On Rue Tatin (4 page)

Michael stayed at the Dubois farm for six months. His relationship with the family was a love affair. He never really did become comfortable speaking French, but it didn’t matter. He was raised on a farm so he knew what to do without asking, and during his six-month tenure he repaired farm buildings and fixed anything that was broken (and had been broken for years), helped Danie or Guy when he could, amused the children, ruffled the ears of the dog. Now and then he would strike out from the farm across the fields, up and over the rolling hills, which were covered in snow in winter and in wildflowers from the first sign of spring. Stone farmhouses and ancient fortified chateaux dot the region, and Michael spent a good deal of time investigating and studying the stonework used to build them, for he wanted to learn the techniques and apply them to his sculptures. The archways of golden stone were of particular interest, and on one of my visits he took me to a spot on the farm where he’d built one, from stone he’d gathered off the land. It looked as though it had always been there.

Michael’s stay ended at the same time that Patricia and I finished the book. Michael and I took stock and decided that we would move back to the States. We thought we needed to get serious about our careers, and the United States was the best place to do that. We packed up, gave up our studio, and shipped our things home. I left with a very heavy heart.

I returned to France at least once a year after that and dreamed of moving back. Finally, ten years after we had left, with the signing of a contract for a book that would celebrate French farmhouse cooking, it could happen.

DANIE’S STUFFED TOMATOES
TOMATES FARCIES

When tomatoes are fat and juicy this is the perfect way to serve them, as I learned from Danie Dubois so many years ago. Our family loves them so I make at least two per person; with a green salad, bread, and a simple dessert they make a filling summer meal. Use tomatoes that are ripe and firm and not too soft, so they hold up in cooking.

2 slices fresh bread (about 2 ounces/60g each)

1/2 cup/125ml whole milk

4 pounds/2kg juicy tomatoes

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons/30ml extra-virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, minced

2 garlic cloves, green germ removed, minced

8 ounces/250g button mushrooms, trimmed, wiped clean and diced

13/4 pounds/875g lean ground pork

1/4 cup/10g fresh tarragon leaves

1 cup/10g loosely packed flat-leaf parsley

2 large eggs

1. Preheat the oven to 425° F/220° C/gas 8.

2. Tear the bread into bite-sized pieces and place it in a small bowl. Cover it with the milk, press the bread down so it is completely covered, and let it sit until it has absorbed all the milk, about 30 minutes.

3. Slice the top off of each tomato and reserve it. Remove the seeds and most of the inner pith of the tomatoes and discard. Lightly season each tomato inside with salt and pepper.

4. Heat the oil with the onions and garlic in a medium skillet over medium heat. Cook, stirring, until the onions are translucent, about 8 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and transfer the onions and the garlic to a medium-size bowl. Add the mushrooms to the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, until they have given up their juice and are tender, 5 to 6 minutes. Transfer the mushrooms to the bowl of onions and garlic.

5. Add the bread and milk to the ingredients in the bowl, along with the pork. Mince the tarragon and the parsley together and add it to the bowl along with the eggs. Blend the mixture thoroughly, using your hands. Season with salt and pepper and blend well. Cook a teaspoon of the mixture and taste it for seasoning—adjust if necessary.

6. Evenly divide the stuffing among the tomatoes, pressing it firmly into them, and mounding it above the edges of the tomato if necessary. Place the tops of the tomatoes atop the stuffing and bake until they become a deep gold, the stuffing is completely cooked, and the tomatoes are tender, about 1 hour. Remove from the oven and serve, drizzling the tomatoes with the cooking juices in the pan.

6
TO
8
SERVINGS

THE DORDOGNE POTATO CAKE
LA GALETTE DE POMMES DE TERRE DORDOGNE

This is the potato
galette
I learned to make from Danie Dubois, on her farm in the Dordogne where Michael spent six months. She serves it often and always with roasted goose or pork. It makes a fine first course or an accompaniment.

6 garlic cloves, green germ removed

1 cup/10g loosely packed flat-leaf parsley, plus additional for garnish, optional

5 tablespoons/75g fat such as lard, goose, or duck fat

31/2 pounds/1.75kg waxy potatoes, peeled

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Mince the garlic with the parsley and transfer it to a small bowl. Add 3 tablespoons (45g) of the fat and mix thoroughly, to make a sort of paste. You may make this ahead of time and refrigerate it, covered.

2. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons (30g) of fat in a large, nonstick skillet with sides that are about 3 inches (71/2 cm) high. You will need to slice the potatoes paper-thin for this dish and the best way to do that is to use a European-style vegetable peeler. “Peel” (or slice) the potatoes right into the hot fat, stirring them occasionally so they don’t stick and seasoning them regularly with salt and pepper as you add them to the pan. It will take about 20 minutes to slice all of the potatoes into the pan, and the potatoes will cook evenly as long as you remember to stir them from time to time. They will stick together somewhat, so gently break them apart as you stir.

3. When all of the potatoes are sliced into the pan, season them one more time with salt and pepper and stir so they are all coated with fat. Add the garlic and parsley mixture and stir so that it melts evenly throughout the potatoes, then cook until the potatoes are deep golden on the underside, a generous 10 minutes.

4. Carefully invert the potato
galette
onto a large plate, then slide it back into the pan, golden-side up, and cook until the underside is deep golden, about 15 minutes. To serve, place a serving plate on top of the pan and invert so the
galette
falls onto the serving plate. Garnish with flat-leaf parsley leaves if desired, and serve.

6
TO
8
SERVINGS

TWO
               

House Hunting

I FLEW TO FRANCE on my own for two weeks to find a house for us to live in. I had dreamed of returning, hankered after the life I had known, my friends, the fragrance of golden butter, fresh bread, and coffee that is so much a part of the French way of living.

By now Michael and I had our two-year-old son, Joseph, a chubby, curly-red-haired bundle of sweet energy and constant motion, and we thought it would be wonderful for him to grow up bilingual. Moving to France to live while I researched a cookbook would give him that chance. Michael was personally less enthusiastic about the idea of going to France, because he had no inherent passion for the country. But doing creative work and being with his family is what’s important to him, and France, he decided, would offer him that.

After poring over the map of France and considering every region we knew and some we didn’t, Michael and I had decided we would live in Normandy. We wanted to be near Paris and near friends, and we’d grown to love the Normandy coast on earlier trips. So on arriving I took the train to Le Vaudreuil, where my by now dearest friend Edith Leroy met me at the station. She was delighted at the idea that we were moving back, and had not only asked if I would stay with them while I looked for a place to live but offered her help.

After making coffee and toast, which we enjoyed with her homemade blackberry and red currant jelly, we began plotting how I should go about looking for a house. I decided to consider anything within a thirty-minute drive of Edith and Bernard’s village. We didn’t care if we lived in the village, but we wanted to be close to it, since we knew almost everyone who lived there and were comfortable with its rhythm. After our breakfast I went out to the village café and bought newspapers, brought them back to the house, and checked the ads. I made several appointments to see houses, and the following day set out early to look.

Mostly what I looked at were contemporary bungalows, which didn’t fit my romantic notion of a house in the French countryside. I spent another day looking, going all the way to Vernon in the east, to Houdan in the southeast, and Honfleur in the northwest, though that was getting pretty far afield. I didn’t find a thing.

After two days, I regrouped. A friend of Edith’s, Christine, said I was going about it all wrong and offered to accompany me the next day. “I’ll show you how we rent houses here,” she said. The next morning we headed off into the countryside, stopping to ask everyone we saw if they knew of anything to rent, including hailing a tractor and asking the farmer. We discovered a few places but nothing fit my criteria. I was looking for space—both Michael and I worked at home—proximity to a choice of schools for Joe and shopping (so I didn’t have to live in the car), charm, and a low price.

I decided to try the realtor in Le Vaudreuil. Edith, out of curiosity, came with me. The man had nothing to rent but as we flipped through his book of available properties he pointed out two houses for sale, both in nearby Louviers. Michael and I had no money to buy, so I discounted them. Not Edith. “
Allez
, Suzanne, let’s go look, it’ll be fun. I’ve always wanted to see what these places looked like inside.” I decided I could take a break from my house search, and away we went in the realtor’s car.

We arrived in Louviers, a mid-size town whose center is a tasteful blend of ancient and postwar architecture. It was badly damaged during World War II—burned by the Germans on their way through—and, like so many towns throughout France, it had to rebuild itself quickly afterward. The rebuilding was done with style—capacious shops and lodgings, cream-colored stuccoed buildings with sharply sloping slate roofs. A boulevard surrounds the center of town, with small streets leading off of it into the heart of the town where a central cherry-tree-lined square serves a multitude of purposes. Mostly it is a parking lot, except on Saturdays when it hosts the farmer’s market that transforms Louviers into a vibrant, colorful fête. The square is also used for special presentations: go-kart races; a twice-yearly, town-wide garage sale where individuals set up stands and sell everything from antiques to children’s trading cards; a spring plant and flower sale.

Another large, grassy square, which is about a five-minute walk from the main square, is bordered by homes and the police and fire stations. It is here where, regularly, huge stages are built and theater performances and concerts are held, and big tents are erected for traveling circuses.

The River Eure runs through Louviers, and it is in the midst of being rediscovered. The current mayor and his administration want to resurrect its banks, which are mostly wild and overgrown, making it a focal point of the town. A kayak club is already based on it at one end of town, and there are a few paths alongside it that are pleasant to walk along, though they eventually peter out into wild growth. The river was long ago diverted into several canals that once powered the textile mills. Houses built along these canals are generally large and prosperous, and they have private, often fanciful wooden bridges across the water.

The streets of Louviers, which are generally very busy during the day and empty quickly after 8
P
.
M
. when shops close, vary from wide—the main boulevards—to extremely narrow, winding, and cobbled. There are many ancient buildings in Louviers, mostly on narrow, cobbled streets, and many are three stories high and just the width of a single room.

Louviers also boasts the remains of cloisters from a Franciscan convent, which was built in 1646, supposedly the only cloisters built over a canal.

Unlike in many old French towns there are decently wide sidewalks throughout most of Louviers, though occasionally one is obliged to walk single file and on tiptoe to avoid being squashed by a speeding car—speed limit signs are merely for decoration rather than serving any practical purpose, it seems. Parking places have been inserted wherever there is room for a car, and still many people park on the sidewalk, or angle themselves into impossibly tight spots.

We wound our way through a maze of streets and stopped in front of one of the tiny, room-wide houses. Outside it was charmingly derelict. Inside it was a complete wreck and smelled like the bowery. Piles of clothing and rags in a corner showed that it was a way station for homeless travelers. We sped out of there.

The second house was another story. It was across from the lavish Romanesque/Gothic church right in the town center, which is so large and imposing that everyone refers to it as a cathedral, though it isn’t, since it is not the principal church of the diocese. The house had been a convent for three hundred years, and before that it was purportedly owned by an artist. For the past twenty-five years it had been the property of a Parisienne who had purchased it to live in, and to transform the ground floor into an antiques shop. It was dry and didn’t smell at all. The old walls were timbered, the clay tile roof sported a tiny bell tower, the windows were paned with old, wavy glass. Inside, it was all blue and gray. And a wreck. The downstairs looked like an archeological dig—big holes, mounds of rubble, a total mess. The walls were in terrible shape, their pale blue paint streaked with grime. Dust covered everything. But the house was filled with a palpable, warm presence.

We followed the realtor and his stiff gray pompadour up the beautiful staircase, which curved gently around a corner, and emerged onto a landing awash in clear, soft light. As he babbled about the attributes of the house I looked out the window and caught my breath—the church was near enough to touch. I was transfixed. We proceeded through the house and Edith kept whispering to me,
“C’est fabuleux, cette maison. Elle a besoin de la peinture et un peu d’électricité, c’est tout.”
“It’s fabulous—all it needs is a few coats of paint and some electricity.”

The house must have been a perfect convent for it rambled on and on, up and around short stairways, in and out of rooms, yet it wasn’t vast. It was very human—the rooms were quite small, the staircases short, the floors old wood, worn in many places.

The rooms were in varying states of decay. Some had graffiti scrawled on the walls and ceilings. “The owner allowed squatters to come, she is very open,” said the realtor. “She is very
spéciale
.”
Spéciale
is a word that means many things, from strange to difficult. I was beginning to get a notion about the owner.

On the third floor was a long, furnished room. A coal stove sat at one end, its pipe jury-rigged out a window. A single bed sat against a wall, with a large chunk of plaster in the middle of the bedspread. At the opposite end was a small kitchenette with garish orange and yellow flowers painted on the wall. A lovely old buffet filled with dishes sat along another wall.

The realtor explained that this is where the owner, a single mother of grown children, lived when she came to stay. As I looked at the room, which had lovely proportions, I was amazed she hadn’t asphyxiated herself with the rigged-up stove pipe. Apparently the woman was an antiques dealer who, for whatever reason (the realtor hinted at a family tragedy), hadn’t been able to fix up the house and install her antiques shop downstairs. She instead stripped it of everything valuable, from fireplace mantels to the crystal ball that had once graced the stairway. She seemed to have become somewhat
folle
, crazy, according to the realtor, leaving the doors unlocked, living in these makeshift conditions, letting the house tumble down around her.

Our final stop was the cave underneath the house, a fascinating vaulted dungeon filled with bottles, cobwebs, and mystery. I wanted to inspect it further, but the realtor shooed us out with his wavery flashlight.

I was captivated. I didn’t say much on the way back to Le Vaudreuil. When we said good-bye to the realtor Edith was vibrating. “What a house,” she said. “You have to buy it. Michael could fix it up in no time. All it needs is paint, some work here and there, a little rearranging.” I listened with half an ear, discouraged beyond measure, seeing our romantic sojourn in France spent in one of the new bungalows I now knew were the preferred rentals in the area. I had loved roaming through the old house, but it just wasn’t possible.

Edith, who is passionate and high-strung by nature, wouldn’t stop talking about the house. She remembered as a child growing up in Louviers passing the house and seeing, inside a window right on the street, an elderly nun in her bed. “We always looked in on her. It is a sweet memory,” she said. Her chatter about the house went on all day. When Bernard came home she told him about it. I’d been thinking about it too—the quality of light inside it was unforgettable, as was that warm feeling within its walls.

Bernard fixed me with his gaze. “What do you think of the house, Suzanne?” he asked, seriously. I faltered. I thought it was beautiful, but it was a mess. And we didn’t have any money to buy it anyway. I told him so. He wanted to go look at it, so I made an appointment for the next day.

I allowed myself to dream, just a little. Imagine not just renting but owning in France. Imagine such a beautiful house. The location was perfect—right in the center of town, in proximity to shops and schools and everything. I didn’t know Louviers at all, but it was a big enough town that nearly everything was available.

As I thought about the house and the town I remembered spending an afternoon there on my own many years ago when I’d been visiting Edith and Bernard. I remembered walking around the ancient cloisters. I remembered the finely manicured public garden, which looked like a tiny version of the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The more I thought about it, the more memories surfaced. There was a wonderful store there filled with herbs and potions and organic foods of all sorts. The city hall and the museum were in a lovely old brick building surrounding a garden with a fanciful concrete-made-to-look-like-wood pergola in the center. From what I’d seen today, Louviers bustled, traffic sped through it, the sidewalks were crowded with people.

Louviers comprises twenty thousand inhabitants, making it the largest town within about thirty miles. It is the commercial center for farmers in the immediate area, who go there for banking and business. It has the rollicking Saturday farmer’s market, another smaller farmer’s market on Wednesday, and its own collection of boutiques and food shops.

I called Michael that night to give him a report. I told him about the house, downplaying Bernard and Edith’s interest in it, simply describing it to him. He said nothing. Then he said, “Go look at it again, get more information.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “But we don’t have any money,” I countered. “We can’t buy a house.”

“Go get more information” was all he would say. I am hopeless when it comes to money. My department is dreams. I rely on Michael to see the truth, so when he said get more information I figured that buying the house was somehow possible.

The next day Bernard saw the house and loved it. He thought it was an
affaire
, a deal. He said that if we decided to buy it he’d loan us the down payment if we needed it and cosign the loan. Bernard is a very successful entrepreneur who started a quality control company almost two decades ago, well before anyone else in France had the idea. The company has done nothing but grow, so that now it does business in most countries of the world. Bernard sold it not long ago, making him a very wealthy man. He is still the director, however, and spends most of his time traveling to distant points on the globe. When Bernard says something is “interesting” it pays to listen. I suddenly started to get very excited.

I called Christian Devisme, a friend, talented architect, and Edith’s brother, and asked him to come inspect the house and give me his professional opinion. He and his partner arrived and spent at least an hour poking, prodding, and snooping around like detectives. They finished in the back garden, where I joined them, and we all gazed at the exterior wall, which was so full of holes it looked like lace. I asked Christian what he thought. He slowly cleared his throat, shook his head, then looked at me sideways.
“Il ne faut pas sousestimer le travail,”
he said, gravely. “You must not underestimate the work.” That sent a chill through me.