On Rue Tatin (9 page)

Michael had parked his old truck on the church square in a paying parking spot and forgotten to move it when he and Joe flew to Italy, where I was researching a project, to meet me for a week’s vacation. When he returned his windshield was papered with parking tickets amounting to several hundred francs. Frustrated with his own carelessness he mentioned it to a friend who takes care of our vehicles. Our friend put his hand on Michael’s shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, I am going to help you.” He helped Michael write a letter to an official explaining what had happened, then went to the official to see him in person. According to Michael, he then stopped by the house and said the tickets had all been forgiven. Michael thanked our friend profusely and tried to give him a bottle of wine. “You owe me nothing,” he said. “But the official is an
amateur
of whiskey.” Within a couple of days we’d sent him a bottle of the finest.

Michael, in the course of talking with a
bricoleur
friend who does a lot of work on his own house, found out that he could buy electrical equipment at cost if he went through this friend who had a friend who worked at an electrical supply house. It involved the minor complication of knowing exactly the type and quantity of material he would need well in advance. For a savings of nearly fifty percent, it was worth it. Michael would write out his orders, our friend would order the equipment under the name of his company, and the discount would be ours.

We have a friend who has a restaurant and when he realized the extent of my recipe testing he told me he could take me to a wholesale supply store where I would be able to buy everything from unsalted butter to stainless steel mixing bowls at just above cost. “No one but registered food professionals are supposed to go, but I’ll just take you with me and pay for your things and you can pay me, no problem,” he said. The first time I accompanied him I was nervous and hoped it didn’t show. My friend assured me there was no problem. “Everyone does this, they just don’t say anything,” he said.

The
tuyau
system has developed to circumvent the killing taxes placed on every aspect of French life, but it is also an ingrained part of the French, who love to
glisser
, or slip through these kinds of loopholes without being noticed or caught. All of these quasi-illegal exploits are much discussed afterward, usually with pride. A friend who claimed her car was damaged in a parking lot when she was the one who caused the damage told everyone she talked with about it, laughing gleefully to think she’d gotten away with it. Another friend claims he buys televisions for people he knows because he paid his television tax when he bought his own television and he now has the right to buy as many as he wants without paying any more tax, whereas first-time purchasers must pay a hefty sum.

Michael and I used to be aghast at the minor cheating and trickery that fueled dinner party conversation, always bringing much laughter and satisfaction, but now we’re used to it and we laugh right along with everyone. It’s simply a part of living here.

APPLES STUFFED WITH GOAT CHEESE
AND LEEKS
POMMES FARCIES AU FROMAGE DE CHÈVRE ET AUX POIREAUX

I made this simple, satisfying appetizer one evening after finding all the ingredients at the Louviers farmer’s market. It is a happy combination, savory and delicious, simple to prepare, and dramatic to serve.

Be sure to remove a strip of skin from the circumference of the apple so the apple doesn’t burst during baking. Serve these with a red Sancerre.

4 large (about 8 ounces/250g each) apples, cored, one strip of skin removed from the circumference of each apple

1 cup/250ml white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc

1 dried, imported bay leaf

Fine sea salt

2 tablespoons/30g unsalted butter

2 large leeks (about 9 ounces/300g) total, white part only, well rinsed, and diced

2 tablespoons to 1/4 cup/60ml bottled water

7 ounces/210g goat cheese

2 tablespoons
crème fraîche
or heavy cream

Freshly ground black pepper

Flat-leaf parsley for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 400 ° F/200 ° C/gas 6.

2. Place the apples in a baking dish and pour the wine around them. Add the bay leaf to the wine. Lightly salt the interior of each apple.

3. Place 1 tablespoon (15g) of the butter and the leeks in a large, heavy saucepan and cook, stirring and shaking the pan, until the leeks begin to turn transparent. Add 1 tablespoon of the water, stir, and cover the pan. Continue cooking until the leeks are tender, about 10 minutes, adding additional water if necessary to prevent the leeks from sticking to the pan.

4. When the leeks are cooked, transfer them to a mixing bowl. Add the goat cheese and
crème fraîche
and stir until all the ingredients are thoroughly mixed. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

5. Gently stuff each apple with an equal amount of the goat cheese and leek mixture, pressing it into the cavity and mounding it on top. Top each apple with one-fourth (1 scant teaspoon) of the remaining tablespoon of butter.

6. Bake in the center of the oven until the apples are tender and the goat cheese is dark golden on top, about 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and transfer one apple to each of four warmed plates. Garnish the plate with sweet cicely or the parsley and serve immediately.

4
SERVINGS

APPLE AND THYME TART
TARTE AUX POMMES PARFUMÉE AU THYM

One morning I picked reines de reinettes and Cox’s Orange Pippin apples from our trees and snipped a handful of thyme branches—which were in flower—from the plants along the courtyard wall and combined them in this wonderful, heady tart. It was simple and sublime!

FOR THE PASTRY:

11/2 cups/200g unbleached, all-purpose flour

Large pinch of sea salt

7 tablespoons/31/2 ounces/105g unsalted butter, chilled and cut in small pieces

5 to 6 tablespoons/75 to 95ml chilled water

1 small egg

FOR THE FILLING:

6 large tart apples, cored, peeled, and cut in 1/4-inch-thick slices

1/2 cup/100g vanilla sugar

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

1. To make the pastry, place the flour and salt in a food processor, and process to mix. Add the butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. With the food processor running, slowly add the water and process just until combined and crumbly. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gently press it into a ball. Let the pastry sit, covered, at room temperature for 1 hour.

2. Whisk together the egg and 1 teaspoon of water to make an egg wash.

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

4. Lightly flour a work surface, and roll out the pastry to a
14-inch/35.5-cm circle. Roll the pastry around the rolling pin and unroll it in a 91/2-inch/24-cm, removable-bottom tart tin, with the edges of the pastry overlapping evenly all around. Gently fit the pastry against the sides of the tart tin and don’t trim the edges.

5. Place half the apple slices in the pastry, sprinkle with half the sugar and all the thyme. Top with the remaining apples and the remaining sugar. Bring the edges of the pastry up and over the apples—they won’t completely cover the apples, which is fine.

6. Brush the pastry with the egg wash. Place the tart tin on a baking sheet, and bake in the lower third of the oven until the pastry is golden and the apples are softened and juicy, about 50 minutes.

7. Remove from the oven and place the tart tin on an upturned bowl to remove the sides of the pan. Let the tart cool to lukewarm or room temperature, then serve.

6
TO
8
SERVINGS

FOUR
               

The Messy House

WHEN WE MOVED into the house on rue Tatin, the outside was fine, gorgeous, in fact, with its beams and plaster walls—called
colombage
—steeply sloping stone roof, and numerous paned windows. The two front doors, both of which have paned windows in them as well, and one that is covered by a stone roof, are just tall enough for us to walk through. The house is shaped like an L, and from what we have found in researching its past, it was once three houses stuck together. The interior of the L was created when one of those houses either crumbled or was pulled down centuries ago. Looking carefully at the large, beamed façade, the one that presents itself to the church and which visitors in town always stop to photograph, the outline of where a door once was becomes obvious, on the second floor.

A friend of ours refers to it as a good witch’s house, particularly in spring and summer when it is almost obscured by the old-fashioned roses that climb all over one part of the façade and the small panes of wavy old glass glint in the light.

Inside, all the key rooms were livable. The temporary kitchen was better than most people’s permanent kitchens. Michael had built it in the room that we surmised had once been the convent’s kitchen, though there was no sink in it, or any other amenity except a lovely old fireplace built into one wall. We asked nuns who live in a neighboring convent and remember when our house was still a convent, and they all agreed that was where three hundred years of simple, sustaining victuals had been prepared. I had a vivid dream one night where I saw a nun in the room standing over a big gas burner stirring soup as she prepared to ladle it out into a bowl and pass it to some hungry soul through a hinged pane in the window. There actually was such a hinged pane in the window that looked out into the backyard, no doubt a catalyst for the dream.

The back wall of the large room, which was lath and plaster and painted a very pale blue, was angled so it looked off-kilter, as was the ten-foot-high ceiling. Two large windows were in the wall on the left, a wall that had clearly been the exterior of the house, and which separated the kitchen from another large room, which Michael surmised was an addition to the main house done some two hundred years ago. The corrugated plastic that covered part of the ceiling only added to its feeling of being an add-on.

Just outside the kitchen at the back of the house was a heavy wooden door. Inside it was a steep stairway and down at the bottom was another heavy door that looked like some giant had gnawed at the top; it had once fit snugly into the carved doorway but time had worn it away. Through that second doorway was one of the prizes of the house, the
cave,
or wine cellar. It had once been enormous, for it had encompassed the
cave
of the house that abuts ours as well. Some time long ago, though, the
caves
had been separated and our house was left with one long rectangular vaulted room off of which there is a tunnel that goes for a certain distance then is blocked. When we are down in the
cave
, which maintains a stable temperature ideal for storing wine, we are directly under our neighbors’ house. There is a grating in the
cave
’s ceiling that is covered now. Evidently, when our neighbor’s children were small they used to drop things down the grating to try to hit the nuns on the head when they were in the
cave
.

In our temporary kitchen Michael built open shelves all along the back wall and nearly up to the ceiling. He lined the corrugated ceiling inside with white insulation that made it clean and bright, and helped capture some heat. We had ignored the muddy brown tiled floor, but Michael’s sister, who visited us soon after we moved to France, decided her project would be to wash it. She got down on her hands and knees and started scrubbing. I heard a shriek and rushed downstairs from my office to see what had happened.

Those muddy brown tiles turned out to be lovely terra-cotta swirled with beautiful ochre and blue. We all stood there with our mouths open. They were gorgeous and very ancient, perhaps dating as far back as the twelfth century as I subsequently learned when visiting a tile collector in a nearby town and seeing the very same tiles in that town’s twelfth-century church.

Michael installed a double sink in the kitchen and poured concrete countertops, which he stained pale turquoise and ochre, to see how they would hold up and which one we would like the best. He hooked up the plumbing, so we had running water, though only cold. We had a small refrigerator that fit at one end of the counter, and two used, but superbly functioning, four-burner gas stoves.

I was delighted. I was finally in a kitchen I could move around in, with enough space to store my equipment. I hung my copper pots above the stove, and my strainers, whisks, and various other lightweight equipment on the big window, so the light filtered into the kitchen through them, and I put all my dishes on the open shelves, so I could get at everything easily. I had plenty of counter space so that after a year of working in cramped conditions I could finally cook and test recipes in comfort.

The kitchen soon felt like home. We bought a graceful old round wood table, which Michael painted bright blue, and we set that at the end of one of the counters, near the fireplace, which held a small blue Mirus, the brand name on an outmoded but charming little square woodstove from the twenties that would be our source of heat. When our friends spied it as they entered the kitchen they would always exclaim over it. “My grandparents had one just like that!” they would say, or “We started out with one like that, too. We got it from our parents.”

We’d gotten the stove from our friend Edith, who had gotten it from her parents, and we loved its efficiency and the warmth it gave to the kitchen, which was also our living room, since none of the other ground-floor rooms were livable yet. We couldn’t build a real fire in the fireplace because it smoked too badly. How, we wondered, had the nuns kept warm—had they simply offered up the smokiness to God?

Joe’s bedroom was finished. Once a tiny chapel, we think, it has three small, paned windows set into the thick walls, looking out at the church. Michael transformed it into a sweet, cozy place, working on it for months, literally sculpting it back to life. He vaulted the window casings and created an arch in plaster above the center window, so that the windows echo the three arched doors on the church across the street. The ceiling was so low we could hardly stand up straight in it, so he worked on the angles and embedded lights in it to give it height, and he lengthened the small door so that he and I could walk in without bending double. The floors looked abominable and we had decided to simply buy carpeting and cover them up—until we priced carpeting. Michael sanded them and to our delight those filthy, scuffed wood floors were pine, and they turned a warm, buttery color. It wasn’t the last time a tight budget turned out to be a blessing.

Joe was very excited about sleeping in his new room. We had painted the walls bright white and found a pretty wrought iron bed in the attic to tuck in one corner. I bought him a fluffy
duvet
with a soft rust and blue cover and we topped it with his considerable collection of stuffed animals. We added a table and chair, shelves for his books and clothes, and we put familiar posters and pictures on his wall. I remade curtains from those in his bedroom in Maine and did whatever else I could to make the room familiar and reassuring.

Our room, adjacent to Joe’s, was nearly finished. Michael had painstakingly replaced all the crumbling plaster between the wall timbers adding electrical wiring and outlets as he went. He reset the good-size window that looked out on the grass and the small brick building behind the house, which belongs to the church; he built in a small closet where a fireplace had once stood; and he completely replastered the ceiling.

The floor was paved with dusty eight-sided terra-cotta tiles called
tommettes
, and my job was to clean them. They needed little more than a thorough washing and waxing, which I expected to be very quick. The washing was, but finding the right wax for these precious old tiles was another story. Edith swept in and said we should use a sticky mixture of linseed oil and beeswax, as she and her grandmother had. “It’s hard to apply and you have to re-apply it every year but it’s the best thing for them,” she said emphatically. I listened to her, but with one ear. I wanted to use something that would enhance the
tommettes
, but a painful process that needed to be done once a year didn’t interest me. I went to the local
quincaillerie
, or hardware store, to ask what I should use. They recommended at least three different products and said it depended on many things. We then went into Paris to the Saint Ouen flea market and a store there that specializes in the restoration of furniture, where we got the definitive answer in the form of two waxes, which needed blending and could then be applied in three coats. The salesman assured us they would give the finish we wanted. “They are used by artisans who restore the ancient monuments of France,” he said. “They give a nice shine, not too much, just like silk.”

Once home I carefully mixed up the waxes and applied them as instructed on the back of the tins. I repeated the procedure twice more. It was very easy as the salesman had said, but for the life of me I couldn’t see any shine on the
tommettes
. They looked just the same as before, perhaps a shade darker. I knelt down and put my cheek to the floor to see if I could see anything. I thought I saw a whisper of a shine.

With the floor waxed all that remained to do in our room was to paint the walls, which seemed simple enough. But first we had to decide upon and find a color. Michael and I both love light, and we both love tradition. In general, our house calls for cool pale blues, grays, and celadon to blue-green, all of which go with the matchless sky outside the windows. The traditional color in Normandy for the plaster between timbers is deep gold, which was too dark, so we decided on a pale version of that, which would be perfect with the wood and the tiles. We had never seen the exact color we wanted anywhere, so we decided the only way to get it was to mix it ourselves.

Michael and I usually end up wanting the same things, we just have different ways of getting there, which is particularly true with colors. In this case we had a vague notion of our goal, a big vat of white paint and tubes of yellow, ochre, white, red, and black pigment before us. Michael insisted we shouldn’t add red, and I felt we had to. We both agreed we should use ochre. As we discussed what we were after we squirted bits of color into the vat of paint as Michael patiently stirred.

“No, that isn’t it yet,” I said.

“You’re right, it needs more ochre,” he said, squirting.

“And some more red, and maybe some yellow,” I countered, squirting.

“Now more ochre,” Michael said, and I agreed. Squirt. He stirred and we squirted until the paint got close to a color we thought was all right. In any case, if we kept squirting we’d soon have black, so we stopped. We looked at each other. “I think I’ll put some on the wall and see how it looks,” I said. Satisfied, Michael left to do something else.

The paint looked delicious, like
café au lait
without the foam. But I was dismayed. It didn’t look like anything I wanted on my bedroom walls.
Zut
. We had overdone it, and we had nothing more in the budget for another vat of paint. Not only that but we wanted to move in the following day, so time was running short.

There was nothing left to do but start painting. My heart sank as I brushed the first paint on the walls. It looked dark and institutional, like something the army would issue to paint a barracks. I kept painting. Maybe it will improve when it dries, I thought, without much conviction.

Michael looked in and shrugged. “Oh, keep going. We’ll let it dry and see,” he said.

I got into the job, its rhythm and sameness. Pretty soon I was paying more attention to the technique than the color, carefully painting alongside each uneven beam, trying not to get any paint where it shouldn’t be, wiping it off quickly if I did. Before I knew it, one coat was applied on all the plaster and the ceiling. By then I was starving. I cast a glance at the room as I walked out to wash the brushes.

Outside it was a fine autumn day. I bought
crudité
sandwiches—
baguettes
stuffed with hard-cooked egg, lettuce, tomatoes, and gallons of delicious mayonnaise—and Oranginas from the closest bakery, along with
sablés
, buttery cookies that are a Normandy specialty. I loved these particular
sablés
, for they have chocolate dough swirled in them and look like chocolate and vanilla pinwheels. I put a cloth on our metal table outside and we sat down to eat. The apple tree was loaded with fist-sized green apples, the pear tree looked like it might fall under the weight of the tiny pears, which looked like the Seckel pears on the tree back in Michael’s and my first house, in Seattle. As I looked at them I imagined many tarts and
clafoutis
for the winter.

I forgot about the paint and the whole inside of the house as we sat there enjoying the autumn sun, the silence, the gothic curls on the church. I marveled at the talent of the craftsmen who had created them—how was it possible to carve such lacy stonework? Who served as models for the bishops and saints who stood guard on the front of the church? What inspired the horrific gargoyles who stuck out their snouts on all the corners?

When we entered the bedroom an hour later, the effect was astonishing. The paint had dried into a warm, soft, luscious ivory. We looked at each other and laughed with relief.

I went about cleaning the bathroom adjacent to our bedroom, polishing the sink, washing the floor, scrubbing the seventeenth-century carved closet doors there. I loved opening them, for inside they are painted a rich velvety blue, certainly applied decades ago by a nun sprucing things up. We could never replicate the color, so we decided to leave it there. Pasted on the inside of one of the doors is a very old paper decal of the sacred heart, its once lurid colors faded to soft red and gold, its edges pinked to give it a three-dimensional air. Around the heart are the words “Jesus, your heart is here! Let its reign begin.” Tiny lettering at the bottom of the decal gives the value of the phrase at 100 days indulgence. Under that is the name Pope Pie, or Pius, and the date July 1877. I imagined the nuns opening the door to get their towels, much as we do, and repeating that phrase as they did to gain more time in heaven.