A Homemade Life (6 page)

M
y parents took me to Paris for the first time when I was ten. It was spring break, and I was in the fourth grade. I told everyone in my class where we were going, and they
ooh
ed and
ahh
ed approvingly, although I don't think any of us knew what Paris really was. I certainly didn't. It was like going to the moon.

It strikes me now, in retrospect, that we took that trip barely a year after Jerry died, and that only three months later, Mia would die, too. My mother probably felt like she was
living
on the moon. She didn't need Paris for that. I guess that's why so much of what I remember from that trip is about my father. She's like a blur at the edge of a photograph.

I can't really tell you about that trip, or about Paris at all, without starting with him. It's funny. It's not so much because of something he showed me or taught me there. In fact, sometimes it's hard to remember anything more than a ghost of that first visit. And it's not that Burg knew Paris particularly well, either. I've come to know it much better now than he ever did. But he
loved
that city, and I guess that's it, really. He loved it so much. And in a sense, he gave it to me.

To properly set the scene, what you need to know first is that my father had a truly excessive coat collection. My father had coats the way old spinsters have cats. He had something like thirty of them. He wasn't
a clotheshorse by any stretch of the imagination, but between his garage sale habit and his seemingly psychic attraction to half-price sale signs, it just sort of happened. The front hall closet was a minefield on hangers, a mishmash of wool, tweed, down, fleece, Gore-Tex, leather, and oilcloth, each so tightly packed against the next that it wouldn't have surprised me to find, upon opening the closet one day, that they had melded together into an enormous, all-weather quilt.

On the chilly, mid-March morning that we landed in Paris, it was a beige trench that he had chosen from amidst the rabble, one of those thin, starchy kinds that fold, for ease of packing, into a zippered travel pouch sewn into the lining. (There is something in the Code of Fatherhood, I believe, that dictates that all dads must own this kind of collapsible, suitcase-ready jacket. That, and collapsible sunshields for their cars, and hammers that transform into screwdrivers that transform into corkscrews.) It was right up his alley, if not particularly Parisian. He was ready for anything.

We had flown all night, from Oklahoma to Atlanta and on to Orly, where we deplaned into what looked to me more like a dingy warehouse, lit in dirty yellows and fluorescent whites, than any airport I'd ever seen. We dragged our bags out to the wet curb, and he flagged down a cab.

“The Latin Quarter,” he yelled to the driver over the din of the highway. “The
Hôtel des Saints-Pères.”
I didn't know what Latin meant, but I knew it had something to do with
E PLURIBUS UNUM
, those words printed on dollar bills.

Our hotel was on a skinny street lined with tall stone buildings that seemed to sit too close to the curb. They reminded me of men in starched suits, puffing out their chests. Our room was a sparse, compact cube crammed between a spiral staircase and a central courtyard. It had the usual amenities, but each looked somehow askew, sort of muddled in the translation. The bedspreads were dusty brown, and I'd never seen a bathroom so small. You couldn't open the door without scraping the knees of the person sitting on the toilet or smacking the rear end of someone at the sink.

“Europe is
different,”
my mother said. “This is a really nice hotel.” But coming from Oklahoma, with its big trucks and strip malls, I wasn't sure. Paris seemed very small, as though its proper inhabitants were those prehistoric men in my social studies book, the ones who were only four feet tall.

My parents had been there before, and they loved the Latin Quarter. My father, especially. That was his Paris. He'd first seen the city in the early sixties, when he spent a month there on sabbatical with his first wife and their children. He was a young radiologist, and he'd come to visit the Institut Curie, which was tucked away in the fifth arrondissement, the old, still-beating heart of the quarter. The way he talked about it, you'd have thought he'd stayed for years. He'd eaten in this brasserie here and that bistro there. He remembered Métro stations and streets with the sort of awkwardly instinctive memory that made me wonder if he'd once sat down with a map and memorized them.

Of that trip, I really only remember one street: the next one over from our hotel, the rue du Dragon. It had a familiar name, but in French, it was hard to pronounce. When I tried to say it aloud, it snagged on my thick American tongue, making me sound, I thought, like I had a tiny dragon stuck in my throat. I liked the idea of that.

We stumbled upon the rue du Dragon that first afternoon. Like most of the other streets in that area, it was a narrow strip of pavement with buildings close in on both sides, but it was a little brighter and more lively, with a few small businesses, two or three restaurants, and a stationery store that sold Mrs. Grossman stickers. (I had a collection at home.) A couple of doors down from the stationery store was a glassy window with a sign above it, written in fat, squatty letters.
La Boule Miche,
it said.

“I think
boule
and
miche
are names,” Burg said, leaning down to my ear, “for a type of bread. Like that round one over there.” He pointed through the window to a shelf where flat, floury disks were propped side by side, like books on a shelf. “But
boule
might also be short for
boulangerie.
That's what they call a bakery.”

We stepped inside. A gray-haired woman was standing behind the
cash register, busily arranging a stack of long paper bags, the sleeves that clothe baguettes when they are sent out into the world.

“Remember,” he said, nudging us closer to the pastry case, “the big street we crossed this morning, in the taxi? The
boulevard Saint-Michel?
They call it the
boul' Mich
for short.” He stooped down to peer into the case. “I wonder if the name of this place is a play on that.”

I have no idea how my father knew these things. Between you and me, his French was awful with a capital A—
affreux,
as the French would say. By the time I was old enough to know the difference, it was clear that his grasp of the language was most firm where food terms were concerned. Beyond that was shaky ground. One-month sabbatical in the sixties or no, when he spoke, Frenchmen winced. In his mouth, a poor, unsuspecting Loire Valley town called Cangey—pronounced
conzhay
—became “Cainghee,” a name better suited to a small town in central Texas. Neuilly (
nuoy-yee
), a well-to-do suburb west of Paris, was reduced to “Nigh-yule,” which strikes me now as a quick, handy way of saying that Christmas is coming soon. But he always tried to speak, at least, and that got him far. It got us into the
boulangerie
. It even got a smile out of the lady at the cash register. If you've ever been to Paris, you know that's no easy feat.

He pulled a few coins out of his pocket.
“Deux croissants et un pain au chocolat, s'il vous plait,”
he said haltingly.

On the wall opposite the pastry case was a copper counter with a long mirror mounted above it. A row of black, velvet-topped stools squatted in front of the counter like spindly mushrooms. We sat down, watching ourselves in the mirror, and ate our pastries: the
croissants
for him and my mother, the
pain au chocolat
for me. It crackled when I bit into it, but underneath the shattery crust, it tore into dozens of stretchy layers and strands. The chocolate inside was still warm, and it oozed out the side until I caught it with my finger and brought it back to my mouth. I was sold.

Each morning after that, while my mother was getting dressed, my father and I would walk around the block to the bakery. It was always the same order for me: a
pain au chocolat
and a
chocolat chaud.
I'd perch
myself atop one of the black mushroom caps, kicking my feet against its stem, and lean over the counter to sip the hot chocolate from its white ceramic cup. Sometimes, for an afternoon snack, he bought me one of the small, oblong breads—
pain passion,
they called them—from a basket by the register. Later in the day, if I got hungry before dinner, I would stuff a little square of chocolate, the kind they give you in cafés when you order coffee, into its doughy center. My father beamed.

For himself, he always bought a
croissant.
I never saw him turn one down, in Paris or anywhere. I can still see him now, sitting next to me on a stool with the street behind him. He'd bite into one pointy end, and then he'd reach for his cup and swallow noisily, wincing at the heat. He always did that with coffee, more of a slurp than a sip, a loud sucking sound that ricocheted around the room. He didn't want to miss a drop.

BREAD AND CHOCOLATE

t
his is a simple trick familiar to every French child. There's something surprisingly right about chocolate and bread together, all that dark, rich sweetness against the chewy, salty crumb. It's one of my favorite snacks.

 

French-style bread, preferably a baguette with a crust that's not too thick

Chocolate, preferably dark

 

Cut or tear off a hunk of bread. Slice or tear it partially across its middle, as though you were going to use it for a sandwich. Break off a piece of chocolate roughly the same length as the piece of bread. Insert the chocolate into the bread. Eat.

 

VARIATION
:
You can also warm the bread a little in the oven, either before or after inserting the chocolate. That way, the bread is soft and warm, and the chocolate gets a little oozy. Oozy chocolate is hard to beat.

I
n spite of the potato salad, pound cake, and
pains au chocolat,
I believed deep down that mine was a childhood of tragic deprivation. My parents put a tight cap on processed foods, which meant no toaster pastries, no grape-flavored bubble gum, no cinnamon toast–flavored cereal, and none of those shiny, single-portion packets of fruit punch with a tiny straw attached. Also not permitted were those stubby, twig-like cheese puffs, which I wanted with a twisted desperation and, on more than one occasion, stole from the lunch box of an unsuspecting classmate. Save for a few packages of Oscar Meyer beef bologna, which somehow crept in under the radar, and the Ranch dressing for my father's potato salad, we generally only ate things made from scratch. It was a conscious decision that my parents made, a source of quiet pride.

None of this helps to explain, however, the fact that until well into adolescence, I believed that pancakes came from a box. In the kitchen of my childhood, pancakes had three ingredients: milk, eggs, and powdered mix. I can still feel the heft of that box in my hand. I can hear the reassuring rustle and thump of the powder as it tumbles down the cardboard chute. It smelled like flour and fat and something faintly creamy, and it made a very nice pancake. I loved Bisquick. I
believed
in Bisquick. Bisquick was pancakes.

But then, sometime around age fifteen, I started reading the food
magazines my parents kept stacked on the coffee table. Some nights, after my homework was finished, I would take one upstairs and thumb through it until I fell asleep. It wasn't long before I stumbled upon a recipe for pancakes. I was honestly miffed. The only box it called for was baking soda. Learning that pancakes could be made without a mix was a strange sort of coming of age. It was like learning that your favorite uncle, the one who could do a spot-on impression of Donald Duck, is a loyal subscriber to a skin magazine.

The box of pancake mix was an anomaly in our pantry. I don't know how to explain it. Maybe it sneaked in with the bologna. As these things go, it was pretty benign. But that anomaly meant that I spent the first two decades of my life eating one single, standardized pancake. I was so busy believing in that mix that a whole world of pancakes almost passed me by. Buttermilk pancakes. Whole wheat pancakes. Big fluffy ones splotched with blueberries! And buckwheat pancakes, the top of the stack.

I've worked hard to make up for lost time, as you can imagine. I've made a lot of pancakes. I've eaten a lot of pancakes. There are so many out there, and so many to love. But a few years ago, I found one in particular that still holds my attention.

The place was a kind of upscale greasy spoon, a funky storefront spot in Seattle called the Longshoreman's Daughter, where the waitresses all had gorgeous skin and messy hair. Everything they served was good, but the buckwheat pancakes were legendary: enormous, the size of salad plates, warm and toasty with a thin, lacy edge. Coming from such a hearty flour, they could have been heavy as bricks, but instead they were light—delicate, even. They were eminently satisfying, but not so much so that you'd want to sleep all afternoon. They came with a tiny pitcher of maple syrup and blueberries scattered around, and they were absolutely perfect pancakes.

Unfortunately, about two years after I first ate there, the Longshoreman's Daughter closed its doors. It was jammed with customers, so I'm not sure why. Maybe they decided to rest on their laurels. It could be hard to keep going, I guess, when you've made a pancake
so good. It could be tempting to hole up and keep them all to yourself.

Which, frankly, is what I want to do whenever I make buckwheat pancakes. In the years since the Longshoreman's Daughter went defunct, I've been tinkering in my own kitchen, and though it took a lot of batches and botches—the recipe you see here took seven excruciating Sunday mornings—I've come very, very close. Mine are a little fluffier than theirs, which I like, and I make them smaller than salad plate size, but they're just as good as the ones that inspired them. There's no mix involved, so I'm not sure what my family would say. But I'm pretty sure that with a little nudge and some maple syrup, they'd come around.

BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES

t
his recipe uses an unconventional mixing trick that I learned from
Cook's Illustrated
. Rather than adding the melted butter directly to the wet ingredients, you first mix it with the egg yolk. It does require an extra bowl—a Pyrex custard cup works nicely; you can microwave the butter in it and then just add the yolk—but it helps the butter to better incorporate into the batter, making for a more even-textured pancake. It's worth the extra bit of effort. Just be sure that you microwave the butter on medium power and in short bursts. If the heat is too high, butter will sometimes splatter or explode.

These pancakes are great on their own, but they're even better with some fruit. Slices of banana are always nice. Or you could try blueberries, raspberries, or blackberries, either fresh or frozen, 4 to 5 per pancake. In the summer, whenever I find myself with a surplus of berries, I arrange them in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet, freeze them until they're hard, and then put them in a heavy-duty plastic bag and stash them in the freezer. They'll last that way for months, and freezing them on the pan means that they don't stick together, so you can pull out only as many as you need. You don't even have to thaw them before adding them to the pancakes; the heat of the pan takes care of that. Whatever you use, let the pancakes cook on their first side, undisturbed, for about 1 minute before you add any fruit. That gives them time to puff and begin to set.

Also, this recipe doubles easily.

 

²
/
₃
cup unbleached all-purpose flour

¹
/
₃
cup buckwheat flour

2 teaspoons sugar

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup buttermilk

¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons milk (preferably not low fat or nonfat)

1 large egg, separated

2 tablespoons (1 ounce) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

Vegetable oil, for brushing griddle

Pure maple syrup, for serving

 

In a large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

Pour the buttermilk and milk into a medium bowl. (A 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup also works well; you can measure right into it.) Whisk the egg white into the milk mixture. In a small bowl, use a fork to beat the yolk with the melted butter. Whisk the yolk mixture into the milk mixture. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients all at once, and whisk until just combined. Do not overmix. The batter will be somewhat thick.

Meanwhile, heat a large nonstick skillet or griddle over medium-high heat. Brush the skillet with oil. To make sure it's hot enough, wet your fingers and sprinkle a few droplets of water onto the pan. If they sizzle, it's ready to go.

Ladle the batter in scant ¼ cupfuls into the skillet, taking care not to crowd them. When the underside of the pancakes is nicely browned and the top starts to bubble and look set around the edges, 2 to 3 minutes, flip them. Cook until the second side has browned, 1 to 2 minutes more.

Re-oil the skillet and repeat with more batter. If you find that the pancakes are browning too quickly in subsequent batches, dial the heat back to medium.

Serve warm, with maple syrup.

 

Yield: 8 to 10 pancakes