A Pig in Provence (4 page)

“C’est Madame l’Américaine.
She’s keeping goats and is going to make goat’s-milk cheese.”

The old woman let go of her cane with one hand and stretched it out in my direction. I took it. Her handshake was firm, her hand warm and smooth.

“Yes, yes, I remember the Americans. One in particular.” She laughed. “Very big and handsome, those American boys. Much better than the filthy Germans. The Germans took our house, you know. That’s right. They were here almost six months, four of them. Ate our chickens, our food, everything. You can still see the bullet holes on the barn where they tried to shoot our pigeons.”

The German soldiers had been right here, at this farm. What stories could be told, I thought. I wanted to ask her when they came and how they looked and what happened to them, and many more questions, but my language skills were not quite up to it. I also wasn’t sure that questioning her on the subject at our first meeting, or ever, would be the correct thing to do, so I simply made some sympathetic sounds.

Many years later, when I was helping to serve lunch at a reunion of local
Résistance
fighters at the village
café
, I thought of Mme. Lacroste’s grandmother, who died soon after our meeting, and wondered if the Germans who had occupied her farm had
been killed by one of the men reminiscing over the roast lamb and potato
gratin.

Provence is like that. Whenever I am there, I bump into living history, all of it connected. I suppose I’m now part of that history too, the American who kept goats.

“Maman,”
Mme. Lacroste called as she headed toward the huge
potager,
the vegetable garden behind the house. There, her mother stood bent over a shovel, digging up what looked like onions. Rows of cabbages, greens, and beets stretched out around her in perfect symmetry. Every bit of the huge garden was filled with something growing. Like her mother, she was wearing a black dress, but her sweater was a somber, serviceable dark blue.

“I’ve come with the American, for you to tell her about cheese.”

Mme. Lacroste turned to me and said, “My grandmother made cheese too, of course, but now, no matter what question you ask her, she only talks about certain things, like the Germans, her dead husband, her wedding trip to Nice.”

“Bonjour,
Madame Rillier,” I said to my companion’s mother. She gave me a no-nonsense handshake, and I understood where Mme. Lacroste had acquired her manner.

“So. You want to make cheese our way. No cheese in America?” She put her hands on her hips and looked me up and down.

“Yes, there’s cheese, but not goat cheese. Not like the French homemade goat cheese.” The term
artisanal
was not yet in my vocabulary. That would come twenty years later, with the beginning of the boom of artisanal foods in the United States.

“Well, I’m glad someone is going to make it again. No one does anymore.” No wonder I couldn’t find any cheese, I thought. No one is making it.

“I used to have seven or eight goats, milked them, and then made cheese,” Mme. Rillier said. “I sold the extra cheeses. A few
others around did the same. The others are dead now, and it got to be too much for me to do by myself. But I’ll tell you how to do it. Come inside.”

Mme. Rillier pushed aside the bowls of soggy bread and food scraps set outside for chickens, a dog, and cats, all of whom were hovering nearby, and we followed her through a swinging screen door into the kitchen. The dog, a brown and white spaniel, was on a chain, and the circumference of the ground within his reach was worn bare with his pacing. “We’ve got to keep him on a chain, otherwise he runs off. Loose dogs get shot. My husband goes hunting with him.”

This was my first invitation into a family home kitchen since our arrival in Provence, and it wasn’t at all what I expected.

No authentic-looking copper pans gleaming over a well-used fireplace, no exposed wood ceiling beams, no soapstone or red tile sink, no terra-cotta pots filled with olives, no bright Provençal printed fabric. In short, this was not like the kitchen in the farmhouse we had rented one summer outside Aix-en-Provence.

Over the next few years as I came to know various farmhouse and modest village kitchens, I would find most of them very much like this one. Many had been modernized during the 1950s or 1960s, with some indoor plumbing and electricity installed, and a small, tubular white enamel water heater hanging over a utilitarian white sink set in faux granite or tiled cement. The walls of these kitchens were painted with multiple layers of pale green or cream-colored enamel, and the floors were red tiles if old, or tiles of inexpensive granite composite if new. An oil- or wood-burning stove both for cooking and for heat was set where a fireplace had once reigned, with the stove’s pipe cut into the chimney flue. Sometimes the mantel was still there, with the pipe stretching beneath it. Somewhere, there would be
a propane-fueled, two-burner stove top or perhaps a modest new stove as well as the oil- or wood-burning one. Often, an overstuffed chair was in a corner and a small canapé, or couch, against a wall.

It was early winter, and Mme. Rillier’s kitchen was warm. Something that smelled of onions and garlic was cooking in a hissing pressure cooker on the back of the stove. A stew maybe, or dried beans, I thought. Greens freshly cut from the garden lay on the sink, along with the bucket of onions she had just brought in. A collection of succulents sat in small pots on the windowsill. On the wall, above an overstuffed brown chair covered with a crocheted afghan in shades of orange, blue, and brown, hung a shotgun.

“Here,” Mme. Rillier said, reaching into a cupboard. “This is a cheese mold.” She held a cuplike ceramic object, glazed ocher on the inside, the terra-cotta of the outside unglazed. It was perforated with a regular pattern of small round holes. She reached deeper into the cupboard and brought out several more molds in various sizes.

“These are what I used. I think they might come in plastic now. Used to be someone in the village who made all the clay things we needed—
daubières, tians,
casseroles, bowls, and these cheese molds. He died during the war.”

The war again. It was still close to these people’s lives, I realized. She would have been about twenty-five when the war ended, and her daughter was born during the war. I wondered again about the Germans. What was it like to live in this isolated place, Germans billeted in your house, your men gone to war or with la Résistance?

“You make your cheese right after milking, while the milk is warm. Don’t let it cool off. Pour the milk into a big bowl or bucket and add the rennet.”

This was the key moment for me. I quickly abandoned my imaginings about the war.

“How much rennet?”

“Just a tiny drop for, say, five liters. Not much. If you add too much, the cheese will be like rubber, full of holes and bitter.”

“And then what?” I asked, afraid that she had finished.

“Then you cover the milk up and by morning it will be curdled. Or, if morning milk, curdled by dinner. Scoop the curd into the molds and set them out to drain. That’s what the holes are for. The next day, salt the cheeses, turn them over, and let them drain another day. That’s it.”

“That’s it? What about aging? Isn’t the cheese awfully soft?”

“Of course it’s soft. It’s a fresh cheese. Every day you keep it, it gets older. Cheese is a living thing, you know, like wine. It changes, just like us, as it gets older. If you want an aged cheese, you keep it longer.”

This didn’t exactly correspond to the USDA guidance about aging cheeses.

“But if your cheeses are good, you won’t have any to age. People will buy them right away. It’s hard to get fresh cheese anymore. And we all remember it, right, Marie-Pierre?” She turned to her daughter, who agreed.

“Well, that’s it.” Mme. Rillier put the cheese molds back into her cupboard.

I thanked her very much, and told Mme. Lacroste I could return on my own if she wanted to stay, which she did. I left mother and daughter in the kitchen.

The dog woke up to bark at me as I left, stretching and pulling on his chain. I stayed clear of his reach and made my way to the front of the house and back to the road slowly, trying to see as much of the
potager
as I could without appearing nosy. I kept my hands tucked deep in my pockets as I walked.

My second and last lesson took place in the sales room of a cheese-making supply depot in Lyon whose ad we had read in
La Chèvre,
a professional journal devoted to goats and goat products, primarily cheese.

There we bought a 50-liter milk can with a huge funnel, a three-part strainer, and paper filters for the strainer, plus 150 plastic cheese molds and 6 stainless-steel racks for draining the cheeses.

“You’ll need these, too,” the young man waiting on us said, pointing at stacks of heavy-duty white plastic basins and tubs.

“Is your cheese room free of dust and insects?” We didn’t have a cheese room, and we were pretty sure we couldn’t keep anything free of dust.

“No,” I said, “not perfectly.”

“In that case, I would recommend these basins with lids. They are very convenient.” I looked at him and smiled.

“You see, as you are milking, you pour the milk from your bucket, through the strainer fitted on top of your milk can. Right?”

“Yes, of course. Right.” Mme. Rillier hadn’t explained this part.

“Then, I suggest you pour the warm milk into this plastic basin, add your drop or two of rennet, put the lid on, keep the basin in a warm place, and in twelve hours you have curds. The lid keeps out the dust and any insects.”

He went on to explain that the curds should then be ladled directly from the basins into the molds, set on a sheet of corrugated plastic—he had that too if we wanted it—and the whey allowed to drain into a bucket or basin. He spoke next about the turning and salting of the cheeses, which didn’t differ from what Mme. Rillier had told me.

We bought two basins with lids and a liter of rennet. Even though we would use only a fraction of a drop per liter of milk,
we wanted to make sure we had enough for the milking season, which would be starting soon.

Our farmhouse wasn’t completely ours. We had purchased it jointly with a friend, with the idea of sharing a calm, rural life with frequent sorties to the cities of Europe, while one or the other kept the house and the goat cheese business going. Very early on, however, it had become apparent to Donald and me that the communal life we had embarked upon with our friend, and now her new partner, was not for us and we began thinking about finding somewhere else to take our little family and the goats, a house with a barn and some land that we could buy. We talked during the long drive to and from Lyon and decided to tell our partners, Joanne and Guild, about our decision when we got back. We hoped that they would buy our share of the house, which they did. We bought their share of the goats.

In spite of the parting, we remained close friends, eventually sharing many summers together in Provence with our children. My friendship with Joanne spans four decades, two new husbands, three children, six stepchildren, and all the memories and experiences that form our personal histories.