On Rue Tatin (3 page)

That started a month of hunting out the best appliances and fixtures I could find. It was July and burning hot; my memories of that time are infused with soaring temperatures, exacerbated by the heat generated by arguing to get everything I needed as I learned the French rules of commerce.

Buying an electric mixer stands out as one of my most memorable lessons. I walked into a kitchen supply store and saw the mixer I wanted, which at that time was hard to find in Paris, high upon a shelf. I asked the
vendeuse
for it by name, and she said they didn’t carry them. I told her they did and pointed to it on the shelf. Without turning to look, she said,
“Ça n’existe pas ici,”
“This doesn’t exist here.” I was dumbfounded. I pointed to the shelf again, but she wouldn’t look. I wanted to grab her head and swivel it around, but instead, feeling my face get very hot, I raised my voice and said,
“Madame, j’insiste. Je veux cette machine, vous l’avez, donnez-la moi.”
“I insist. I want that machine, you have it, give it to me.”

Startled, she turned, climbed up a ladder, got the machine, and hefted it onto the counter. I examined it, paid for it, and walked out with it under my arm.
“Au revoir, madame,”
said the
vendeuse
with her musical accent. “Not likely,” I thought, but went on my way, hot, drenched, and still angry. But victorious. Or at least I felt victorious. I’d gotten what I wanted. She undoubtedly felt victorious, too. After all, she’d made me suffer. It took me awhile to cool off. But when I plugged in my mixer back at the
salon de thé
and made my first batch of brownies, I forgot it all and put the lesson I’d learned to good use. I wasn’t brought up to argue, raise my voice, or object. Doing business in France taught me to do all three.

After choosing ovens and mixers, cook tops and sinks, I was ready. I tested my recipes and fed them to my employers and their families. Finally, in early September we were ready to open.
Le tout Paris
had been invited. I had prepared pans of my mother’s sticky brownies, chocolate chip cookies, spice breads, molasses cookies, and other traditional American foods which, at that time, were novelties in Paris.

Opening night was a stunning success, and it began an intensely busy year, as my weeks sped away in a flurry of early morning shopping at the nearby Marché-St-Germain, where I became friends with the chicken lady and her
pâté
-making husband. She delivered chickens—heads, pinfeathers, and feet attached—whenever I had chicken salad or stew on the menu, and she was always giving and asking for recipes. I took my work seriously and put in long hours, trying to live up to the tradition of what I’d learned. The customers loved the food, from the hearty chili to the green-flecked zucchini bread (which I called spice cake, or no one would have eaten it). My saucer-sized chocolate chip cookies were the biggest hit. One day I stuck my head into the dining room and saw a properly dressed woman eating one with a knife and fork!

Michael, a sculptor in the mood for an adventure, had decided to join me in Paris. Before he’d met me he had been making plans to take a year off, live in Europe, and work on his drawing, so moving to Paris fit in with his plans. Four months after I returned he arrived. He was eager to study French, since he spoke not a word, and he couldn’t wait to strike up an intimate relationship with the museums of Paris. While I was at work he would spend the day in museums or sitting in a park drawing, or attending French classes. In the evenings we would go to movies, or walk along the river eating Berthillon ice cream, the best in Paris, or simply wander the city streets. We were living on practically nothing and loving it.

I loved my schedule—early mornings at the market, cooking for hours in a music-filled kitchen, filling baskets with buttery cookies and slices of cake, stirring pots of spicy soups, and rolling out pounds and pounds of pastry dough. The bookstore became a destination for Parisian literati. The
salon de thé
was successful. The duo who had begun the enterprise began having problems, however, which made the working atmosphere unpleasant, and after a year I was ready to move on. I missed writing, too, and needed time to do it. I had already given my notice and Michael and I had decided that we would go back to the States when Patricia Wells came in for lunch one day. In the course of the meal she offered me a job as assistant on her first book, which was to be called the
Food Lover’s Guide to Paris.
I refused. I knew how much Michael wanted to go back to the United States and his sculpture studio. Patricia persisted, however, pointing out the advantages of working with her.

I was tempted, and when I told Michael about the job he insisted I take it. He would manage for another year and a half, he said. I was thrilled, and grateful to Michael. I knew it was a sacrifice for him. He loved Paris, but needed more room than our tiny studio allowed. And he had discovered something he had already known about himself, but forgotten. Drawing was all right, but manipulating large pieces of wood, metal, plastic, and stone were lifeblood for him.

At about the same time I accepted the job, a friend of mine wanted to know if Michael would be available to help shore up disintegrating buildings at her cousin’s farm in the Dordogne. He jumped at the opportunity. He didn’t care that it was five hours south of Paris. It didn’t faze him that the farm family spoke no English and that he himself spoke virtually no French. He didn’t mind that the job would begin immediately. He wanted out of Paris, and he wanted to work with his hands. I saw him off at the Gare d’Austerlitz a few days later, not sure when I’d see him again—either he would return to Paris, or I would go down to visit.

Meantime, I started working with Patricia. Ours was a good match, and we spent an intense, concentrated, happy year walking the streets of Paris, sampling every bit of food the city offered. We developed a rhythm. Patricia would choose addresses to visit during the day, and I would plot them on a map at night. We would meet at a café that we wanted to test in the morning, and go from there. Our addresses included
boulangeries, pâtisseries
, kitchen stores,
brocantes
(many of these secondhand stores carry food wares), or anything at all to do with food. We would go until about 1
P
.
M
., then stop for lunch and start out again when the shops reopened, around 3
P
.
M
. Our day ended around 7
P
.
M
., when we would separate for the night to prepare for the following day.

I was in heaven. I was also planning Michael’s and my wedding and couldn’t imagine being happier. We were married in a very simple ceremony in Le Vaudreuil, presided over by Bernard, in his role as vice-mayor. Patricia and her husband, Walter, brought the champagne, and Michael and I prepared the lunch we served to our twelve guests. One of our friends supplied the flowers, another loaned me a silk petticoat, and Madame Dancerne, Edith and Bernard’s neighbor, contributed her homemade cider and
calvados
. It was a gorgeous misty Saturday. Bernard gave a short speech about the appropriateness of the wedding and how it continued the tradition of the Anglo-Saxon communion with France, so prevalent throughout the ages in Normandy. Our lunch of cream of watercress soup,
cannelloni à la crème
, salad, and Camembert was rich and satisfying. Our wedding cake was a
marjolaine
that I had made the day before in Paris, and which was transported to the wedding on Patricia’s special silver
marjolaine
tray.

After the meal, we borrowed Edith’s Deux Chevaux and drove to the nearby village of Bec Hellouin. We wanted to attend mass in the abbey’s twelfth-century chapel on Sunday morning, to hear the renowned Gregorian chants. We spent our wedding night in a small
auberge
, or inn, went to mass the next morning, toured the village, then drove back to Le Vaudreuil, returned the car, and took the train to Paris. On Monday, Michael returned to the farm and I picked up work again.

Living separately was hard now that we were married. We missed each other so much that we decided I should spend my three-day weekends on the farm, where Danie and Guy Dubois raised geese for
foie gras
. Right after work each Friday I got on a train that arrived at Brive-la-Gaillarde in the Dordogne just before midnight. That first time was magic; Michael picked me up and we drove through the night to the farm, down winding, inky black roads. At the farm the kitchen light was on and the table was set with a bottle of the farm’s wine, some fresh
rillettes
(shredded pork and goose meat cooked in goose fat) that Danie had made that day, a loaf of gorgeous bread, and some fresh cheese. Though everyone was asleep, it was a very warm welcome, and that midnight snack began yet another phase of my culinary education.

Not only did I get to see Michael every weekend, but I became, along with him, part of the extended Dubois family. I already knew them from Michael’s stories—there was Danie, who did everything including cooking the most delicious meals Michael had ever tasted, which she served to her family and to paying guests who spent the night on the farm, and Guy, who had terrible eyesight and was a little loopy but sweet and a very good farmer. He always went off half-cocked, though, doing wheelies with his tractor as he took corners too fast, occasionally bashing a trailer into one of the walnut trees on the property, leaving his tools everywhere, and spewing corn all over the farmyard when he unloaded the trailer. Gilles, their teenaged son, was in cooking school and would return home now and then to stir up the kitchen, and Cathie, their daughter, was a moody adolescent who loved to eat anything and everything. She was skinny as a rail, which frustrated her slightly plump mother no end.

Danie and Guy’s life was a throwback to medieval times. Danie married Guy and, through obligation, went to live with him at his parents’ house. As the daughter-in-law she was expected to do all the work around the house, yet she had no rights and no money of her own. Within their first year of marriage she gave birth to Gilles, who cried all the time. She was still expected to do all the work and keep the baby quiet. She was, she once told me, a slave.

Danie is short and solidly beautiful with wavy dark brown hair, soft, intense brown eyes, and a rare determination. She chafed at her position. She worked with no modern conveniences, so her solution was to do what farm women have done throughout the ages. She bought a few geese and fattened them up for
foie gras
, which she sold to earn money of her own. With it she bought an iron, so she didn’t have to heat irons in the fireplace any more. Then she bought a washing machine.

Her
foie gras
was of such high quality that she soon made a name for herself. She convinced Guy they should build their own house down the road from his parents. They enlarged their by now substantial flock of geese, and their family, too—Cathie was born.

Danie continued making
foie gras
, which she sold locally, doing all the butchering, preparing, and preserving with the help of several women from the village. Guy did the field work and helped with the geese. Danie, who loves people and activity and had always felt isolated in their tiny village of less than one hundred inhabitants, began taking in paying guests. She devised a program where a group would come for the weekend and they would all butcher and prepare a pig together. She cooked sumptuous meals for the group, regaling guests with dishes she’d grown up eating. Everyone would leave happily on Sunday with parts of the pig preserved for their own use. Danie also did weekends where guests prepared their own goose and all the meals revolved around luscious, silken
foie gras
. She became even more successful, her
foie gras
renowned.

Danie’s food was simply the food she learned to make growing up, but it was the most intensely, purely flavorful food I’d ever tasted. Her potato
galettes
were crisp and perfectly seasoned with garlic, her meaty
magret de canard
so tender you could cut it with a fork, her baked stuffed tomatoes the essence of tomato. She made her own cheese, which was creamy and light; her
rillettes
—a staple on the table—were rich and succulent.

Every weekend was an intense culinary learning experience for me, redolent of garlic and goose fat, filled with freshly butchered rabbits, wild mushrooms, greens harvested in the fields for flavorful salads and vegetables fresh from the gardens. There was always a crowd for meals—whether paying guests or the postman, Hubert, who timed his daily visit at lunchtime—and we were always racing to get everything done in time. Danie took to showing me once how to do something—like slicing potatoes paper-thin with her incredibly blunt paring knife for
galette de pommes de terre
, or trimming a goose breast, or cutting butter into feathery thin slices (with the same dull paring knife) for her tender, crisp pastry. Then she would disappear, leaving me to prepare meals, showing up to do the finishing touches.

Danie and I became comrades. We worked around the clock either preparing meals, gathering ingredients (which meant going to the nearby village to pick up fresh milk from the dairy farmer, walnuts from the Dubois barn down the road, lettuces from the garden outside the house), or cleaning up.

I loved every minute of being at the Dubois farm, especially those consecrated to food (which were most of them). Each process on the farm had its own gastronomic ritual, so that goose-butchering time meant
foie gras
straight from the bird, served on bread grilled over the coals. It also meant
demoiselles
, the goose carcasses after the breast meat has been removed, which are highly seasoned with salt and pepper and grilled over the fire. There isn’t a great deal to eat on a
demoiselle
, but it is considered a rare treat and so tasty that we would all dive in with our fingers. Butchering a pig meant fresh blood sausages and roast pork, and during bean season we had mounds of green beans tossed in garlic and Danie’s own walnut oil. Spring meant fresh wild mushrooms and tiny dandelions tossed in a walnut oil vinaigrette and golden sweet walnut meats from the orchard across the street.