NOT "Crackers over the Sink"

Inspired by red gooseberries

One of my friends had her 85th birthday recently, and I decided to make a special birthday dinner for the two of us. We enjoy meals on my front porch together, often remembering when there were four of us, not just two. (We share a lot of memories.) So why not an extra-special evening? And there were those gooseberries, after all, calling for something out of the ordinary.

So I put together a dinner plan starting with dessert, the most ambitious item on my menu:  gooseberry tart. Gooseberries have to be “topped and tailed” (stem and blossom ends removed), which is time-consuming but also a basically meditative task perfect for a summer afternoon. Instead of adding sugar to the berries, I mixed in about a third of a little jar of plum jam.

For the shell, I looked at half a dozen recipes and cobbled mine together from bits and pieces of all of them. I didn’t have almonds to grind for the pastry (that would be nice another time) but did have powdered sugar. And we might as well say here that this pastry is known as pâte sucrée. Chunks of butter worked with fingers into flour, sugar, and a pinch of salt, and I added a whole egg (though some people use only the yolk or no egg at all). While the sweet dough rested in the refrigerator, I worked outside in the yard for an hour, planting what will be a lovely daylily border, I’m sure, when the plants fill in. 

Later, while prebaking the tart shell I cooked a batch of rigatoni, and you could call what I made with it mac ‘n’ cheese, I suppose, at least a variation thereon: basic bechamel sauce but made with cream rather than milk and fresh nutmeg grated in; then, for the cheese, raclette. We are very fortunate to have fine raclette made right here on the peninsula at Leelanau Cheese, and I’d bought that at the farmers market on Friday, too. My cheesy pasta I baked in cute little ramekins, with extra raclette on top, but the cuteness was nothing compared to the taste. I warned my friend, “One bite, and you’ll feel a need to go to confession!” She laughed but agreed after she tasted.

We had the salad I invented a couple weeks ago and love for its cool, freshing summer tastes and textures: tomato (this one an heirloom variety from the farmers market), cucumber, blueberries, and pinenuts, with balsamic vinaigrette. We had poached (steamed, really) salmon and green beans with curried mayonnaise, with the rigatoni-raclette on the side. And for dessert we had gooseberry tart generously heaped with freshly whipped real cream.

(Cold, the next day)

Half-eaten serving!

Another friend told me the other day that someone had asked her, after her husband died, if she was fixing regular meals for herself or “eating crackers over the sink.” I certainly don’t fix meals like this when I’m alone (or even for company more than once a year, if that!), but once in a blue moon, for an old friend, it felt like the right time to pull out all the stops -- which meant I also did better than crackers over the sink the following day, when my next evening's dinner recapitulated everything but the whipped cream and so, finally, I got a few half-decent photos to illustrate this post. Because while I often photograph while I'm in the process of cooking and baking, I also often forget to photograph the finished dishes in all their glory. "Did you take a picture of that?" the Artist used to ask me. But now no one asks.

 

Memory's Lasting Perfume

When snow arrived this week, I brought my rosemary plants into the house. Rosemary is a tender herb, native to hot, dry climates like Provence, and will not survive a winter outdoors, so one of my Friday projects was to strip the fragrant leaves from the longest stems for winter drying. Because the resident Artist, in his home office, has the only south-facing window in ou4 old farmhouse, that is where the remaining trimmed plants are resting for the time being.

My friend Helene referred to her dining room windowsill of plants, fresh herbs and a few pots of blooms, as her garden, and early on during my stay with her we established our mutual love of growing things. Years later (and years into our transatlantic correspondence), when I came to live here in the farmhouse, I would sometimes sit out by my vegetable garden at sunrise and write a description of the scene to my faraway friend, who was kind enough to praise my laborious essays — truly, attempts — in French. 

At last one year I received no answer to my last letter for a worrisome length of time and got a disturbing recording when I called her phone number. I telephoned her downstairs neighbor, heart pounding. Yes, Helene had died. She was then, after all, 90 years old by that time and had had health issues for all the years I’d known her, but the shock was no less painful for being unsurprising. And Mme. Lamy could not help telling me, over and over, that Helene had “suffered terribly.” Each time she said it, I recoiled from the painful stab of that awful phrase. But Mme. Lamy also told me, several times, how happy Helene had always been when the mail brought a letter from me, and I take comfort still in knowing I gave her some little bit of joy now and then. 

Rosemary is good for flavoring vegetables and meats, especially suckling pig, veal, lamb and game. It keeps its pungency well when dried. Use this herb with moderation, as it has a very strong aroma and flavor. - Ginette Mathiot, in I Know How to Cook

Never in my life have I prepared suckling pig or veal, but I do love lamb, and there is no cooking or even living without vegetables. 

The New Putting Food By (not that “new,” actually, as my third edition has a 1982 printing date) cautions that rosemary must not be dried at higher than room temperature and dries best away from light. Just as well. Moving the rosemary-drying operation upstairs means not adding one more project to our crowded downstairs living space, where my apple-drying project continues in full swing evening after evening. 

Rosemary is one of the flavors (un des parfums) in the beloved French mixture called “herbes de Provence,” which sometimes includes lavender, too, along with other herbs. It was in Paris that I came to know and love and require herbes de Provence in my cooking on a regular basis, and so for that reason, along with my memory of my friend’s windowsill garden, Helene is very present to me as I handle these sharply fragrant leaves.

Is there someone in your life whose day would be brightened by a letter from you?

Her letters brought joy to me, too

Thirty Years Ago Today

Thirty years ago this morning I awoke in Paris to the sounds of cooing pigeons and the voices of Frenchwomen at their morning household chores coming through tall bedroom courtyard windows. On the nightstand beside my bed was a pot of lilies-of-the-valley. I had arrived at midnight the night before, exhausted after two nights without sleep, a transatlantic flight, hours crouched on the floor of the railroad station in Luxembourg (waiting room with benches only for first-class passengers), a train ride made mostly on my feet (I had a ticket but not a seat reservation), and, after a confusing taxi ride in the dark, a climb with heavy bag to the third floor of 39 rue Vaugirard, where I found a note on the door telling me that Mme. Pillet was downstairs at a friend’s apartment. Down I trudged to find her. Back up again. Did I want something to eat? Wasn’t I hungry? No, I needed to fall into bed as quickly as possible before I keeled over onto the floor!

In the morning I woke refreshed. It was a sunny morning. The soft pigeon sounds, the flute-y women’s voices, the sweet chink of spoons against china cups—purling, murmuring--seemed too beautiful to be real.

Hélène made coffee for me that first morning but warned me she would not do so regularly. She did, however, as she realized I would not be a slovenly renter, extend to me kitchen privileges not accorded to all who stayed in the room, and by the end of the month, when it came time for me to leave, we were close friends.

Being there. Nothing at all like looking at pictures or watching a movie or reading a book or imagining! The ancient city filled with lilies-of-the-valley, pots and bouquets and corsages of them everywhere. The Seine sparkling in the sun.

And so on May Day I remember that morning 30 years ago. A day to celebrate friendship, a holiday from work. For me, a dream come true that lives on, cherished, in memory.

Senses in the Kitchen, at Work and at Play

No doubt synesthesia was born long ago in the wild past of our early evolution, but it is just as surely reborn in the kitchen. When you see fat leeks in the grocery store produce section or smell the earthy freshness of dainty wild ones in the woods, don’t you already feel their smoothness in your mouth? What about the color? My eyes see green, but my mind reads purple, the smooth purple of an eggplant, and my ears hear the rich, dark music of a bassoon or a cello.

Leeks, along with daffodils, are associated by the Welsh with the Feast of St. David on March first. I missed the day again this year. The first of March is too early to look for leeks and daffodils in northern Michigan. So let’s come back indoors, back into the kitchen, and sift through memories and towels.

I am hopeless when it comes to sewing. My mother loved to sew – sewed new dresses for my sisters and me all the time when we were little -- and couldn’t understand how trying to follow a pattern could reduce me to tears. I was proud of my skill in threading the machine, both top and bottom threads, but had not joined 4-H in order to make aprons and skirts! In my mind, 4-H membership was the first step to getting a horse!

Horses = Heaven!
Sewing = Heaven’s Opposite!

Not realizing the difference between farm clubs and city clubs, I was in for a big disappointment. Anyway, it’s impossible to sew and read a book at the same time. I’m talking about real books, with pages to turn. So other than replacing the occasional button, I don’t sew.

And yet, I adore fabric. Beautiful fabric with a good “hand”  attracts and pleases me. I love those very thin, very lightweight cotton shirts that feel like silk against the skin, and I love soft cotton tea towels and much-washed tablecloths. Old-fashioned potholders and “dishrags” made by friends cleverer than I am with their hands increase my pleasure in the kitchen.

Kitchen work, I believe, is such joy because it engages all the senses, along with the hands and the mind. (Somehow I don’t resent putting down a book to work in the kitchen.) Fresh ingredients and finished dishes delight the eye, and anything sizzling in a skillet calls the ears into play, as does the plop-plop-plop of cranberries in a saucepan. Aromas, ah! There are even smells other than those of the food: my electric blender, for instance, gives off metallic whiffs I associate with our old family electric train of childhood.

As for taste, that hardly needs to be mentioned, does it? But touch, too frequently given short shrift in kitchen writing, is for me a principal element of cooking’s joy. Touch comes into play most obviously in the making of bread, as kneading bread dough brings together the work of eyes, nose, and hands. Piecrust requires a lighter touch, but the rolling out of the dough, folding and lifting and fitting to the pan, and finally the fluting of the crust’s boundaries with fingers and thumbs all call for direct unmediated contact of hands with material. 

Besides handling food, washing dishes in hot, soapy water and taking up a soft cotton towel to dry them bring feelings of deep luxury and an opportunity for peaceful meditation that would be ruled out by a dictatorial dishwashing machine. Fortunately, there’s no room in my little Paris kitchen for such a machine.

And let’s bring Paris into our musings before we part company for the day. Do you eat asparagus with knife and fork? Next time, try picking a spear up with your fingers for that first bite from the tender tip. You may dip in melted butter or lemon juice of Hollandaise – or nothing at all! My dear Parisian landlady and friend gave me permission to eat asparagus with my fingers at one of our first dinners together, and with that gesture we celebrated our common peasant heritage. I do it now both for the tactile pleasure and in memory of my old friend.

Once in my presence a little French boy was reprimanded for eating with his fingers, “like a wild tiger,” as his mother put it. The phrase captivated me. Moi, je mange comme un tigre sauvage!

There is still snow on the ground, but soon we will have wild leeks and fresh local asparagus again....

On the rue de Vaugirard

Au coin

Forgive the poor quality of this first image, cropped and blown up from a full-size print, itself of unexceptional quality. It was on the rue de Vaugirard (the longest street in Paris, my taxi driver warned when I gave him the street number, he trying to ascertain that I really did know where I was going), in the sixth arrondissement, that I encountered my first Paris kitchen. It was the kitchen of the first apartment I ever saw in Paris, the first Paris building I’d ever been in other than the train station, le gare du Nord.

For years I had been hoarding a few days a year of vacation time, never spending all I had available, until at last I had enough vacation time to go to Paris – for the first time! – for an entire month. All alone! I was going to have, at last, an adventure I had dreamed of all my life. “Where are you staying?” one friend asked. Airily I dismissed the question. I would find a hotel when I got there. The friend was aghast. Most of my friends were aghast, truth be told. One person, I was told years later, predicted that the city would “eat her alive.” “Her” being me, of course. Others told me I would hate Paris because Parisians were rude and hated Americans. I dismissed that silliness out of hand, sure that Parisians would love me, because I would be so happy to be there.

I did not take Paris by storm, but on that first visit I formed a friendship with a woman of my parents’ generation, a friendship that endured to the death.

Back home, the friend who had asked where I would be staying had been in Paris the previous year, and he contacted a woman from whom he had rented a room, although I already had plane tickets and would be arriving on the last day of April (2007), to stay through the month of May, whether or not that particular room might be available. Madame replied that she had only one month still available for the entire year – the month of May. I was in!

It was an exhausting flight on Icelandair, from Chicago via Keflavik to Luxemburg, where there was a long layover in a train station with waiting room seating accommodations only for first-class passengers. I hunkered down on the floor with my bag, willing the hands of the clock to move. Hours later the train to Paris began boarding, but I still had nowhere to sit: I had a ticket to ride but no “reservation,” a separate expense that would have guaranteed me a seat. Without a reservation I had to stand up, exhausted, swaying, almost until my destination was reached.

Midnight. Back in Michigan it was 7 a.m. I had been awake for two nights already. Yes, I assured the taxi driver, I was certain of the house number. And I had the all-important code that would get me into the building.

Un escargot

A beautiful stairway led up to the apartment of Madame Hélène P. Up and up and up I went with what now felt like a bag of cement. On her door was a little handwritten note, saying she was downstairs on the first floor, visiting a friend! I staggered back down, taking the bag along, unfamiliar with the city and the building and its inhabitants and customs. Mme. P. and her friend, Mme. L., tried to urge on me a cup of tea, a bite of something to eat, but all I had strength to do was to fall on a bed, and so, back upstairs and into – my room!

The room she rented out by the month – under the table, bien sûr, since the apartment was rent-controlled but because only with the income from the room could she manage to survive – was much larger and more generously furnished than her own bedroom. I had what seemed an enormous bed with small tables on each side, a fireplace surmounted by a mirror, a large table for writing, and a closet. The bathroom, c’est-à-dire, la salle de bain (not la toilette, which was in a separate, small, windowless room on the other side of the kitchen), with large tub and shower and bidet and window and rack for drying hand-laundered items, was between the two bedrooms, but my landlady seemed to regard it as mine, for some reason. Because I was a paying guest. When she asked me once, apologetically, if she might have a bath, I was shocked. “Mais vous êtes chez vous!” I told her. It was her home! And yet, dependent on her sub rosa rental income, she wanted her renter to be happy.

Hélène et Sirius, son chat

How could I not be happy? That first morning, hearing French voices through the open windows, the thrilling, chinking sound of spoon against coffee cup, the cooing and purling of pigeons and occasional flutter of their wings!

I would go out every morning, having studied my map and bus schedules and chosen a direction and one or more destinations for the day, but I only took a camera with me two or three times, near the end of my time there, because more than anything else I wanted to be where I was, immersed in the sensations of the moment and not viewing objectively through a mechanical lens. In the evenings, Mme. P. and I would sit together at her dining table, which also held her small television set, and she would watch tennis matches or work crossword puzzles, and I would write letters home, but our conversations gradually became more important to both of us. Hélène spoke no English, which was ideal from my perspective, as it forced me to rely on and improve the high school French I had been struggling to retain for so many years. We generally had a dictionary or two on the table between us, as well as a pad of “bloc-notes,” that peculiar paper the French seem to favor which instead of being simply lined for writing is broken up into a blue grid of small squares. If either of us could not make out what the other was trying to say, we would resort to pen and paper.

I saw myself in that era of my life as remarkably independent and self-sufficient. Hadn’t I gotten myself across the Atlantic Ocean, and wasn’t I making my way around a cosmopolitan world city day after day, all alone, in an acquired second language? Mme. P. saw me, I later learned, as “fragile,” and in a number of small ways she took me under her wing. When I brought home a bottle of red wine one evening, wine I thought incredibly cheap, she told me not to waste my money so extravagantly, that she would keep a bottle filled for me from her supply of bulk wine. She cleared a shelf in the refrigerator for me and kept a bottle filled with wine for me on that shelf. Next she offered to take me to the nearest neighborhood produce market, her favorite, one alas! now replaced by modern apartments. And after carefully noting my generally frugal (apart from that first bottle of wine) and tidy ways, she extended kitchen privileges to me. Cooking in Hélène’s kitchen did not come automatically with room rental. It was a privilege that had to be earned.

Another “alas!” is that I have no photographs of the kitchen, nor did I keep any kind of record of what I cooked in it. I remember an artichoke one evening. Another time I returned alone to the market Hélène had introduced me to and requested an avocado of a Vietnamese vendor. “Pour manger quand?” he asked. When I intended to eat the avocado determined the one he would choose for me. I also had a little beguin (a weakness) for all kinds of French sausages and related products. The variety dazzled me.

Later I would come to know the wonderful market street of the ninth arrondissement, la rue des Martyrs, and when to pronounce or not pronounce the final ‘s’ of the word plus when buying a tranche of cheese, the difference being more or no more.

Fromages!!!

About halfway through May, Hélène and I had progressed to addressing one another by the familiar tu, and it’s hard to say which of us was more touched by the conversational intimacy. For me it marked a first; for her, it might have been one of the last. When I returned to Michigan, we began an exchange of letters. And earlier this year, when I plucked I Know How to Cook, the English translation of the basic French cookbook, Je sais cuisiner, off my shelf, out fell letters from Paris.

I was transported. My friend, who died at the age of 90 about a decade ago, was alive again as I re-read the letters. The last one, I realized more than I had when first I received it, was one she knew would probably be the last she would write to me. It expressed how deeply she valued our friendship, how much I meant to her, but she also admitted that she had little desire any more for her own life, that she had become “a bit of a spectator of the end of [her] life” (un peu spectateur de ma fin de vie), though she retained her love of nature – the sky, clouds, cats, and “animals in general.” Always she closed sending kisses to my dog, a dog she knew only from snapshots.

I saw her last in September 2000, but Hélène is with me still, in my little Paris kitchen in my old Michigan farmhouse. It was Hélène who encouraged me to eat asparagus with my fingers, peasant-style (Hélène was artistic, well read, politically and socially well informed, and the same year I met her I began graduate studies in philosophy, but both of us came from peasant stock and were proud of that heritage), and even now, in spring, when Michigan asparagus is so tender and green, I wish I could have introduced my Parisian friend to the way we know the vegetable here Up North.

Ma chère amie, Hélène, tu es encore dans mon coeur et vraiment dans ma vie quotidienne. Quand je faire du pain, quand je bois du vin, je pense à toi.

The kitchen in my Michigan farmhouse, small as it is, overflows with dear, ghostly presences, and for that I am grateful. I would not have it any less crowded for the world. Here is the pasta maker given to me by another friend back in the 1970s. I think of her every time I use it. She died this year, but she also is alive in my Paris kitchen.

Pasta maker from Linda

Homemade noodles

Noodles and gravy