On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town. Susan Loomis
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through college I cooked whenever I had free time. When I wasn’t cooking I was reading about it, planning my next meal, designing my next dinner party. After earning a degree in communications and working on newspapers and in public relations, it dawned on me that I could incorporate food into my professional life, which is what had led me to La Varenne. I wanted to be a food writer, but first I had to learn how to cook.
So here I was in a 200-year-old building in Paris, right near the place des Invalides, basking in the world’s best butter, the fattest fragrant pink garlic, spinach whose leaves were so firm and meaty they stood up on the table instead of lying flat, brown eggs whose yellow yolks tasted like the essence of egg. I thought I knew good apples, fragrant strawberries, juicy pears. But never had I tasted the likes of the fraises des bois I had on a tart at La Varenne, and the pears I sniffed made me want to fold them into cakes, slather them with chocolate, poach them in fragrant herbs and spices.
Everything was so whole. Chickens came with head, feet and pin feathers, and so did the pigeons and quail; the fish looked at me with big, dreamy eyes as I took them from the cooler, the lettuce still had soil clinging to it.
Once my onerous receptionist stint was finished I moved on to washing dishes at cooking demonstrations, a job I much preferred. At least I was in contact with food. I lived in a blessed cloud of ecstasy – about the food, the flavours, the techniques I was learning. I jumped at the chance to run errands to the market, the cheese shop, the bakery. When I wasn’t at La Varenne I took jobs cooking for embassy families, catering bar mitzvahs, making canapés for special occasions. Anything to be with food. Whenever I could I went to spend a day at a bakery or pâtisserie, often getting up at 1 a.m. and arriving when the baker did, so I missed nothing and could still get to work on time.
The chefs on duty with us for our evening classes – terribly handsome all of them, with their crisp whites and their Gallic attitudes – would yell, scream, cajole, flirt, pinch and generally try to pummel us into cooks of some merit. After several hours of cooking we would sit down late in the evening to sample and critique our creations. I always raced through whatever my required dish or dishes were so that I could jump ahead and make something else from the list, usually in the dessert category. I always toyed with these extra recipes, embellishing and transforming them by adding ground walnuts to a gâteau breton, for instance, and pâte sablée to a chocolate charlotte. It was more fun than I could have imagined.
Being a stagiaire at La Varenne was a unique experience, not always easy, but invaluable, like boot camp for cooks. All those long days doing the bidding of the chefs, the hours in the basement peeling garlic for a cooking demonstration, or in the office writing or rewriting something for one of the school’s books that were produced there was ideal training for the life of a freelance food writer!
I had expected, while doing my apprenticeship, to travel on weekends. Before arriving in France, I had joined an organization called SERVAS, which is set up to further international goodwill by supplying travelers with names of host families in countries where they want to visit. The idea is that the traveller stays with the host family free of charge for up to three days and must, in exchange, be willing to participate in whatever the family is doing, be it harvesting grapes, taking care of children or touring the countryside.
I looked through my list and found a family that wasn’t too far out of Paris and called to see if I could come out the following weekend. They were busy but referred me to their daughter nearby who, when I called, said a visit would be just fine. Early Saturday morning I hopped on a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare and was on my way to my first weekend in the French countryside.
When I arrived at the train station in Normandy I was met by a tall, thin, harried-looking woman who drove me to her tall stone house. We entered her huge courtyard with its sculpted privets and riotous dahlias and I saw the image of all I love in France. Solid and square with graceful proportions, it was a maison bourgeoise, its façade a parade of tall windows each hung with a different antique lace curtain. Geraniums and pansies spilled out of window boxes, an antique bicycle leaned against the wall, the wicker basket on its back mudguard overflowing with petunias. She immediately said something to me I didn’t understand, pointed to her three chubby, gorgeous golden-haired children and took off in the car. I was alone and the children immediately started trying to kill each other. I searched frantically for phrases like ‘Be quiet’ and ‘Go to your room’ but, of course, nothing came out. I finally yelled, ‘Arrêtez!’ They stopped, looked at me with their big, wide eyes, and all started to giggle and point their fingers. I searched in the cupboards looking for something to give them to eat and found only one box of organic biscuits – I now remembered that the description of this family included ‘vegetarian’. What else had it included? I wondered, as I chased the children through the freezing, massive, stone-floored house.
My hostess finally returned and dealt with the children: she gave each a heaping plate of steaming noodles with Gruyere cheese and put them all to bed. They were crying, but she simply shut their doors and came back downstairs. We had a quick lunch of the same pasta, with the most delicious green salad I had ever tasted, then she indicated that I should follow her out to the garden. There we worked in almost complete silence, carrying wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of soil, weeds and stones from one part of the garden to the other. I was delighted, eking out bits of conversation as we worked.
I learned that the woman, Edith, who was just a few years older than me, and Bernard, her husband, had just bought the house. She was by profession a painter; Bernard had just started his own company, and they were stretched very thin. The conversation was slow going. Edith didn’t make eye contact, didn’t talk much, and never smiled. I was in heaven. I had always heard the French were cold and somewhat austere – I was experiencing that in spades, and found it so exotic.
We worked for hours, then Edith got the kids, gave them a snack (those organic biscuits), piled them into the back of her green Deux Chevaux and motioned for me to get in beside her. She flew out of the driveway and we careered through the village and down a winding road to the next town, where she had an errand to run. She left the children with her parents – older, more austere versions of Edith – and off we went.
We ended up at an herboristerie, or herb store, that smelled of lavender, rosemary and fresh thyme, and was so calm and peaceful I wanted to set up camp there. Edith bought bread, organic cookies, and a cajot, or crate, full of. soil-covered carrots, leeks, potatoes and cabbages, all organic, then we piled back into the Deux Chevaux, picked up the kids and careered back home. The kids were flying around in the back seat screaming and hitting each other, themselves, the car seats. Edith was perfectly composed. I was a wreck, imagining an accident and a litde sturdy ball of a child hurding through the windshield. We arrived home safely, however, the kids piled out of the car and went to play in the yard. Edith and I went into the house and she began to prepare dinner. It was about 7 p.m.
An hour later her husband Bernard, a short, stocky man with fine brown hair and large brown eyes, arrived. He set down his briefcase, shook my hand, and offered to give me a tour of the house. He spoke decent English, and between us we understood each other perfecdy. It was a huge relief. We got upstairs to the master bedroom; its small bathroom had a pastoral mural painted on the walls, Edith’s work. It was lovely, and freezing. ‘You may want to take a shower before dinner,’ he said, waving to the small bath tub which had a shower attachment. ‘I know Americans like to be very clean.’ Nothing in the world would have induced me to bathe – I could barely keep my teeth from chattering as it was.
Bernard was the picture of civility, as calm and warm as Edith was tense and cool. I started to relax and almost immediately began to understand a bit of French. Edith fed the children and put them to bed, and sometime later the three of us sat down at a candlelit table in the kitchen next to the fireplace, the only warm spot in the house. Bernard explained that the house had an old coal furnace which Edith had to fill several times a day. Even when full it didn’t offer much comfort. Some day they would change it.
Edith had made a simple meal – carottes râpées, a mound of sarrasin buckwheat groats with a garlicky, lemony vinaigrette and braised leeks, a huge garden salad, a Camembert so creamy it melted in my mouth.