This all sounded good to me. I went into the house to cook. I was working on recipes and the menu included avocado with pistachio oil and shallots, braised oxtail with cinnamon, baked potatoes with bay leaves and ginger madeleines with allspice ice cream. With all this dog business, I was behind schedule. Several hours later Anthony returned with a dog dish, some dog toys, and another leash, this one bright red leather. The dog was all over him, and he all over the dog, and they played for a moment. Then the waterworks began again. ‘You can come visit him whenever you want,’ I reassured Anthony, who seemed close to a nervous break-down. ‘I will do that, Madame, merci,’ he sniffed, backing out of the courtyard. We went about finding a place for the dog to sleep, and a place to set his bowls. We had decided the dog would eat leftovers and dry food, since both Michael and I are morally opposed to feeding dogs food that could logically be given to hungry humans, and most canned dog food fits into that category. So, Michael and Joe went off to buy him some dry food. We got the dog set up. He was asleep by this time, on the entranceway rug, right in the middle of the traffic pattern. We all stood there and looked at him. He was pretty darn cute. He needed a name. I wanted to give him a literary French name, like Aristide or Gionot, since he was a French poodle. Michael and Joe settled on calling him LD, for Little Dog. I’d renounced responsibility for the dog – how could I intervene? Dinner that night was a resounding success – we loved all the recipes – and there were few leftovers, but what remained went into the dog’s dish. He immediately dragged the bones into the middle of the kitchen floor and noisily chewed on them, then left them right there when he wandered off to fall asleep again. We transferred LD to a clean blanket in the kitchen, and we all turned in. Sometime after we’d all fallen asleep we heard excited barking. It was LD reacting to something outside – a light going off, a car going by, we didn’t know what. Michael quieted him down and we went back to sleep. The next day Joe came down the stairs and wrinkled his nose as he walked into the kitchen. ‘Where’s LD?’ he asked and, simultaneously, ‘What is that smell?’ LD and the smell were in the same spot. He hadn’t left any untoward packages anywhere; he just smelt like a not-very-clean animal. We hadn’t noticed it the night before, most likely in the excitement of having him in our home. ‘When you get home from school we’ll give him a bath,’ Michael said to Joe. But Michael and I couldn’t make it through the day with this fragrant dog, who smelt as if he’d rolled in something dead. How had we not noticed this the night before? Michael bathed him, rubbed him dry, and put him outside on a long tether. He was fluffy, clean and very cute. We both went back to work. LD began to bark, at moving objects – people, cars, birds flying by. I went out to tell him to be quiet, in English. He stopped barking, but gave me the most quizzical look. We stared at each other for a full minute before I realized he hadn’t understood the words I’d said. So, I wondered, how does one tell a dog to be quiet in French? ‘Tais-toi’? Impolite. ‘Calme-toi’? Ineffectual. I settled on ‘Shhht!’, the sound most often heard in a French classroom, which can be uttered with a great deal of authority. By the time I’d climbed the flight of stairs to my office he’d started up again. I brought him inside, and he stopped. I showed him his blankets and he lay down and immediately fell asleep. ‘Whew,’ I thought, but I was wary. I went back to my office. Pretty soon I heard LD leaping up the stairs. He nosed open my office door, came in, sat down under my desk and rested his head on my foot. ‘Aw,’ I thought, ‘he’s really cute.’ But he still smelt, and he twitched. Then he got up and left. I heard Michael lead him to his blanket, after which I heard no more. Later on, Michael put LD on a leash to go and pick up Joe from school, and off they went. I looked out of the window after them. There was Michael, tall, well-built, masculine, with this fluff-ball on a leash that walked in an odd, gimpy way down the street. The scene looked good, unlike the hysterically funny scenes of the Frenchmen I see who walk their dogs. There they go, normal, virile-looking men, in handsome business suits or newly pressed jeans, walking mincing little dogs who stop and sniff at every piece of gravel. Whenever I see one I try not to stare, which is hard because they look so ridiculous. I can’t believe they actually go out in public with their dogs. Why don’t they have labradors, or huskies, or something more befitting their sartorial splendour? When Michael and Joe returned, Joe was holding the leash, petting LD, completely enraptured. ‘This experiment seems to be working,’ I thought. Several days passed and, aside from LD barking constantly when he was outside, he easily settled into our lives. He was obviously an inside dog, and he seemed used to making himself at home. Anthony and his mother had been right – he didn’t jump on the furniture or make any messes inside. He didn’t eat leftovers or dry dog food, either. ‘He’ll get used to it,’ Michael promised. ‘It’s a matter of time.’ Lulled into a feeling of security, I let him out through the front door one day, sure he’d stay close to the door. How wrong I was. He bolted immediately, so far and fast that I lost him. Oh dear, I thought, that was short and sweet. Within an hour he was back, however, docile as could be. He headed to his blanket and fell asleep. When he woke up, he immediately threw up, a lot, in the middle of the floor. He looked perplexed for a minute, then bounded around, the picture of good health. He hadn’t eaten anything at all since morning, so how, I wondered, was he able to throw up so much? We developed a routine. LD stayed in the house during the day, more often than not in my office, his head on my foot. I didn’t love the dog, but it was kind of sweet that he’d chosen my foot as his pillow. And he was quiet enough. We learned that he would bolt immediately if he got out the front door, so we tied him to the apple tree with a very long leash a couple of times a day so he could get fresh air. He barked, but we ignored him and hoped the neighbours did, too. Despite our efforts, he ran away often, always returning an hour or so later. He would circle his bedding, lie down and sleep for a while, then rise and throw up. After the first few times we concluded he had found someone who fed him a lot of meat. ‘This,’ Michael said looking at LD, ‘is a hobo dog.’ Michael put up wire mesh around our fence to keep him in, and asked the priest and the office workers at the parish house to be sure and keep the gate closed on their side – something they’d resisted doing when we’d claimed an open gate was dangerous for our son, but something they seemed very willing to do for a dog. Secure in the knowledge that he was fenced in, we let LD out. He bounded around the garden, tried to wiggle through the iron grating and found it closed. Then he just stood there, head cocked, as though he was thinking. I went back to work, and LD disappeared. Michael found that he’d pushed up the heavy wire mesh and crawled under it. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as he’d first seemed. One night Joe begged for LD to sleep in his room, and we didn’t object. We moved his bedding up there and he settled in, the ‘little match’ dog. Sometime later, Joe called out my name. When I went into his room, he said, ‘Mama, LD stinks. Can you take him out of here?’ I almost choked with laughter, yet it was sad, too. Joe’s dreams about having a dog to keep him company hadn’t included a smelly animal that ran away all the time, came home and threw up, barked too much. LD was beginning to be a disappointment. The next day LD got out of the house, ran away, and didn’t return. I answered a knock on the door and it was a young woman who worked at one of the shops in the neighbourhood. ‘I saw the police pick up your dog,’ she said in a sly sort of way. ‘When, where?’ I asked. ‘Oh, it was a while ago. He was really annoying everyone with his barking,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, you should have signalled me somehow, I would have gone to get him,’ I said. ‘Well, you know it is illegal for a dog to be wandering around without a leash,’ she said, righteously. I realized that she had called the police about LD. I went to the police station and described LD. Sure enough, they had just transported him to the animal shelter in Rouen. Michael, horrified, jumped in the car and went to retrieve him. Fifty dollars and two hours later, he was back with a lively, unapologetic LD. ‘This dog is really dumb,’ Michael said, locking him into the house. ‘We cannot ever let him out without a leash. If he runs away again like that, I’m not going after him.’ By then, LD had been with us about a month. I kept trying to convince myself to like him. He seemed to love us, wiggling all over when he saw us, snuggling up if one of us sat down. He wanted to be near us all the time, but he didn’t really want to play. I don’t think he understood the concept of play. Life to him was running free, sleeping, eating, being walked on a leash that he could pull against. And he had so many bad habits: incessant barking when he was outside, or when he heard a noise inside; his running away; his aroma. His eating habits hadn’t adapted to our rules, either. He didn’t like vegetables or dry dog food. Michael caved in and got him some canned food, which he inhaled. Michael bathed LD practically every day, but it didn’t help much: he was just a smelly dog. Joe liked him, but they weren’t bonding. In fact, none of us were bonding with LD. Poor thing – he was a travelling dog with bonding issues, not a family dog. Two months had gone by, and we were sure the statute of limitations on dog borrowing dictated that we had owned him too long to return him to the emotionally distraught Anthony. In fact, we now wondered if Anthony and his mother hadn’t been rehearsing for a drama project with their Oscar-winning sobfest, as neither of them ever came to visit the dog. Now and then, I would take LD on a walk in town, thinking perhaps he and I would bond. Besides, I figured that I would look really French if I had a caniche on a leash. I’m taller than most French woman, have reddish hair, freckles, blue eyes and blonde eyebrows, which means I don’t look French in the least, so maybe LD would be my ticket to Frenchness. But it didn’t work. Friends and acquaintances stooped to give him a pat but mentioned nothing different about me. Their only reaction was a certain sympathy when I explained why I was walking LD down the pavement. I guess I didn’t look any more French than usual as I struggled to keep him from running into every shop we passed, and from stopping to sniff every tiny little thing. Then there were those terribly embarrassing moments when LD had to ‘fait ses besoins’. I gently tugged him to the gutter, but he resisted, so I had to pick him up and deposit him there, then stand on the other end of the leash, waiting. It was excruciating. Where was I supposed to look? How was I supposed to act if someone I knew came up to greet me? I love to bicycle, and I go for a ride through the fields several times a week. Invariably, LD would wind up flapping along behind me and I would stop, grab him, go home and lock him up, then start again. This happened so many times it became part of my bicycle ride. I would have loved his company on my rides, but he was too undisciplined: at the first opportunity he’d run into someone’s house, or jump over a fence into a yard full of chickens, or make a mess on someone’s front path, or knock over an elderly lady; it was impossible to let him run free. The more we had LD, the less we all liked him, but no one wanted to admit it. It was nearing summer and the French government had launched its yearly pre-holiday campaign to discourage the French from abandoning their dogs, which they do in huge numbers each year. Plaintive doggies looked out from posters everywhere, while the words, ‘You wouldn’t be able to abandon him?’ stretched like a reproach above his head. It was as if they were reading our minds, though we certainly weren’t the kind of people to abandon a dog, even a tramp dog, rubbish-eating, meat mercenary like LD. Michael, the lover of all animals, agreed that he was a sorry excuse for a pet. ‘This dog is an apartment dog,’ he said, the worst judgement he could lay on an animal. ‘He should sit on a chair all day and be fed with a silver spoon.’ Joe liked him but didn’t really want to be around him much, either, but we were stuck with him and we were attached, sort of. So we settled into accepting him, the way one does dopey neighbours or quirky plumbing. He didn’t chew up things, he wasn’t mean, he didn’t wet in the house, he wasn’t ruining anything but the peace and quiet of the neighbourhood. But he certainly wasn’t the playmate Joe had envisioned. We’d had LD for about two months when I discovered I was pregnant. I couldn’t believe it, and Michael’s disbelief surpassed mine. I looked at LD, long and hard, perplexed. I try for three years to get pregnant, then decide it’s impossible. We decide to get a dog, get one within moments of our decision, and within two months of its acquisition I’m pregnant? What did it all mean? If we’d known pregnancy was imminent, we wouldn’t have had to go through this dog thing. On the other hand … I couldn’t entertain that thought: the same one which holds that couples who want to get pregnant and can’t suddenly manage to do so the minute they decided to adopt a child. I was determined to stay fit and healthy during this pregnancy, and stepped up my regular bike rides. One day I set off to ride to the supermarket. For once, LD was nowhere to be seen, until I began to go around the roundabout several blocks from the house. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spied him behind me. I felt as if I could just let him keep running behind me until he lost me and was too far away from home to find his way back. This seemed a rather heartless way to end our relationship, but it showed me that LD needed a new home. Michael, Joe and I later had a family discussion about LD as the dog snuggled under our feet until its head was resting in its accustomed place. We all agreed that we really liked him, but that he wasn’t the right dog for us. We all knew that lots of people would love him, but that being part of our family must have been like reform school for him: he had rules to follow, regular baths, no fresh meat and was prevented from rampaging around the neighbourhood. ‘What kind of a life is this?’ he must have asked himself. The animal shelter seemed like the best solution, so we took him there One day, not two weeks later, I was walking to pick up Joe from school when I saw a caniche not far ahead, running in a funny, familiar, gimpy way. I gained on him and looked him in the face. It was LD, sticking close to the walls, stopping every five seconds to sniff, fat and happy. He’d been adopted by a new owner who was walking some way in front of him: a middle-aged, nicely dressed woman. They looked good together. Since then we’ve seen him often. He’s a lot fatter than he was with us, and he’s clipped now, an uptown dog. But it is obvious that his heart and soul are still free and on the run. Old LD is having the best of it all! CHICKEN WITH SORREL Poulet ? L’Oseille This recipe is a family favourite, and perfect in spring or fall when sorrel is at its lemony best. 1 tbs extra-virgin olive oil – optional 5 oz (150 g) slab bacon, cut into 1 x / -inch (2.5 x 1.3cm) pieces 1 medium free range chicken (3 / pounds; 1 / kg), cut into 6 pieces (2 wing/breast pieces, 2 thighs, 2 legs) Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 lb (500 g) onions, peeled, cut in half, and sliced paper-thin 1 cup (250 ml) dry white wine, such as a Sauvignon Blanc 2 imported bay leaves 4 cups (loosely packed) sorrel leaves, rinsed and patted dry 1 cup (250 ml) cr?me fra?che, or heavy, non ultra-pasteurized cream 1. If your bacon is very lean, you will need to use the olive oil. Heat the oil, if using, in a large heavy skillet over medium-high heat. When it is hot, add the bacon and saut? until it is just golden on all sides, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove the bacon from the skillet with a slotted spoon and set it aside on a plate. Drain all but 1 tablespoon of the fat from the skillet. 2. Add as many pieces of the chicken as will comfortably fit in the skillet without being overcrowded. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper and brown until golden, about 5 minutes. Turn, sprinkle with more salt and pepper, and brown the other side, 5 minutes. Repeat until all of the pieces are browned. Remove the chicken from the pan and reserve. 3. Add the onions to the skillet and cook, stirring, until they are softened, about 8 minutes. Then add the wine and scrape any browned juices from the bottom of the skillet. Return the chicken and the bacon to the skillet, along with the bay leaves, pushing the chicken down among the onions. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium. Cover and cook at a simmer until the chicken is tender and nearly cooked through, about 30 minutes. 4. While the chicken is cooking, stack the sorrel leaves on top of one another and cut them crosswise into very, very thin strips (chiffonade). 5. Remove the chicken from the skillet, place it on a serving platter, cover it loosely with aluminum foil, and keep it warm in a low oven. Stir the cr?me fra?che into the cooking juices, raise the heat to medium-high and bring to a simmer. Add the sorrel, stirring as it melts down into the sauce. Reduce the heat if necessary so the liquid remains at a lively simmer and cook until the sorrel has wilted and turned an olive green, and the sauce has reduced by about one third, 5 to 7 minutes. Taste for seasoning. 6. Remove the chicken from the oven, and pour the sauce over it. Serve immediately. 4 to 6 servings BELGIAN ENDIVE WITH LEMON AND GARLIC VINAIGRETTE Endives a la Vinaigrette Citronn?e This is a fresh, winter salad that chases away the chill! I often add cured black olives to this salad, for a wonderful counterpoint in flavour and texture. For the vinaigrette: / tsp minced lemon zest 2 tbs freshly squeezed lemon juice Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 medium shallot, halved, peeled, cut in paper thin slices 1 small clove garlic, green germ removed, minced 6 tbs (90ml) extra-virgin olive oil 6 large Belgian endive, trimmed 1. In a large salad bowl, place the zest then whisk together the lemon juice with the salt, pepper, shallot, and garlic. Slowly whisk in the olive oil until the vinaigrette is emulsified. 2. Cut the endive into crosswise slices. Add it to the vinaigrette and toss until it is thoroughly coated. Season to taste sand serve. 6 servings ROASTED COCKLES WITH SAFFRON AND LEMON Coques au Four ? la Sauce Safrane Try this recipe with tiny manila clams as well. There is no salt in the dipping sauce, and none is generally needed. The zest from / lemon, minced 1 scant tbs freshly squeezed lemon juice / tsp saffron threads 3 lb (1.5 kg) small clams, degorged (#ulink_f95afa1d-68cd-5247-b96b-9c8da0f6e5ee) / cup (60 ml) extra-virgin olive oil 1. At least one hour and up to four hours before serving, place the lemon zest and the juice in a small dish and crumble the saffron into it. Stir so the saffron is completely moistened and reserve. 2. Preheat the oven to 450°F (230°C). 3. Place the clams in one layer in a large baking pan. Roast them in the centre of the oven until they open, 8 to 10 minutes. 4. While the clams are roasting, transfer the lemon juice and the saffron to a small bowl and whisk in the olive oil. Evenly divide the mixture among six tiny ramekins, and place the ramekins in the centre of six warmed plates. 5. Remove the clams from the oven, discarding any that haven’t opened. Evenly divide the clams among the six small plates, carefully arranging them around the ramekins. Serve immediately. 6. Appetizer servings (#ulink_8b39c9af-93f0-5a9d-9a8a-d0aa124c004f) To degorge the clams, place them in a large container of heavily salted water. Stir in 1 tablespoon of semolina or fine cornmeal, and refrigerate them for at least 4 hours and up to 8 hours, changing the water at least 3 times, adding semolina or cornmeal each time. An Ode to the Market in Louviers (#ulink_af4ce433-0686-58a2-a0d6-58dfbd9fb75f) I love waking up on Saturday morning; even from inside my bedroom I can feel the lilt in the air because it’s my favourite day of the week, market day. I like to get to the market by 8.30 a.m. If I go any earlier the vendors won’t have their stands fully set up; much later and the crowds who at that hour are still at home taking their last sips of coffee and wiping the crumbs of baguette from the corners of their mouths, will descend to block the passages, chat with the vendors and stand in long queues in front of the most coveted produce. By getting there before them I can do all of these things at a leisurely pace, and still be home in time to put in a good, full day of cooking. I have a prescribed order to my marketing, which rarely varies. I walk out of our courtyard and head right down the main street of town to the bank’s cash machine. I am already in heaven as I watch the street wake up: the florists are putting out the last plants and buckets of flowers on the pavement; Brigitte, the owner of Laure Boutique is arranging the precarious stacks of baskets and postcard racks that announce her store; and one of the women who works at the charcuterie is carefully spelling out the daily specials on a sandwich board outside the shop. I always, every time, admire her slightly Victorian handwriting and the way she manages to produce a perfectly straight, perfectly justified list. Brigitte looks up as I pass, takes off her glasses and we kiss twice on each cheek, then I go on. When I turn the corner from the main street I can hear the hum of the market, which will build to more of a crescendo as it swings into its full, mid-morning rhythm. When I turn again, into the market, I get the same feeling as when I set foot on the dance floor: the rhythm takes over and I pick up my pace, straighten my back and hold my head a bit higher as I meet the sounds and colours. I refer to this street as ‘goat cheese alley’ because the goat’s cheese producer is here with his soft, creamy fresh cheeses. I don’t dare buy any now because they’re so fragile they need special handling or they’ll turn to mush, but I smile and nod to the producer, who is usually sharing a rillettes sandwich with his neighbour, the produits de luxe, or luxury products man across the way. I’ll buy cheese from him just before I leave the market to return home. I smile at the produits de luxe man, too. He has the most exquisite smoked herring, fat, luscious fillets of salt cod, dried and peppered mackerel fillets, gorgeous smoked salmon and trout. I buy the herring and the salt cod most often – the first to serve with boiled potatoes and fresh onions, the latter to serve in dozens of different ways, though my favourite preparation is a silken, garlicky puree called brandade. Next to him is the plant man who, each year, has the most beautiful pansies and petunias. I always buy royal blue pansies for the autumn and winter window boxes, which I like to mix with white, or white and salmon. Come spring and I plant pots with his deep purple petunias, which fill our courtyard with their vanilla aroma. Along with the fuchsia and white and mauve petunias in the window boxes, they make a riotous display of colour that lasts right into autumn. The long farm-stall next to him is manned by a trio of young farmers who laugh and make jokes all morning long. The mother of one of them is there sometimes, too, and she is just as jovial as they. I check out their produce as I walk by, cataloguing it in my head in case they’ve got something I’ll need when I return. The market is full of quirky personalities, and across the street is one of them: a woman with an assortment of fruits and vegetables that she grows herself and that she claims are all organic. She’s got that honest, country look that can’t help but be attractive; I bought most of my vegetables from her when I first began shopping at the market years ago. But I learned to pass her by, because each time I returned home I would find something rotten, unripe or otherwise inedible in the bottom of my bag. Then I began hearing others complain about her. How she stays in business I’ll never know, but she seems to do just fine. Kitty corner from her is a snaggle-toothed man with unkempt hair who sells very few items, all of them slightly smudged and grubby. I cannot imagine anyone actually buying the smashed pats of butter he says he makes, or the boxes of nuts that are surely from several years ago, judging by their allure. He is a distant cousin of people we know, and all they can say is that he was put on this earth to be mean. Mean he may be and a cheater to boot, if what they say is true, but he certainly seems to enjoy himself at the market, and is always in conversation with one of his neighbours. The Portuguese stand at the corner scents the air with peppers, garlic and lemon from a dozen varieties of seasoned olives. The charming proprietor and his carbon copy of a son smile shyly as they spoon them into small plastic bags, then knot them tightly with a quick flip and turn. They also sell strings of gorgeous sun-dried figs, white and yellow cornmeal, deliciously salty air-cured pork loin called luomo, candied fruits including kumquats – which I buy at Christmas – and an assortment of Portuguese wines, cheeses and spices. Once past this stand I make a beeline for Jean-Claude and Monique Martin, the undisputed reigning family of the market. Oh, there are many other wonderful producers and much delicious produce, but none have the finesse of character and produce that Jean-Claude and Monique possess. My mouth waters as I stand there looking at their crates full of violet-flavoured m?che (lamb’s lettuce), delicate cauliflower, sweet carrots, earthy potatoes and celery root. Jean-Claude is small and wiry with intense blue eyes that burn with humour and intelligence. Monique is small and much calmer, with a steady, direct gaze. Their daughter Myriam, with her choppy punk haircut and her slim 1950s glasses doesn’t say much, but she’s got a lively glint in her eyes, as does her older brother Xavier, who speaks with a charming lisp. They both work hard at the market stall with their parents, though each holds a full-time job during the week. It pays to get to the Martins’ stall early, as they are extremely popular. Jean-Claude is full of mischievous comments, and when he sees someone he knows well he booms a greeting of ‘?a va ti?’ which is the local patois for ‘How’re you doing?’ Monique gives a kiss on each cheek to customers, some of whom the couple has served for the twenty years they’ve been coming to the market in Louviers. I’ve learned over time that Monique has a quick wit. I was reminded of it most recently when I was struggling to find exact change in my purse full of euros and cents. France had changed its currency from francs to euros about two months before, in what had been an amazingly tranquil transition. There were some complaints, particularly about the size of the small denominations of coins, the kind I was trying to locate so that I could give Monique exact change. ‘Oh, I’m just like an old lady digging in my purse,’ I said, frustrated with the sameness of all the coins. ‘Suzanne,’ Monique replied with a straight face, ‘the old ladies have a lot less trouble than you.’ I first struck up a friendship with the Martins over recipes. Monique is a good country cook who loves to talk food, and I have several of her recipes in my French Farmhouse Cookbook. Jean-Claude is a good country eater who couldn’t care less about technique, but loves to eavesdrop and add his two cents worth. I’m not really sure which recipe was the first Monique shared with me – I believe it was for a salad tossed with apples saut?ed in butter – but ever since then we’ve been friends. I’ve been to their home to cook with Monique and I’ve shared meals and aperitif hours with them, too, sitting at an outdoor table that overlooks their rectangular farmyard. Monique and Jean-Claude live in the lovely old farmhouse that sits at one end of the farmyard, while Monique’s parents’ house stands at a right-angle to it, and Myriam’s house is across the patch of green lawn with its big flower pot in the centre. Beyond, completing the rectangle, are hangars filled with farm equipment, hutches for dogs and refrigerators for storing produce. I’ve seen the Martins prosper in the ten years I’ve known them. When I first visited them at their large farm it was dusty and in desperate need of some loving attention. The big storm at the end of 1999 caught them unawares and their chimney crashed to the ground, destroying a good part of their roof with it. They used this unhappy event and the repairs it required as impetus to redo the entire fa?ade of their farm in trompe l’oeil timbers, which brightened it up immensely. I believe one of the reasons the Martins have prospered is because they added an extra farmers’ market to their week. For once, in a moment of seriousness, Jean-Claude took the time to explain to me the marketing of vegetables, helping me see how much more advantageous it is for them to sell directly to the consumer than to go through a middle person. The organization required to sell at several different markets is daunting, and it means that Jean-Claude often stays at the farm to harvest while Monique and their children sell. But it makes their hard work and the long hours they put in worthwhile. For the consumer like me it means that I’m getting produce that was harvested just hours before I buy it from the person who grew it. The only thing better than this would be if I grew and harvested the produce myself. It is relationships like the one I have with the Martins that results in the intensely flavoured food I have the privilege to cook and eat. I am so thankful to farmers like the Martins and consumers like the French who demand the quality of goods they produce, for they are responsible for the network of vibrant markets throughout France. They are the country’s soul, and no one would want to live without them. The Martins raise basic produce on fertile fields that are scattered around the area. There are some behind the farm, and some down a lane and across a bridge to a bucolic island in the River Eure. Further down another road is yet another field. The Martins are fortunate to have their fields nearby; I know farmers who travel many kilometres to work their land, which makes their days long and inefficient. The alluvial soil of the Martins’ fields makes for sweeter-than-average carrots, crisp, tender lettuce with a delicate flavour, spicy shallots and lush, sweet spinach. They sell many other vegetables including gorgeous tall leeks, incredibly delicious cauliflower and tasty broccoli, celery root, sweet and hot ‘jaune paille’ onions, courgettes, tomatoes, squashes and fat round beets as well as long slim ones. When I first began buying from the Martins’ they sold only cooked beets, a custom that dates from the Second World War when fuel was scarce. Farmers had a more generous fuel allotment than other citizens then, so they cooked beets in huge vats at the farm and sold them cooked to save their customers fuel. I prefer to cook my own beets, and I also love them raw, tossed in a cumin vinaigrette, so I asked Jean-Claude if I could buy some raw beets from him. He brought a crate the next week and found that other customers liked them raw, too. Now the Martins always have raw beets along with the cooked. I noticed that each week the Martins would sell crate after crate of black radishes, and I asked Jean-Claude what people did with them, for I had only ever come across black radish grated and tossed with rice-wine vinegar. Jean-Claude opened his eyes wide and looked at me as if I was an imbecile. ‘Suzanne, you don’t know what to do with black radishes?’ he said in an exaggeratedly surprised tone. ‘Monique, viens dire ? Suzanne ce qu’il faut faire avec les radis noir. Come and tell Susan what to do with black radishes.’ She laughed and said, ‘C’est simple.’ She told me to slice them thin and serve them on fresh bread slathered with butter, or toss them in a shallot-rich vinaigrette. I do both and we all love their nutty, slightly hot flavour. It turns out they have medicinal properties, too, the most common being a cure for a sore throat once they’ve been cooked with sugar to a golden pur?e. The Martins periodically invite me to stop by the farm, which is a twenty-minute drive from Louviers. Most recently I took Fiona, and with Monique we ambled along the ‘chemin de halage’, the towpath that was used by horses to drag barges down the River Eure. Almost every riverside town and village in France has such a road, and it provides an insight into the life of the community, as it is hidden from the main streets behind homes, farms and factories. In this particular farming village it runs along behind tidy productive gardens and small fields, a restored manor house and little fishing huts that have been turned into vacation homes. We saw flowers and vegetables, rabbits and chickens, people having drinks under huge parasols, fishermen reeling in their small, wiggly catch. We even picked some redcurrants that hung over a fence into the pathway. Our return to the Martins’ farm, which is in the centre of the village, coincided with Jean-Claude’s return from the fields, and it gave us a chance to take a drink together at the large table outside. Monique’s parents joined us too, and it was a warm, friendly time. When I’ve finished at the Martins’ stall at the market I pack everything carefully into my basket and they tell me what I owe. How, I always wonder, is it possible to get so much for so little? I would be willing to pay so much more for all this gorgeous produce that my family, my luncheon guests and my cooking school students enjoy so much. I walk away from the stand thinking that I’m getting much, much more than I’ve paid for. When I’m shopping for my cooking classes or for a special lunch I buy a lot of produce, and take no end of teasing. After I’ve chosen multiple heads of lettuce, enough carrots and leeks to make soup or turn into a garnish, radishes and baby potatoes for an appetizer, aubergine and tomatoes to accompany something from the grill, my basket is overflowing. One week I was asking about the keeping qualities of their shell beans: I needed them on Friday morning to serve as a garnish on saut?ed foie gras, and our market is on Saturday morning. ‘Xavier can deliver them to you on Friday morning: he goes to Louviers every day,’ Monique said. Xavier nodded in acquiescence. I looked at him a bit sceptically. ‘Are you sure that this is convenient for you?’ I asked. ‘If you don’t mind getting them at seven-thirty in the morning, I’ll do it whenever you want,’ he responded. Imagine: farm-fresh vegetables delivered to my door. I accepted, gratefully, realizing that this might change my shopping habits forever. I walk right by the gorgeous loaves of sourdough bread that are displayed at a stand next to the Martins’, and which beckon like a siren’s call. I’ve succumbed before to this bread, which is sold by the pound, and each time I’ve been disappointed. The crust is dark and shatteringly crisp, the ‘mie’, or crumb, is filled with irregular holes, just like good bread should be, but there is an aftertaste of chlorine. I assume it is from the water used in the bread since, according to the man who sells it-who I don’t think is actually the man who makes it – the only ingredients in this bread are the sacred triumvirate of flour, water and salt. Unfortunately, not everything at the market is as it seems. Baptiste’s stand is next. The farm he works with his uncle must be in a microclimate, for while he has just about the same variety of produce that the Martins do, his is always a bit in advance, which gives him an edge – he’s got the first tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, courgettes, and a variety of strawberry called Mara des Bois that produces from early spring into autumn with a flavour and aroma so musky and sweet it should be bottled. I always think I’ll serve them with a cake or a cr?me br?l?e, but we usually end up eating them all before I can do anything with them. In the winter Baptiste makes his fortune, a word I use as hyperbole, on Belgian endive. This he cultivates in soil, unlike most endive in France, which is cultivated hydroponically. It is in season from November to March or April, depending on the year, and he sells every single endive that he harvests. I get milk across the way from Baptiste, then continue on down the row of stalls to a vendor who specializes in Hass avocados which, depending on the time of year, are either from Spain or Israel, and are unparalleled in flavour. On my way I bypass Guy-Guy, the charcutier, despite the delicious aromas emanating from his huge pan of bubbling choucroute, or sauerkraut, his fat sausages, his smoked hams and his enormous, garlicky p?t?s. I shopped at this large, colourful stall until I discovered a charcutier whose products are finer, more richly and carefully flavoured, less mass-produced than Guy-Guy’s. I don’t know why it took me so long to discover him, for his pork products are head and shoulders above anyone else’s at the market, or in the town of Louviers, for that matter. A dapper little man with pomaded hair and a tidy white coat, he and his plump, blonde-haired wife are old-fashioned and gracious, products of a different era. On Saturdays they have two young men working alongside them, one of which, I’m almost certain, is their son. Though they are all very pleasant, they have no time for chit-chat, since the queue at their stand is long and insistent. As I wait I watch people load up for the week on p?t?, sausages, garlicky saucisson ? l’ail, ham, tripe, head cheese, jellied pigs’ feet. I buy ‘jambon ? l’os’, ham on the bone, which the charcutier hand-cuts into sumptuous, uneven slices, which I like to serve along with a green salad dressed with chive vinaigrette. I’m not even a ham lover, but for his boiled ham I make a huge, almost gluttonous exception. We all love his garlicky sausages, which I serve with vinaigrette-dressed green beans and potatoes, or atop a salad. His lightly smoked bacon, which, like all bacon in France, is lean and delicately flavoured, is delicious too. Beyond the charcuterie truck and past the honey man, his card table loaded with several kinds of honey and handmade beeswax candles, is the quiche truck. Here Madeleine, Monique Martin’s cousin, and her husband Jean-Pierre sell quiches, cakes, pizza and a few fruit tarts. They make everything themselves at home, except for the quiches – their specialty – which they cook in the two gas ovens inside the truck. I always wonder, when I watch Jean-Pierre put a baking sheet crowded with quiches into his oven, where I can see the blue flame burning, why the whole thing doesn’t explode. I would have thought it would act like an incendiary bomb, but so far as I’m aware there has never been a mishap. And the quiche truck is hardly a threat compared with the pizza truck and its wood-burning oven that parks in one of Louvier’s car parks every Friday night – but that’s another story. In any case, Monique and Jean-Pierre make the most delicious little quiches I’ve ever had. The crust is crisp and tender, while the filling – which is seasoned with Gruy?re or a classic blend of Gruy?re and bacon, with salmon and leeks, or with tomatoes and garlic – is just the right creaminess. Often Fiona and I go to the market together, and when Monique sees us coming she’s already got a quiche that’s not too cold, not too hot, all ready. ‘Bonjour Mademoiselle,’ she says, and hands it down into Fiona’s waiting hand. Sometimes I’m so hungry I’ll eat mine right there, too, along with all the other people who are doing the same thing. Like them, I’ll go ahead and get myself another one for lunch, along with those I’m buying for the rest of the family. Madeleine and Jean-Pierre’s quiches are one of our Saturday lunchtime treats. My p?riple, or route, through the market is not as quick as it may sound, for I’ve undoubtedly run into several people on my way. Xavier Rousseau who, with his wife Virginie, makes the beautifully delicate Rouennais-style pottery across town from us, which they paint in the traditional seventeenth- to eighteenth-century decor, is an early market goer too. We buss each other on the cheek, then do a quick catch up, our conversations usually revolving around the same subject. ‘How’s work?’ I ask him. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Too busy, mais qu’est-ce que tu veux?’ ‘Too busy, but what do you want?’ I often visit them at their studio and they are always there, sitting on tall stools by their big front window, painstakingly painting the dishes they so carefully throw and mould. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/susan-loomis/tarte-tatin-more-of-la-belle-vie-on-rue-tatin/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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