Picnic in Provence (12 page)

So this year, I’m going to stage a private celebration. I’ve decided to take the day off. From myself. Today, I will not feel behind. I will not worry about being a better wife, mother, daughter, housekeeper, or writer. I’m not making a fancy dinner. I’ll be having quite an ordinary day, but I’ll be thinking and thanking—instead of fretting and fixing. We all need one day a year when we meet our own expectations and allow the world to be as it is instead of exactly how we would like it to be.

YOU KNOW IT’S
Christmas in France when the refrigerator looks like this: the fruit drawer is full of cheese, the cheese drawer is full of foie gras, the four bottles of water on the door have been replaced with champagne, and the lettuce (wrapped loosely in a dish towel) is wedged in over two broad, beady-eyed live crabs (nicknamed Gérard and Gaston). Last year, Gwendal forgot the crabs were in there. When he opened the door, they started rustling. He thought it was a poltergeist.

I was happy for the distraction. It had been a busy, bumpy year, and our little family arrived at Christmas feeling slightly bruised, like an apple left too long in the bottom of someone’s handbag. Thankfully, the preparations for a Provençal Christmas are so complex that every thought not directly related to mistletoe and candied orange peel is happily put aside until Lent.

The bus for Apt market leaves at 7:32. Without a French driver’s license (it’s on my to-do list), I’m stuck taking the bus, so I’m up at the hour of the stray cats and the dog-walkers. It’s still dark, the midnight blue getting paler each minute I wait. The streetlights are hidden in a Dickensian veil of fog. Despite the cold, the butcher is sitting on the terrace of the café across the street in his paper hat and apron. One more espresso before he pulls up the front window shade and starts his day.

Like the buyers at Macy’s, the citizens of Provence start planning Christmas in September. One day in the early autumn, I was on my way to the
boulangerie
when I noticed the open door to Jean’s cellar.
“Bonjour, ma puce.”
He had taken to calling me his little flea, which is a term of endearment, though it doesn’t quite sound that way. Amid the carefully stacked firewood and five-liter jugs of
vin ordinaire,
Jean was hanging a bunch of just ripe muscat grapes from a hook on the ceiling. A few inches to the left, suspended in a mesh bag, was a last-of-the-season melon. Long and mottled green like a German torpedo, it was supposed to survive in this dangling position until Christmas Eve.

These fruits are part of the Provençal tradition of
les treize desserts,
the thirteen desserts served on Christmas Eve. Contemporary France is an overwhelmingly secular place, but the country’s Catholic past is so enmeshed in local life that it is impossible to entirely separate the Apostles from the almond brittle. Everyone must taste a piece of each dessert (for luck), and, best of all, you
must
leave the dishes and food on the table all night, so hungry travelers can come and dine if they like. In my opinion, anything that gets me out of doing the dishes is a tradition worth adopting.

Gathering
les treize desserts
is a bit like a scavenger hunt designed by mischievous Keebler elves. When I arrived at the market, it was only ten after eight, so I had a coffee and watched the men set up their stands of tablecloths and soaps and stir the huge, flat cast-iron skillets of paella that would be ready for lunch. The sun was glinting off the clock towers by the time I took the side street up to the North African grocery. I picked out medjool dates and tender teardrop-shaped figs from Portugal. I would need fat muscat raisins and moist prunes. Jean had already given us a large plastic bag filled with walnuts from his tree.
Where, oh, where is my silver nutcracker? I need to call my mother.
I bought a package of pink marzipan so Nicole and I could make
fruits déguisés,
dates stuffed with marzipan, each topped with half a walnut and rolled in sugar.

There was a bustle of people in the street as I made my way to La Bonbonnière, which is, quite simply, the most beautiful candy store in the world.

The best thing about La Bonbonnière is that it’s all windows. Before I even walk through the door I am greeted by a fuzzy three-foot-high statue of a polar bear trying to dip his paws into a copper cauldron filled with
marrons glacés
—whole candied chestnuts. Each one was meticulously wrapped in gold foil, a miniature gift in and of itself. If nothing else, Christmas in Provence reminds you of a time when sugar was a luxury as fine and rare as silk.

Back to my assignment: I needed two kinds of nougat: white soft nougat made with honey, almonds, and fluffy egg whites (the angel’s part) and hard dark nougat—more like honey almond brittle—for the devil.

Where are the
calissons d’Aix?
There they are, hiding behind the cash register, small ovals of almond paste covered with fondant icing. Traditional
calissons
are flavored with essence of bitter almond, but I couldn’t resist some of the more exotic variations: rose, lemon verbena, and
génépi,
an astringent mountain herb.

Though I love the tender chew of nougat and the pliant sweetness of marzipan, my favorite of the Provençal Christmas treats is the
mendiant
—a small disk of dark or milk chocolate topped with dried fruit and nuts representing four religious orders: raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnuts for the Augustinians, dried figs for the Franciscans, and almonds for the Carmelites. When Alexandre is a bit older, I think we’ll make these together. They seem like an ideal family project—essentially puddles of melted chocolate with fruit and nut toppings. See, as soon as you say “puddles of melted chocolate,” everyone’s on board.

Though
fruits confits
—candied fruit—are not, strictly speaking, part of
les treize desserts,
I can’t resist. I think of them as the crown jewels of French
confiserie
, and Apt is the world capital of production. Dipped in sugar syrup, the fruits become almost translucent; whole pears, apricots, and strawberries glow from within like the gems in a pirate’s treasure chest. Slices of kiwi, melon, and angelica catch the light like the panes of a stained-glass window. All the dazzling tastes of a Provençal summer, frozen in time.

Knowing that I would have too many packages to carry, Gwendal took Alexandre and came to pick me up. I met them at the café on the main square. I kept dropping bags in Gwendal’s lap and hurrying off to the next errand.

I went to the organic-produce man for fresh grapes (since there were none hanging in my cellar), apples, pears, almonds, and hazelnuts still in their shells. There wasn’t a single fresh melon to be had, so I’d make due with a candied slice. The
pompe à l’huile,
an olive oil–based brioche flavored with anise or orange-flower water, I could order from the village
boulangerie
.

I couldn’t leave La Bonbonnière without the tiny sugar Santa Claus driving a marzipan car for Alexandre. He just turned sixteen months, so he’ll be a more active participant in Christmas this year. When I put the car down in front of him, he looked confused: Eat the toys? Don’t eat the toys? Oh, well, I guess parental consistency can go out the window once a year.

I DON’T KNOW
if it’s the Christmas tree lights or running the oven and three stove burners at once, but the electricity keeps blowing. I’m doing my best to cook around it, but at this rate, we could be eating Christmas dinner for New Year’s.

After the gas went out for the third time under my stuffed squid, I decided to concentrate on the main course. One of the things that happens when my mother-in-law comes to town is that I end up cooking with leftover champagne. I know “leftover champagne” sounds like the culinary equivalent of a unicorn, but it does exist. I wrapped a large sea bass in cured ham and scattered some green olives with herbes de Provence alongside. Then, instead of reaching for my usual bottle of white cooking wine, I poured in a flat glass of bubbly that I’d forgotten to empty the night before.

While the fish was in the oven, Nicole went into the dining room and lifted Alexandre so he could see the crèche on the mantelpiece; it was one of Nicole’s gifts to us this year. The small painted figurines are still handmade in several towns in Provence. In addition to the three Wise Men, there was a recalcitrant donkey, a painter with his easel, and a row of lavender plants. We would be able to add to it year after year until we had a whole tiny village. A neighbor up the road told me I was supposed to go out into the forest before Christmas Eve and find a springy piece of moss for the whole thing to sit on. I didn’t quite get around to it.

The fish was delicious, though I can’t swear if it was the champagne or the idea of the champagne that made it taste so good. After dinner it was time for the recounting of the Myth of the Christmas Cheese, one of my favorite family stories. Every year, Gwendal’s great-aunt Jeanne, who lives in Auvergne, sends an entire ashy discus of Saint-Nectaire and a wedge of Salers the size and weight of a family Bible. During the general strike in 1995, the cheese was held up at the postal depot. The postman arrived three weeks later, holding the odoriferous package at arm’s length.
“Ça. C’est à vous.”
This story has all the elements of a classic French tale: smelly cheese, a national strike, and a comically put-upon civil servant.

It was nearly midnight when we each put the thirteen symbolic desserts on our plates: figs, almonds, hazelnuts, raisins, prunes, white nougat, dark nougat, candied melon, grapes, pears, clementines, the anise-flavored
pompe à l’huile
brioche, and the sweet almond paste of the
calissons d’Aix
. True to tradition, we left the half-empty wineglasses right where they were, and the peels from the clementines went straight into the fire. They sent up a spark before they flamed out and disappeared.