Repas à l'école

E tells us that, next year, she's going to pack her sister's and her lunch for school every day. She'll make roast chicken sandwiches with lettuce, tomato (when it's in season, she points out), cheese, and mayonnaise (she likes mayo). She's a little concerned about the bread. She knows we won't be able to get baguettes every day, and she's not a big fan of regular sandwich bread. I think she's still mulling over that part of the equation.

We haven't had the school lunch conversation while we've been here because lunch is part of the deal at the Collège des vignes. We pay an additional fee--it averages out to a few euros per girl per day--and they eat lunch in the school canteen.

Here's what that looks like:

There's a guy in a toque (and he's not being cute; he's a chef, and that hat is his uniform, it's how you know he's the one in charge), some sous-chefs, a kitchen (stoves, ovens, sinks, prep counters, pots and pans and heat), and a cafeteria line. The kids line up with their trays. They take an entrée, a plat, and a dessert. The first course, the entrée, could be some grated carrots with vinaigrette, or it could be a boiled egg with a little mayonnaise, or some sliced beets, pâté, or a green salad. The main course, the plat, ranges from spaghetti bolognaise to boeuf bourguignon to couscous, which is not just the grain but a thick meat and vegetable stew. Dessert? They can have a piece of fruit (kiwis are popular) or a yogurt or, once in a while, a beignet. Of course there's also sliced baguette for everyone, and cheese. The food is all prepared on site. Everyone drinks water.

As far as I can determine, it is a Styrofoam-free environment. The meals are served on plates made out of something like Corelle; the kids eat with real cutlery, and drink out of heavy plastic cups. The only thing disposable is the paper napkins.

The children sit at round tables, eight or so at each, and serve each other from the water pitcher in the center. A surveillant or two keeps order--these are junior high school kids with pitchers of water: the possibilities of chaos are pretty high.

Morning classes end at noon. Afternoon classes begin at 1.30. The entire school cycles through the canteen during that hour and a half--about 700 students--eating in half-hour relays. Before and after they eat, the kids are outside in the courtyard, playing games, doing homework, fiddling with their cell phones.

We spent kindergarten through sixth grade packing lunches almost every night for school the next day: peanut butter and jelly, or mini-bagels with cream cheese, or egg salad on challah. Baby carrots or cucumber slices. Raisins or fruit cup. Occasionally a couple of Newman-Os. A day or so a week the girls bought lunch: Chips Olé, which I'm fairly sure is trademarked by Exxon, or pizza. It was a treat for us not to have to pack lunch, but thinking about the girls eating something that had been prepared in an industrial kitchen god knows where, shipped frozen to the school, microwaved, and plopped onto a Styrofoam tray--that really about outweighed the extra ten minutes on the sofa that not packing lunch bought us. Every day they bought cartons of milk to drink: plain or chocolate or strawberry.

At the girls' elementary school, the kids had about 20 minutes to eat, followed by 15 minutes on the blacktop.

So we've relished not packing lunch for these two years and hearing from the girls that they prefer paella with shrimp to pork, that the lamb in the couscous was pretty good today, and that the kiwis weren't quite ripe enough today but should be good by Friday.

And need I mention that I've never seen a pudgy kid at the Collège des vignes? Which is of course not just about the school lunches--but it's not not about the school lunches, either.

I read this a few weeks ago, and that's what precipitated the conversation that led to E planning the chicken sandwiches. Their high school--they'll be in high school next year--has an open lunch policy, which means that the students, beginning in their second year and depending on various factors, can eat lunch off campus. What's the nearest restaurant they can walk to?

McDonald's.

If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen putting a chicken in the oven.

Boundaries

We stayed at the Relais de Roquefure--and let me interrupt myself to say how much I love staying in small family-run hotels. There are probably thousands of them in France, in old town houses, châteaux, farmhouses, stables, a lot of them in old inns that have always been inns. The rooms, at least in the ones we can afford, tend to be small and the bathrooms smaller, but they are clean and comfortable and come with a sense of place and of individuality. The person who greets you when you arrive is not waiting for her shift to end; it's her hotel. She lives in the other wing. And these hotels are not precious, either, at least I've not come across one that is: that self-conscious homeyness of cheap antiques, pink wallpaper and dishes of potpourri that afflicts many small non-chain American hotels. These hotels are, I guess we would say, old-fashioned family hotels. In the best sense of the word.

And the Relais de Roquefure was a fine example of the genre. The building is a 200 year old bastide, a three-story main section bolstered by assorted connected former farm buildings, set on a few acres of land at the end of a country road that is part of one of the medieval Saint Jacques de Compostello pilgrimage routes. The innkeepers were a young couple expecting their first child. February is deep in the off season in the Lubéron, and so we were among the only guests.

As is often the case with hotels like this one, dinner was offered in the hotel's dining room. The husband in the couple was also the hotel chef. Our first two nights at the Relais we elected to eat elsewhere, partly because the chef offered only a menu. Which means, translated, not a menu in the American senses but rather a set dinner. To put it bluntly: no choices. First course, second course, cheese or dessert. Everyone got the same thing, and what they got was what the chef found at the market that day.

All very romantic and slow food and charming until the first time you sit down to dinner and find pieds et paquets on your plate. Pieds et paquets, for the uninitiated, is a popular Provençal stew composed of stuffed bits of sheep or cow stomach (the paquets, packets) simmered with blanched sheep's pieds, feet.

You know how much I love France. And French food. But that's my boundary.

I've never actually had the experience of pushing blanched pied du mouton around on my plate, and I hope not to. And that is why we put off dinner at the Relais until our final evening there. We wanted to have dinner in the large paneled dining room with windows overlooking the garden, we really did; we like nothing better than the idea of going down to dinner in the hotel. But what were we going to do if the main course turned out to be beyond our boundaries or, worse, beyond E and G's boundaries? They are adventurous eaters, but there are limits to any 13 year old palate, and we did not want to test them.

So Monday afternoon when we returned from our hike and bumped into the chef in the front hall, we reserved for dinner, feeling very brave indeed. Part of the experience, we said. We didn't mention our concern that dinner might be a long way from roast chicken to the girls. We didn't want to worry them or give them time to draw up a list of acceptable foods. We didn't want to give up the element of surprise.

Dinner was at 8. We took up our station in the dining room; the only other diner was the only other hotel guest, a Belgian woman who sat across the room from us with her book. The chef came out. Tonight's dinner: a salad with melted rounds of chèvre served on toasts; magret de canard with vegetables; a fruit gratin. The chef gave us a plate of thin baguette slices covered in homemade tapenade and went back to the kitchen. Our work began.

Magret de canard is duck breast. You know, ducks, those cute little birds that we were watching on the river this afternoon.

It tastes like dark meat chicken, and you like that, I said.

It's a lot like beef, C said.

Think how cool it would be to tell you friends in America about the time you ate duck breast at a country inn in Provence, I said.

The girls were unconvinced. Remember, cute little feathery creatures. Quack, quack.

We all enjoyed the salad with cheese. Then C and I went back on duty.

Just try it, is all. Just take a couple of bites, C said.

Don't think about what it is, I said. Just try it.

And then the plates arrived. A fan of sliced duck breast enclosing ratatouille and a roasted potato covered in a creamy mint and truffle sauce.

It tastes like beef, C said. Think of it as beef.

Just try it, I said.

The girls each took a bite. They chewed.

G was the first to swallow. It tastes like beef, she said with a twinkle, but better.

They both finished their portions. It was a success.

G had only one caveat. I still don't like foie gras, she said.

Duly noted.

Eggs for supper

I canvassed the coffee ladies on Monday morning and they told me that I should put our truffle in a box with eggs and leave it for several days. The scent of the truffe would penetrate the eggshells and flavor the eggs with truffle, and then I should make an omelette.

I had heard this before--I think Peter Mayle wrote it someplace --but I needed to hear it from practical English ladies in sensible shoes to believe that it was more than a story about the strange foodways of the French, that it was actually something you could do with a truffle. Monday night, while C was doing the dishes, I took out a half dozen eggs, put them in one of our finest Rubbermaid containers, and then popped in the truffle. (In the picture, it's the thing that's not an egg.)

C sniffed the truffle and raised his eyebrows. Do you think it's spoiled?

Of course it's not spoiled. I sniffed and amended my opinion. Surely it's not spoiled, I said.

It had a strong smell, like something that you'd dig up under a tree, something that may have grown there or that, possibly, the dog had left there and was planning to come back for. It smelled like a mushroom in the way that the lettuce for sale at the village market in July is like the lettuce I can buy now at the LeClerc hypermarché: like a mushroom, but a thousand times more so. The texture, the feel of the truffle, was a cross between a mushroom and what I imagine a preserved brain feels like. More firm than squishy, but with a definite squish factor, and lots and lots of little curly and squiggly ridges. We wondered what had possessed people to decide that these were food.

Then we put the lid on the box and, after some deliberation, put the box in the refrigerator. The question was twofold: whether to leave it out on the counter (eggs aren't refrigerated in French grocery stores), and whether the smell of the truffle would leak out of the Rubbermaid and penetrate everything in the fridge (in which case we'd have milk à la truffe, orange juice à la truffe, maple syrup à la truffe...). We decided to rely on our American instincts towards refrigeration and our trust in the impermeability of American plastics.

Last night I read around the web and through our cookbooks for a recipe for truffle omelet. Everyone said pretty much the same thing: do the egg and truffle in a box trick, then make an omelet. You could add some truffle to the omelet if you wanted to. After about the fourth recipe it dawned on me that I know how to make an omelet (or how to try; see below), and that this was ridiculous. (Overthinking, again.) So I took out the egg box, cracked the eggs into a bowl, sliced about a quarter of the truffle thinly into the eggs, added salt, pepper, and a little cream (it was in the fridge, and, why not, what's it going to do, make the omelette à la truffe richer?), and whisked it all together.

I made a salad and put the minestrone soup I'd made earlier in the week to warm on the back burner. Then I got out my great-aunt's cast iron skillet and put some butter in it. I wish you could have known my great-aunt, whose interests in the decades I knew her were ceramics, chain-smoking, Whitman's samplers, and soap operas. (But she always shared the candy, and turned off the television--at the next commercial--when we came to visit.) I've been told that she had been a good cook in her day, but by the time I knew her, her cooking days were over. I thought of her in her farm kitchen in New Jersey, standing over this same skillet frying scrapple, as I poured my eggs and truffle slices into it.

My plans for an omelet quickly became plans for scrambled eggs, as my lack of an omelet pan ran up against my electric stove that doesn't heat the pan evenly (and then there's the not-negligible question of my patience for fiddling, or lack thereof). So much for a beautiful, tall, puffy creation.

I divided the eggs between the four of us and put the salad and bread on the table. (The soup was the next course.) We all took a bite.

They taste, and I don't mean this in a bad way, like dirt. Like the earth, said E.

And they did. Like loamy, dark, fertile soil, the kind that you think is in your garden when you're ordering seeds from catalogues in February, when the soil you have is actually more comparable to those mushrooms that come in blue Styrofoam boxes wrapped in plastic. Their taste was mild, but also deep and strong.

Well. We liked them, was the verdict. Score one more for the French.

Telling it slant

It has been brought to my attention that I may have made some uncharitable comments about Jules last week. Uncharitable, maybe; true, nevertheless. However, truth is a complicated creature, and so is Jules.

Friday Jules and Madame invited us to dinner. Don't come too early, he told me in the afternoon. He had stopped by the house to apologize for the power being out. But it's not out, I said, showing him the digital clock on the oven. You must have turned it back on, he said. Let me look at the fuse box.

It was futile to explain that I had not touched the fuse box and that the power had not so much as blinked. He was already kneeling on the floor in the electrical closet, flipping switches on and off. When he was satisfied that the power was in fact on, he stood up and backed out the back door, trying not to leave too much dirt (he had been out in the mud that surrounds the replanted olivier) on the floor. Don't come too early tonight, he said. We're not terribly organized.

We had been up to the big house for drinks after Epiphany, just before Jules and Madame went back to Paris. Jules is a different person as a host: warm, funny, expansive, gracious. It is bad form to talk dirt about the workers over a drink, so he tells stories about his grandparents, his trips to America when he was a young man, his daughters and grandchildren. And he tells us how remarkable we are and the girls are, which is always easy to listen to. When you came, you could not speak a word, pas un seut mot, of French, and now, look at you! Incroyable!

Then Madame chimes in with, And they know more about the area than people who have lived here for years. The way they have adjusted to living in a foreign country, and especially how they put up with living with the French, c'est vraiment formidable.

Leaving aside the decades of our lives that we have both devoted to studying French, it is nonetheless flattering. That night we talked about truffles--the truffle season is upon us--where to find them, how to buy them. C and I were planning to go to the marché aux truffes in the next village on the weekend. Jules and Madame asked us to buy them a truffle if we found any. And then we came back down the terraces, and Jules and Madame left for Paris early the next morning.

Friday night we sat down to dinner at 9.30 with Jules and Madame and another set of neighbors. The first course, served at room temperature, was a bowl of what looked like green beans tossed with canned tuna. Tuna and haricots verts are a familiar combination from salade niçoise, so, though I'd never thought to have the two on their own without the rest of the salade, I was happy to take a serving.

An aside: the risk, when dining en famille with a French person, is that something will end up on your plate that, while it is well within the parameters of the ordinary French diet, will require an American, even a fairly broad-dieted American, to move the goalposts back a bit. I was once served a whole barracuda which still sported its eyes and, more alarmingly, its teeth. Also, a pâté made out of cod liver.

So green beans tossed with tuna fish seemed pretty tame. Even though the tuna looked, well, it looked like cat food. The canned tuna spectrum is significantly wider in France than it is in the States. There is canned tuna that comes marinated in extra-virgin olive oil in a beautiful yellow tin with green belle-époque script and an etching of Marseilles, and then there is tuna that comes in a plain white and blue tin and looks, when you open the tin, like cat food.

But it didn't have teeth and wasn't known for its DocosaHexaenoic Acid content, so I took a bite.

It wasn't tuna. It was foie gras.

At that moment there was enough rapid French happening at the table that C could lean over to me--his place was across from mine--and say, What is this?

It's foie gras, I replied.

He took another bite. These, he said, are the best green beans I've ever tasted.

I did suggest to him shortly after midnight, when we had come home and were reviewing the evening, that you could mix foie gras with chex mix and that would taste pretty good, too. Or, for that matter, with cat food.

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of poulet à l'estragon, rice, cheeses, chocolate cake, funny stories, and Bordeaux. At one point, after the cheese but before the dessert, Jules put on his 1950 Rock-ola juke box, choosing first a French song from the 1960s, Capri c'est fini, then a Elvis singing Blue Suede Shoes, the Rolling Stones Satisfaction, and, to top it off, Janis Joplin singing The Rose. Jules and Madame took the plates to the kitchen, where Madame stayed, assembling the next course. Jules came back and forth, though, doing a few dance steps on each trip. C helped them while I talked over Mick Jagger to the other neighbors.

All three came back and sat down for dessert, and C threw me a look that said, More to come.

There was. After dessert we had tisanes and coffee in the sitting room and then, at a quarter to midnight, we stood to go. Jules disappeared into the kitchen and came back carrying a small, heavily used, paper bag. He passed it off to C with a studied, mischievous nonchalance. We all kissed goodbye, and the neighbors walked back up the hill while we walked down.

We had gone only a few feet from the door when I made C tell me what was in the bag.

It's a truffle, he said. They found a dealer.

And so, let it be said that Jules is a complicated creature. This truffle set them back a few dozen euros, not a lot compared to the cost of rerouting the drainage away from the dead olive tree, but a lot for something that a pig noses out of the ground. We'd talked about how we wanted to get one, try it, figure out what it was about truffles that made food people so excited. So when Jules and Madame bought truffles for themselves, they bought one for us, too.

C was up early Saturday morning to write a thank you note. I came down and proofread the French before handing it over to the real experts in the house, who corrected errors that neither of us had recognized. Then we mailed the letter up to Paris, where Jules and Madame had gone even earlier Saturday morning. And this week, in between wiping the mud off the dogs' paws and trying to find a place to park between the ouvriers' camionettes and brouettes méchaniques and tarps and piles of stone and the concrete mixer--in between all that, I'll be studying truffle recipes. I know we'll have an omelette scented with truffles, and I'm thinking about a risotto, maybe some pasta, maybe just a fresh baguette, toasted a little, with some of our olive oil and a few shavings of truffe. All courtesy of Jules. La vérité, she is so complicated.

Road Food

Colette, C's French teacher and our friend, lives in a village up in the mountains, the last village on my mental map before the mountains edge out everything except ski resorts. She is cheerful and practical and sensible, and one evening a few weeks ago (this is the story she told C), she was driving home and saw, along the roadside, a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She pulled off the road, got out of the car, and went to check the rabbit. It was dead but still warm. So she picked it up and took it home for dinner. Her American husband was, she related in a tone that was fond but a little puzzled, distressed to learn that he was enjoying--in a wine sauce, with raisins and onions--what we in the States call roadkill. Colette confided that the lapin had been a little tough, which she attributes to her having been in such a hurry to make dinner that she didn't hang the carcass in her larder to age.

This is not the first roadkill for dinner story we've heard; in fact, it's the third. There was Violette, whose car collided with a sanglier, which she then put in the trunk and later packaged up for the freezer. Wild boar stew, sausages, and steaks all winter long. And there was Marcelle, the main course of whose Christmas dinner last year was built around venison from a deer that her father had found, likewise, newly dead by the road.

We are told that it is illegal in France to pick up and take home a dead animal that you yourself have hit with a car. (Violette is a fugitive from the law.) It is difficult to resist speculating on how that law came to be required, exactly. Were French people waiting until dusk every day, and then getting behind the wheel and going out to aim at animals as they crossed the road? Were people hitting deer and wild boars and rabbits and, it's France, god knows what else, on purpose? You have to admit that it's easier than going hunting, doesn't require reflective clothing or artillery, and can be done while listening to Johnny Hallyday on the radio. Of course, it's easy to get around the law if you are a two-car family: the first car finds dinner, the second car brings it home.

We dined out on these stories while we were Stateside and our friends and family had reactions that ranged from Aren't the French wonderful wistfulness to But that rabbit could have been diseased! They might all have contracted rabies from eating it! disdain. It was universally inconceivable, regardless of where our audience fell on the reaction spectrum, to have scooped up a rabbit from the side of the road and eaten it for supper.

Then we came home to France and told Colette about the banana pudding that my aunt made for Christmas dinner. She's been making it for decades; here's a recipe similar to the one I think she uses. You will note that the recipe calls for boxed vanilla pudding mix, whipped topping (which advertised itself, last time I checked, as non-dairy), and vanilla wafers. The wafers she uses are called Nilla because they don't actually contain any vanilla, and advertising them as such would be like calling the whipped topping cream. Colette laughed long and hard at the notion of eating such a concoction, and that was even before we mentioned the Velveeta that also figured in a few of our American meals. Is it cheese? she asked. Well, it is, and it isn't. It comes closer to being cheese than whipped topping comes to being cream, but not by much. At all.

It's a conversation about cultural differences. How processed do you need your food to be? How far removed from nature, red in tooth and claw (and fender), and how far removed from the chemistry lab? We've not been offered a dinner of freshly hit meat, and I'm not sure what our response would be if we were; it would probably have a lot to do with whether there was adequate red wine on offer. As for the banana pudding and Velveeta, I have to say, first, that I had always loved both. Okay, not loved. Enjoyed ambivalently once or twice a year may be closer to the truth. Loved eating the food that my family had made for me, loved feeling cared for. Wished, though, once I was grown, that my family loved to make something else, something that had less of a plastic after-taste.

I think part of our relationship with France is rooted there, in that wish that our families--disclaimer: whom we love and would never trade in--were more like the families in Madeleine L'Engle's books, where the parents are both Nobel prize winning physicists who read poetry aloud at the dinner table and teach the children to sing in four-part harmony while they're spending summers hiking in the Andes. And that our country concerned itself less with figuring out how to manufacture a cheese that had a shelf life of a century (and giving it a handgun to fend off any other cheeses), and more with protecting small things, like the local farmers who might make a little extra money making their own cheese and selling their own cows' cream. Or with making sure that people don't just go out and aim their cars at wild animals as an easy way of getting dinner.

If, however, you've got a friend to drive behind you, remember to hang the lapin for a few days before you cook it. It'll be more tender that way.

Let my foie gras go

I've been out doing our Christmas shopping this week--nothing too grandiose; the good thing about going back to the States for Christmas is that I could give dish washing soap that was lavender scented and had a label written in French and it would look chic--and I have observed that, along with all the hanging Santas and lopsided light displays (which I love; they feel so much less like an attempt to open my wallet) this: there is an awful lot of foie gras for sale. Foie gras and champagne. And chocolates, big flat boxes of assortments, named after Parisian sites. The box someone gave us is a Champs-Elysées. I've also seen a Place Vendôme.

But that's a query for another day. Today is foie gras day here at La Bastiole, because this morning I heard a story about The Origins of Foie Gras.

Before I tell you the story I heard, think about where you think foie gras came from (and I mean that culturally, not in terms of Jemima Puddleduck and Lucy Goosey). Have you ever thought about it? I think that, if pressed, I would have devised some origin myth about the court of a French Renaissance king, somebody like François I, and it might have included a farmer who was ennobled after he served the king...etc. etc.

I would have been wrong. Here's the origin myth told me today as gospel truth by an actual française. It wasn't the French at all, and it was long before the Renaissance.

It was the Egyptians. 7000 years ago. They discovered that migratory birds tasted better when hunted just before their migrations, and that, en plus, their foie tasted really, really good then. Aha, thought Hamenophtet. This is because the birds have stuffed themselves to last the journey. And the reason the liver tastes really good then? Because it made the birds more aerodynamic if they ate lots of food that caused their livers to engorge, thus making the liver, at the center of their bodies, heavier, and their bodies more evenly weighted. (Foie gras: the result of millennia of evolution.) The Egyptians figured out that they could force-feed the migratory birds on figs to get pre-migration quality foie gras year round, corn not yet being available since, remember, it's 7000 years ago and no one's sailed across the Atlantic yet. (No one knows about the Atlantic yet, much less about maize, which is what the French use now.)

So the Egyptians went swanning along, force-feeding their geese and ducks, for a few centuries. And then one day there was a slave uprising and several unpleasant events, like a plague of locusts and frogs falling out of the sky--and then the slaves, they upped and left.

And do you know what those slaves took with them, according to my friend? (This is my favorite part.) Not just the matzah. Les juifs ont pris la recette du foie gras, she said. Tu sais, le foie gras, c'est casher. The Jews took with them the recipe for foie gras. You know, foie gras is kosher. Like that explains everything.

All those years Moses was growing up in the Pharaoh's palace? It wasn't just grapes and olives and roast pheasant. He was having a little foie gras as an apéro.

Moses trying to get the Israelites to leave the land of bondage: Really, come on, come with me into the desert, I know it's all going to work out, just trust me on this one. If we come with you, will you show us how to do that thing to our geese?

And when he came down from Mount Sinai, was it just with the tablets, or did he sweeten the deal a little? Maybe a little foie gras poêlé for everybody who agreed not to covet their neighbor's ox?

Okay, I'll stop now.

What I love about this origin myth--and who am I to call it a myth? maybe I'm just the last person to hear about it--is that the French never give any one else credit for anything. Democracy? French. Metric system? French. Religious tolerance? French. Internet? French. (Really.) Minority rights? French. Denim fabric? French. (It came from Nîmes. De Nîmes.) Photography? French. Anything innovative or interesting or important, you'll find, always, the French at the front of the line, saying, Us, oui, us, that came from us.

But foie gras, that cornerstone of French civilization, for that they do not take credit. (I guess that would be like saying that Jesus was actually born in Béziers, and that Bethelem is just a corruption of the original French word.) Foie gras is too important to have been stumbed upon by some chef outside Chambord 400 years ago. Its origins had to have a deeper explanation, a richer and more profound story. And how much more profound does it get than the flight from Egypt? It's interesting that my friend's story doesn't credit the Egyptians with disseminating foie gras. It credits the Jews, and links the spread of foie gras to what is arguably the moment when Judeo-Christian civilization was born: the moment when the Israelites stopped being a bunch of slaves from the next desert over and began to think of themselves as a people.

A people with a set of commandments and a really good recipe.

Of course, the French do claim credit for perfecting it.

Île flottante

I went to lunch at the cooking school the other day. It was a floral menu, and by that I do not mean that the food was arranged on the plate to look like flowers, or that we learned how to make sugar-paste roses. We cooked with flowers; jasmine, to be specific. First course was pan-seared foie gras with sauteed leeks and a reduction of confiture de jasmin and balsamic vinegar. Main course: breast of guinea fowl stuffed with jasmin flowers and more jasmin jam. Dessert: île flottante, that Frenchiest of French desserts, the poached meringue islands floating in a sea of jasmin-scented custard. The whole meal seemed like something a courtier on the make would have served Cathérine de Médicis.

When I'm at the cooking school, my grandfather Marron is never far from my mind, and on this particular day he brought a friend along. Madame Trollat was the manager of the hotel in Paris where Grandpa Marron stayed twice a year for several weeks at a time, a dozen years in a row. He was a good customer, and I suppose that's why the hotel staff in general and Madame Trollat in particular put up with his total absence of French (French, for him, consisted of speaking English loudly) and his stealing the demi-baguette from his breakfast and making a ham sandwich for lunch in his room every day.

Once every trip--at the end of the trip--Grandpa Marron would take Madame Trollat to dinner. Not just to dinner: to the Tour d'Argent, a restaurant so famous and expensive and fancy that the recorded commentary on the bâteaux mouches still refers to it. (The dollar was stronger then.) I met Madame Trollat once, fairly late in my grandfather's career as a sometime Parisian, and I remember her as a tallish woman with strong features and a chignon--her long, carefully tinted hair done up always in a perfect, seemingly hairpinless French twist. After Grandpa Marron had called her Madame Troll (the thing that lives under the bridge) at (the preposition) for several years, she taught him how to pronounce her hame: Twah-la (rhymes with voilà). She told Grandpa Marron that when she retired from the hotel, she was going to go back to her native village in la France profonde; she already spent August there every year.

The evening of their dinner date, Madame Trollat always appeared in the foyer of the hotel wearing her fur. Grandpa Marron, the farmer's son from New Jersey, would follow her out the door and into the waiting taxi. The way he always told it, Madame was an adventurous orderer, eating all those bizarre things that Americans find so intimidating on a French menu. But she always took the same thing for dessert: île flottante. It's one of those incredibly, impossibly French concoctions of eggs and milk. The ingredients are all the same as your grandmother's custard and yet the way they are put together results in something that doesn't just keep body and soul together, it gives the soul reason to want to stick around a while longer. Grandpa Marron said he never ordered it; he was a mousse au chocolat man himself, and I always had the impression that he thought île flottante was too French for him to be able to carry off. (I can only imagine how he might have pronounced it.) But every year that's what Madame Trollat ordered.

That's what I was thinking about as I ate my dessert at the cooking school. Time was when every French daughter learned how to make île flottante, the way that Americans learn how to make scrambled eggs, or grilled cheese. It's a classic recipe, and there's really only one way to make it, so I don't imagine that my portion was very different from what Madame enjoyed 30 years ago. Except that mine was scented--ever so delicately--with jasmine.

A man, a dog, and a Pouilly-Fuissé

We went out for a birthday dinner the other night. I remember choosing restaurants in our American city on the basis of no more than a review in the paper, or a tip from a friend. Here, it is more involved than that. We talk to friends--the hiking ladies, C's colleagues, the English ladies, parents of the girls' friends, as wide a net as we can manage. We look up restaurants online. We check our guidebooks. We do a couple of drive-bys. Then, if more than one or two sources recommend the same place, we drop to the next layer of research. Is there likely to be something on the menu for our American palates? (We're not yet to the pieds et paquets stage of assimilation.) How much will this evening take out of the general funds? And, are they open the night or the week or the month in question?

If the menu looks promising, and the price does not cause us to catch our breath, and if someone answer the phone when we call, then, at least a week after our restaurant selection process has begun, it is finished. Otherwise, we begin again, or, occasionally, just go out and buy a chicken to roast.

Last Friday we went to a restaurant recommended both by one of the hiking ladies and by our Swedish neighbors, with the added bonus of having been a favorite local haunt of Julia and Paul Child several decades ago, albeit under different owners. Our reservations were for 7.30 and, as usual, we opened the restaurant. Just the five of us and the six staff. All the staff were young, their degrees and certificates in restauranteering freshly minted, except for the maître'd cum sommelier. While the others wore dark pants and jackets, he alone was in his shirtsleeves, a red apron tied nattily over his starched white shirt. He was a ringer for Sean Connery.

We studied the menu carefully. The room was silent except for our American voices. Once it was clear that we had made our choices, M. Connery approached the table with a flourish. He spoke to us in careful English, and we responded in our careful French.

He switched. If you are going to make the effort to speak French, he said magnanimously, then of course I will be delighted to speak French with you.

We murmured gratitude and C ordered a bottle of wine.

Ah, monsieur, he shook his head. If I might suggest, for the difference in price, this is a much better wine. He gestured to the menu. C agreed--what else could he do?--and off M. Connery went.

He was back a few minutes later with the bottle. The drama of presentation began: opening it, pouring a few swallows into C's glass. C swirled the wine around in the glass a few times, and M. Connery seized his opportunity. He held the candle up to the glass; showed C how to tilt the glass just so over the candle; how to look at the wine's color. Then more swirls, a sniff, and a taste. Much praise for C's willingness to follow the process. And then: All that matters, really, is the swirl and the taste. All the rest is a performance, is simply le drame.

He walked around the table, pouring wine. The other day, he said, I went to a wine tasting at the Hotel Carlton in Cannes. The Hotel Carlton is one of the grand old places across from the beach, full up these last couple of weeks with fancy people in town for the festival. People were there from all the best restaurants in France, some of the greatest sommeliers in the country. And some of the best wines. Two of the finest sommeliers were tasting a Pouilly-Fuissé--this is a famous wine, the kind that Gatsby would have bought by the case, to go with his silk shirts--and everyone else was watching to see what they thought of it. The first one tasted; the second one tasted. Then the second said: This wine tastes like a wet hunting dog. And the first one responded: Yes, but what breed?

We all laughed--some because we understood, others because we mostly understood, others because the rest of us were laughing, and M. Connery radiated the satisfaction that comes from having told a good story well--and, glasses filled, he retired to the other side of the room. The girls sat patiently by while I translated as best I could. Then E said: It's like being in a Peter Mayle story. Peter Mayle, our neighbor a few hours to the west, who has published a whole library based on the trope of a foreigner's encounters with French characters.

And it was. There must be a word for it, for the feeling of finding yourself inside someone else's story. A word for what it feels like, as a traveller, to stumble into an experience that is so closely aligned with something someone else has already described. And yet, to find the experience wholly genuine. Here we were, in this country-elegant restaurant, deciphering the menu as best we could, feeling a little out of place. I am sure that our sommelier had been to countless wine tastings over the course of his career--maybe not at the Hotel Carlton last week, but certainly someime, and I expect that the hunting dog joke has been making the rounds for quite a while--but he told the story well. And in telling it he drew us in, made us feel part of a circle that shared the same reference points, made us feel less foreign and more at home.

Which is not to say that M. Connery was not playing a role--the gracious host--or that we were not playing a role ourselves--the well-meaning foreigners. But in the absence of a mother tongue and mother culture to connect us, warmth and kindness and a story about a man and a dog could fill the bill. We laughed together and then settled into the always-serious business of a proper French meal. As Peter Mayle would say, Merci, Provence.

Leeks and freckles

Sad news out and about in the world lately, the earth cracking open and the sea heaving up and thousands of people, whole villages, just gone. If we were living in the time before the printing press and the Reformation then we would all go on pilgrimage someplace, leaving our wooden shoes behind and slumping barefoot through the spring mud to some saint's shrine to ask her to intercede, save us, protect us, make it go away. Some of the sad news touches our own family: natural disasters on a smaller scale but disasters nonetheless, disasters that serve in an odd way to point up the larger ones. See how you suffer? That's what it's like, now, elsewhere, for so many people at once. You feel sad and confused and angry that this could have happened, that this did happen? Think about those other people, and how they feel as they sort through the rubble looking for their child's pencil case. These disasters that leave us powerless and angry and sad.

I have no saints to visit barefoot and muddy, but today I chopped leeks and they were so white. The white gave way gradually to the softest of yellows and the yellow to a green that no paint color calling itself spring green could ever match. It was so beautiful that my heart tightened in my chest. All this sadness and I look at G.'s freckles as she bends over her dinner plate, and they are so present, so tangible, and so frail that I have to look away before tears come. Potatoes boiling in salted water: the bubbles are exactly what bubbles want to be, and I find myself staring, reading them for clues. Outside, storms pass and repass over us, but in the distance I can see a boat sailing along under clear skies, and it is like being dropped into a painting.

For years a poem by Marge Piercy, If they come in the night, hung over my desk, but in the taking down of our stateside life I had forgotten it. Today the words came back. She writes: I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me only not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands...All this meaningless loss of life makes me sad, but it makes me angry too, an anger whose fierceness takes me by surprise. How can anyone step away, and how awful to be taken away, from a world in which leeks can be so white, freckles so perfect, bubbles so true, ships sailing on a such a sea? I want it all: I want to chop mountains of leeks and watch those freckles age, cook potatoes for everyone I know and watch summers full of ships. I want to sit outside under the stars with people I love, and eat and drink and laugh until I have to catch my breath. What I count, my rubies, my children, are those moments wide open when I know clearly who I am, who you are, what we do, Piercy writes, with all my senses hungry and filled at once like a pitcher with light.

Hungry and filled at once, like a pitcher with light. That is what I would ask my saint for, if I had one: the grace to be like a pitcher that is empty and yet full of light. That could help ride out the sorrow.

Les asperges sauvages

We dropped the girls off at a slumber party the other evening, and when we came home we took the dogs for a walk. It was just before sunset--we are in that magical time of year when you can actually feel the days getting longer in your pores--and the light was pink. The sky was clear, and when we came out of the path at the top of the ridge, the village looked even more like a postcard than usual.

An older couple was walking towards us on the road. He was wearing a baseball cap, a giveaway from a bank, and carrying a long walking stick, something it looked like he had picked up on the walk. She was smaller than he, wearing gardening gloves, and beaming at us. My internal proselytizer alarm went off as she came closer and held up her hand towards me.

Proselytizers where I come from don't usually begin by showing me a handful of weeds, so I stopped and wished her a good evening. She continued to hold up her weeds, and I looked at them more closely.

It was a handful of wild asparagus. And a strand of blooming periwinkle for good measure.

Ah, madame, vous avez trouvé des asperges sauvages, you've found wild asparagus!

She beamed some more. On a fait la tour de la colline, we've walked around the hill, up from our house and along the crest, and we found all this. Now I don't know whether to make an omelette or some soup.

The asparagus was matchstick-thin and long, and a green that was both deep and bright. They are rare; I've only seen them for sale twice. I had bought some at the market the week before, from the man who sells mushrooms, and had made, or tried to make, an omelette. Sauté some shallots in a little butter. Cut off the ends of the asparagus, and cut the rest into bits an inch or two long. Cook them with the shallots for a minute or two, and then pour in some eggs that you have whisked up, and if you can't get the omelette turned (I'm not always able to yet), then you have some really good scrambled eggs. Good enough to proselytize about.

The last week or so I had driven by people walking slowly along road shoulders (such as they are), armed with a grocery bag and garden shears, and had wondered what they could be doing. Now I understood. A slow walk down the lane and you could bring home dinner.

We talked to the asparagus hunters for a few minutes. They had lived in their house on the other side of our hill for 40 years. He was a retired maître plombier; he looked up at the village and gestured with his stick toward it: he had worked on most of those houses. She told us where they lived, and we told her where we lived, and then, wishing them a bonne omelette, we parted ways.

C. and I spent the rest of the walk examining the roadside for delicacies. We didn't find any--our neighbors had passed before us, after all--but we were still filled with a sense of awe. What a world it is when wonders lurk in hedges, and an evening's amble can yield an omelette.

Tea time

The quilting ladies came for the day last week.

Here is how it works: each week, the quilting ladies meet at a different house. The hostess of the week provides coffee and cookies, ahem, biscuits, when everyone arrives, usually around 10.30. The ladies settle in, take out their sewing, and work for an hour or two. Around 12.30, the French ladies decide that it is time for lunch, and take the sandwiches, salads, and leftovers that each has brought from home into the kitchen or dining room. The hostess, meanwhile, has opened bottles of red wine and laid out a cheese platter and a basket of assorted breads--as well as glasses, plates, knives for cheese, and napkins. She hovers while the French ladies eat, making sure that everyone has enough wine and showing them how to use the microwave. When the French are finished, the English ladies come next: same procedure. After lunch: coffee, again, and maybe a bit of chocolate. Then: more sewing. Sometime just past three, it will be time for tea and cake. The French ladies prefer thé ordinaire, the English, Earl Grey.

I had to borrow wine glasses and tea cups from Jules. I laid in a half dozen bottles of red and five varieties of cheese. I vacuumed and dusted and knocked the cobwebs down from the ceiling. I baked a cake. The French ladies colonized the living room and the English ladies took over the kitchen table, and I filled the sink with soapy water and washed coffee cups and then washed wine glasses and cheese plates. I forgot the after-lunch coffee service, which made the English ladies laugh. At 3.15 I put the kettle on for tea, set out tea cups on their saucers, and took the boxes of tea out of the cupboard. While I waited for the water to boil I put a teabag in each cup.

Agatha came to survey the field. She is about six feet tall and given to quelling, the residue of a lifetime spent first teaching French to English children and, latterly, English to French children. When she comes into a room she draws herself up to her full height and makes a Statement, such as, I was almost Swept down the Hill by All This Rain, and expects everyone to stand to attention. There is frequent dissension in the ranks of English ladies about this: there are insurgents who believe that conversations that, well begun, should in fact be allowed to continue and even be completed when Agatha enters, and those insurgents have been known to insist that anyone speaking carry on and disregard the commotion. But that is difficult to do. As annoying as it may be to be interupted mid-story, it is practically impossible to ignore the sense of importance and adventure that sweeps in the door along with her.

So there I was arranging my teacups and tea bags, and there was Agatha peering over my shoulder. Getting ready for tea, are we, my dear?

I mumbled something about it being tea time.

Agatha looked at the teacups and then around the kitchen, evidently missing something. But my dear, where is your teapot? You can't mean that you are going to make all these single cups of tea.

Yes, I explained, I am. I have a teapot, but it holds only three or four cups, so it would be useless...

Don't have a teapot big enough! She turned to the English ladies, who were, of course, mid-conversation. Girls, she doesn't have a teapot! My dear, Lizzie here has at least six teapots, and I know she would be glad to have you come and choose one, wouldn't you, Lizzie?

Lizzie looked up for her stitching and twinkled, divided between being irritated--she was in the middle of a particularly funny story about a vicar in a posh church who was drunk for Christmas Eve services--and amused. You have but to ask, my dear.

The water came to a boil just then, and I began to pour it over the teabags in their cups. Agatha watched. Are you using one teabag for each cup? Her voice almost cracked from shock.

Yes, I replied. Isn't that how you make tea, I thought to myself. Teabag, cup, boiling water, wait three minutes?

Oh, no no no no no, my dear. She turned to the English ladies, who had now given up on hearing about the drunken vicar and were riveted on Agatha and the tea cups. Girls, she's using one teabag per cup! This tea is quite strong, my dear, and it is really unnecessary to use one bag for every cup. One teabag will do nicely for two, even three cups, won't it, girls?

There were murmurs of acquiescence from the table. Oh, yes, one was enough for two, certainly, it did get quite strong quite fast, didn't it?

I began rearranging teabags, moving quickly before I ended up with too-strong tea. Agatha supervised happily, pointing out that, really, one would go through a whole box of tea rather quickly if one used so many bags at once!

I passed out teacups and slices of cake--American pound cake, filled with French cream and spread with English raspberry jam--serving Agatha first. She carried her plate and saucer back into the salon, where she was sewing with the French ladies. A minute or two later I followed her in, bearing more tea--ordinaire, of course--and cake. When I came in, Agatha had the French ladies in rapt attention. Elle n'a pas une théière assez grande! She doesn't have a teapot big enough! They all tittered politely and sympathetically: the French, they don't all have teapots big enough, either.

Back at the kitchen table, the ladies teased me about Agatha and my strong tea, and Lizzie finished her story about the vicar. I poured second cups and offered second slices of cake. Then it was time to wash again. Before I threw out the used teabags, I asked the English ladies if anyone would like to take them home to reuse. They laughed--and then Ginny said, gently, you know, if you reuse them later, the tea is very bitter. So out they went.

From Julia's Kitchen

I went to cooking class across the valley last week in Julia's kitchen. The keeper of the kitchen these days is an American lady of a certain age--sensible shoes, salt and pepper hair that she doesn't bother coloring anymore--who teaches cooking to vacationing Americans. We met this winter, and then we met again, and the second time--in yoga class, this was--she invited me to come for a day. There would be only one vacationing American. I would be there to offer a little local American color and to fill in the conversational cracks.

The vacationing Americans who come for cooking class spend the morning with the keeper in the kitchen, making a three or four-course lunch. At around one o'clock everything is ready, and then everyone sits down and eats and drinks until three o'clock or so. They spend a week at Julia's house--three days preparing and eating lunch, a day visiting the markets and lunching out in a proper French restaurant, a day with a visiting chef. The keeper is there throughout, shepherding, chatting, coaxing, leading, teaching. So only one visiting American can make for an intense week. Thus my invitation.

I have made the pilgrimage, several times, to Julia's kitchen, the one from the Cambridge house, now at the Smithsonian. The countertops are high and made of worn butcherblock. There is an island in the middle of the kitchen, with large storage baskets underneath. On the wall, of course, the famous pegboard, with the outlines of the pots and pans and whisk and spatulas painted so that the busy cook will know just where to put everything. I have looked in at that kitchen and read all the labels that the curators thought fit to write, and imagined what it would be like to step inside and take down a rolling pin. When I was a little girl I read a book about a sister and brother who got locked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art after hours. I'm sure that something else must have happened to them, but I don't remember what it was. What stayed with me was the thrilling idea of being behind the ropes, of being able to wander, to touch, to sit, without any shushing or shaking of heads. So all my life that notion has followed me. Locked in Versailles and sitting on the little slipper chairs in the Queen's bedchamber. Locked in Monticello and sitting at Jefferson's desk. And if I were ever locked in the Smithsonian Museum of American History, I would bypass everything else and go directly to Julia's kitchen.

On the appointed day last week I drove across the valley, down the lane, past the "Défense d'Entrer / Propriété Privé" sign, and up a rutted gravel track. Julia's house is not grand. It is the house that you would design if you were not trying to impress anyone with Your House in France, but just wanted a place to live and have your friends to stay. Park and go around to the back--there isn't really a front door, just a series of French doors opening onto the small terrace--and open the screen door. It leads directly into the kitchen. Julia's kitchen. The same. High counters, butcherblock, island with wicker baskets of equipment, and, of course, the pegboard.

The keeper handed me an apron, a dishtowel, and a clipboard with copies of the recipes we were to make. I met the visiting American--an elfin lawyer from St. Louis--and we started cooking. The keeper taught techniques and tricks: save the tops of leeks for making stock. Correct melted chocolate that has gotten too hot and separated by whisking in heavy cream. Put basil stems, shorn of their leaves, in the sauce for their flavor, and fish them out later. We both took notes, and watched, and asked questions. In between times there were stories, about other places we'd been, meals we'd eaten, people we had eaten with. But there were no stories about Julia. She hardly came up, really. A few times I thought she would--and then instead I learned that in France it is permissible to break off just the amount of celery that you need from the stalk, and buy that instead of the whole bunch, which is a helpful thing to know. As the morning wore on I found myself bending to lean my elbows on the kitchen island where we were working. I am nowhere near six feet myself, and the countertops were too high for me.

It was when we were sitting down to lunch--if the pink champagne is good, go ahead and serve it with the meal, and when you put the plate down in front of your guests, the meat always goes at six o'clock--that I suddenly understood. There was no need to talk about Julia. This was not some exercise in hagiography. No saints lived here. This was the house, the kitchen, of someone who liked to cook, who liked to teach people to cook, who liked to sit long over her meals with friends eat and drink and talk and laugh without reservation. What we were doing was not participating in some pilgrimage but simply carrying on the same work that Julia had done herself, the ordinary alchemy of turning groceries into lunch. A particularly good lunch, but nothing mysterious. Sitting at Jefferson's desk I have always imagined that I might get that much closer to Jefferson's thoughts, and maybe at Monticello things are different. But in Julia's kitchen what I learned was that cooking done with love and care is the same in every kitchen.

I tried out my theory this weekend. It was Easter, and the house was full of company, so much that we overflowed into Jules' house up the terraces. Of all our household this weekend I was the only one for whom Easter meant much, or anything, beyond egg hunts and chocolate rabbits, and although I have long ago stopped sorting out my thoughts on resurrection, I retain a sense of the holy. A sense that this holiday is about grace, about good things happening when you don't think they will, when you've given up hope that they ever will again. So we have the chocolate bunnies and the girls have grown up with egg hunts, and I struggle with teaching them--not bread into body or wine into blood, but grace and compassion and kindness.

That's what I was thinking about Sunday afternoon while I made the keeper's recipe for osso bucco. That, and worrying. Everyone, even the dogs, had gone out and left me to cook, happily, in the kitchen. I turned on music and opened the kitchen door to the breezes, and chopped and sautéed and braised. Our guests were a motley assortment--family, old friends, friends of friends--and though they knew each other there was plenty to worry about. Would everyone be on time? Would they bring what they had said they would, and if they didn't, how would I produce the backups I had ready in the downstairs refrigerator without hurting feelings? Would conversation be easy? Would there be common ground? Would there be enough, would there be too much, what had I forgotten...the litany went round and round.

But everyone came when they said they would, and brought their offerings. We opened champagne and toasted Easter and Passover and Spring and family and friendship and hope for better days. When the osso bucco came out, it was as good as the one that had come out of Julia's kitchen the other day. Everyone loved it. We told stories and laughed until we couldn't catch our breath. We sat long over the main course, longer over the cheese--with the cheese some honey from a friend's hives, and our own olive oil--and then over the American cake longer, and, then, finally, time for tea. When we got up from the table late that night we were full, contented, a good meal closer to heaven. The bread and wine and osso bucco may not have turned into the body and blood, but they did knit us together, and make us all a little more whole. Julia said one time: Good food is also love.

Mise en place

We went to the Christmas Market in Valbonne last night. It had rained steadily all weekend and we had all followed a routine of determined activity in the morning that faded into staggered afternoon naps. The meteo warned us that the weather could well continue into Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I decided late in the afternoon yesterday, after nap, that we would all load up and go over the hill. Fireworks were scheduled for the early evening, to be followed by vin and chocolat chaud in the place. We didn't think the fireworks would go off in the rain, but decided to go over anyway.

Two curves away from the village traffic came to a dead stop and we suspected that there might be other people who had finished their afternoon naps too. C. let us out at the edge of the village and we opened our umbrellas and ventured into the market: G., E., and our Christmas visitors and I. Everywhere were families with umbrellas and hoods. On the village's upper terrace there were wooden pens enclosing sheep, goats, and poultry (the first time I have ever seen small farm animals on display for charm's sake, not for potential consumption), and, at the far end of the boules court, a miniature wooden chalet for Pere Noel. Between the animals and Santa were a few stands selling homemade jams and jellies and foie gras, and local olive oil, and even truffles. We stepped around the mud and the puddles, leaning under the tents as much to get out of the rain as to see the sheep and the truffles.

Turning back down into the village I spotted the socca stand. I had already talked about socca to our visitors, and the crisp chickpea flour cake would be a warm antidote to the weather. Sending everyone else on, I got in line for our socca behind two men who were already waiting. The socca man had rigged a tent over his worktable and firewood and created a little waiting space. Behind his stainless worktable he had an old kitchen chair, and as I got into line he was mixing his batter in something like a five-gallon bucket: chickpea flour, olive oil, water, salt. He stirred and added and stirred and added, oblivious to the men and to me. Once he judged the batter to be the right consistency, he put a lid on the bucket and set it aside.

It was when the socca man took out the second bucket of batter and began to make adjustments to it, as well, that I realized it was going to be some time before the socca was forthcoming. The men in front of me weren't waiting for their socca to come out of the oven; they were waiting to order. The socca man continued to adjust his batter, a little oil, a little water, and others began to gather under the tent.

I wondered if I should push on. This is a familiar problem: every time I stop to buy socca at a market, I find myself waiting and waiting and whoever is with me waits and waits too. Is it worth it? Shouldn't I just go on? But I am almost always entranced by the preparation of the socca. It is the street food, the fast food, of the region; it is peasant food, cheap and filling and probably fairly nutritious. The socca man drives from market to market with his wood-burning oven hitched to the back of his truck, or, sometimes, his motorcycle. Like New York hot dog carts, or pretzel carts, the socca cart provides a quick and warm snack.

But--and here is the cultural catch--quick means something different in the markets of the Cote d'Azur. Last night at least a dozen people had gathered under the tent and spilled out under their umbrellas before the socca man took the order of the men in front of me. He had adjusted his batter, added wood to the fire, and, finally, cleaned off his stainless steel worktable and then set his salt, pepper, paper napkins and aluminum foil just so. And there was no impatient energy from the line, no grumbling, no pushing, no angling for a closer position, just quiet chat while they waited. The socca would be ready when it was ready. New Yorkers would have left in a huff after saying a few choice words, and Washingtonians would probably have sued, but the Valbonnaises waited patiently.

I struggled, as I always do. My family were waiting, time was passing, what about the fireworks and the vin chaud? Then the socca man asked for my order, and in a second I decided. I would wait while he made two more socca for us. C. and G. appeared, ducking under my umbrella, and I sent them away again, just a few more minutes and I'll meet you in the place. The men in front of me were gone now with their four socca, and my socca was in the oven. The socca man kept checking it, adjusting it in the flat pan it cooked in, turning it a bit, pushing it closer and then farther from the fire, until, finally, he judged it to be just right. Then he took the pan out and put it on the stone trivet on top of the worktable and, using a tiny wooden knife, cut the round thin pancake in half and folded each half over again. He slid the halves onto pieces of aluminum and gently peppered and salted each one, then folded the aluminum down to make a packet and handed the two packets and two napkins to me with one hand while he took my two euros in the other.

I moved away from the rest of the line and turned down the lane towards the place. The lane was lined with tented booths--olive wood bowls, pottery, mushrooms, honey, the Corsican sausage man, and an old man dozing over his homemade nougat--and across the lane giant irregular snowflakes flashed in blue and white lights. A soaked red carpet down the center led the way to the place, and the crowds were smiling and happy and busy. As I walked past the fountain, a warning firework shot up over the place, and its white sparkles showed over the blue and white lights and the red carpet and the booths, through the rain. I came around the corner into the place and found my family, and we gathered at the edge of a tent selling dried fruits and nuts and looked up past the rain into the fireworks that went off overhead. And we shared warm socca.

Une belle dinde

The holidays, all of them, have snuck up on me this year. I expected the fall to last longer, somehow, but it didn't, and a few weeks ago C. started talking about whom to invite for Thanksgiving, and now that's past and we are rollicking on towards Christmas, not to mention Hanukkah, of which we are now in the midst and which I very nearly forgot altogether.

But back to Thanksgiving. A. was still here when C. began working on the guest list, and in her helpful way she asked where we would get a turkey. I realized that I had no idea, aucune idee, where to find a turkey. I had never seen one in the poultry section of any of the grocery stores where I shop. I don't go into butcher shops very often, but I realized, after thinking for a moment or two, that I could not remember seeing a turkey in any of them. No turkeys were ever advertised as being on special; the most evidence of turkey that I had ever seen was the occasional package of escalope de dinde in the poultry section. An almost endless variety of chickens, large, small and medium, male and female: but never a turkey.

Yet it was our intention to have a full American Thanksgiving. L. and G. were coming from Paris, and bringing us cranberry sauce, canned pumpkin puree, and (not without some guilt and ambivalence on my part, but to E. and G.'s complete delight) a bag of marshmallows to put on the sweet potato pudding. And so I would have to find a turkey.

On a cold morning two weeks before Thanksgiving I ventured in to our local butcher shop. I had bought a roasted chicken or two there before--most recently, I had bought a roasted chicken in the evening that had been roasted in the morning, and my willingness to do so baffled the butcher, who seemed to take it both as a personal favor to him (buying chicken that was not moments off of the rotisserie!) and to find it deeply puzzling (why would Madame buy a chicken left over from this morning's roasting?)--but I was far from being a regular, a cliente. The shop was empty when I went in. Chickens were roasting, quiches and tartes were arranged on the top of the meat case, and the case itself was full of an elaborate and bloody assortment of cuts of beef, lamb, veal, rabbit arrayed in carnivorous glory.

I asked for some chicken breasts and, while the butcher was wrapping them, I ventured my request. I would like to order a turkey, if that's possible.

Ah. Vous faites le Thanksgiving americain. You are making American Thanksgiving. The butcher smiled and wiped his hands on his apron.

I smiled back, encouraged. Can you get turkeys for Thanksgiving?

But of course. A woman in Valbonne ordered one the other day. It is what you always eat for Thanksgiving, no? Turkey farcis? Stuffed turkey?

Yes, yes. We will be 12 people; can you get me a turkey the right size for that many people?

We conferred a bit about what the right size was, and when I should pick it up, and he took my name and phone number. I had one last request.

When you prepare the turkey, Monsieur, can you make it very clean? The roast chicken I had bought recently had come with shins attached. Did you know that chickens have shins? They do. In a rare moment of courage, I had snapped the roasted shins off of the legs before I carved the bird and before anyone else in the household could see them and decide to commence vegetarianism that night. However, I did not trust myself to be able to come to terms with turkey shins, or feet, or any other parts of the turkey never reproduced as a Normal Rockwell illustration of Thanksgiving.

The butcher looked quizzically at me. I tried to explain: no gizzards, no organs, no shins, but my French failed me. I fell back on foreignness. Could you, Monsieur, prepare the turkey as though it was for an American lady?

Now he nodded. Do not worry, Madame. It will be all clean.



The day before we were to make our Thanksgiving americain, L. and I went to pick up the turkey. The shop was busy; two butchers were on duty, the one from whom I had bought the chicken with shins and the one who had taken my turkey order. The turkey order man was attending to three ladies of a certain age. The ladies were turned out in sunglasses, leopard prints, sleek black suits, heels, and gloves; they looked like they had just been transported from one of the more fashionable shopping streets on the Right Bank. They were ordering an assortment of items for lunch.

Meanwhile, the chicken shins butcher turned to us. I explained that I had ordered a turkey. Ah! Une belle dinde! He smiled, glad that this time I was not settling for a leftover chicken. A pretty turkey! He rubbed his hands together and went behind the counter, where he opened a large door. I had seen that door, of course, but had never wondered what was behind it, in the same way, I imagine, that we Americans can look at a piece of meat on white styrofoam wrapped in plastic and not wonder where it came from. Well, wonder no more. The door opened to reveal a walk-in meat locker easily half the size again of the shop itself. Entire sides of beef hung from hooks in the ceiling. L. and I both drew back a half step.

Three turkeys hung from hooks across from the sides of beef. Our butcher took the first one and brought it out into the shop to weigh it. It was a little feathery and--how does one say this?--obviously quite fresh. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to describe something else in its place: a turkey from an American supermarket, for instance. What I have always unwrapped, or asked someone else to unwrap for me, on the kitchen counter on Thanksgiving morning, has been a white, white bird. If there were organs, they were neatly wrapped in waxed paper in the cavity of the bird. No feathers. No suggestion that this creature walked around recently, and no suggestion, either, of what it might have walked around on. The turkey that the butcher happily began to wrap up for us looked like it had probably enjoyed a hearty supper the night before.

That's not her turkey; someone's already bought that turkey, the other butcher interrupted him. Go get one of the other turkeys for her.

Our butcher shrugged and went back in the meat locker. Meanwhile, the leopard ladies were still ordering. We'll take some slices of roast beef; it's rare, isn't it?

Their butcher took a slab of roast beef the size of his forearm out of the case. With an immense knife, he shaved off a few deep pink slices.

And some of these beignets, these little doughnuts. They're so good with coffee. The taller leopard lady turned to the shorter one and they bobbed their heads at each other confidentially.

Their butcher wrapped the roast beef in paper and reached up to the top of the counter for a handful of beignets. There was no intermediate step: wrap the bloody beef, pick up the beignets.

Our butcher emerged from the meat locker with a second turkey. This one was a few grams smaller and had fewer feathers. The leopard ladies went off with their bloody roast beef and beignets, and our butcher wrapped and bagged the turkey--5 kilos and change--and handed over the bill with a flourish: Ca fait 79 euros, s'il vous plait, Madame.

In years past I have hesitated, as I stood at the turkey desk in Whole Foods, over whether to order the organic, free-range, baptised turkey at $3.47 per pound or to order instead the slightly less well-cared for bird at $2.50 per pound. Those days are gone. Thirty, forty dollars for a turkey? I will scoff at Thanksgiving tables in the future. Why, I remember the year I paid over a hundred dollars for a turkey in France.

It was a good turkey, though. It tasted different from the Butterballs of my childhood, and from the organic Toms of the past few years, a stronger taste, a turkier taste. We were pretty sure, L. and C. and I, that this turkey had not been injected with anything, and we could see for ourselves that there had been no chemical solvents, unless you count water, involved in preparing it for sale. And, though I'm sure the butchers and the turkey farmer are not going hungry, I don't think there was a whole lot of profit injected into the price. There are fewer people wanting turkeys, and fewer turkeys to be had, so turkeys cost more. (A lot more.)

The distance between production and consumption is shorter, and is not shrink-wrapped. Feathers and blood are a part of life and death, and eating beignets that have been close to roast beef juices probably won't kill you or even make you sick. (At least if you don't think about it too much.)

Nevertheless, I think we'll give turkey a miss for Christmas. Lobster might be cheaper.