On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town. Susan Loomis
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hours, trying to live up to the tradition of what I had learned. The customers loved the food, from the hearty chili to the green-flecked zucchini (courgette) cake (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. I shook my head. Only in France.
Michael, a sculptor in the mood for an adventure, had decided to join me in Paris. Before he 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 be 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, or simply wander the streets of Paris. We were living on centimes 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 get back to the US, and his sculpture studio; I felt I needed to get on with things as well. 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’d discovered something he’d 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 that I accepted the job a friend of mine called to say that a friend of hers in the Dordogne needed help on her farm, to shore up disintegrating farm buildings. She wanted to know if Michael would be available to go there and help. When I told Michael he jumped at the opportunity. He didn’t care that it was five hours south of Paris. It didn’t phase 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 would 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 dealing in food wares – anything at all to do with food. We would keep going until about 1 p.m., then stop for lunch, and start out again when the shops re-opened, 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 presided over by Bernard in the village of Le Vaudreuil. The meal over, we borrowed Edith’s Deux Chevaux and drove to the nearby village of Bec Hellouin. It was a Saturday, and we wanted to go to 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, 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-Gaillard 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 on the table was 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 had, which she served to her family and to paying guests who spent the night on the farm; Guy, the farmer, who had terrible eyesight and was a little loopy but very sweet and a very good farmer. He always went off half-cocked, though, doing wheelies with his tractor as he took a corner too fast, bashing a trailer into one of the walnut trees on the property, leaving his tools everywhere, 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 was obliged to go 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 bore 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 determination rare to find anywhere. She chafed at her position. She worked all the time with no conveniences to help her, 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. They had a daughter.
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 100 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 had learned to make as she grew up, but it was the most intensely, purely flavourful food I had 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 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