Picnic in Provence (27 page)

What I really need is a master class. When in doubt, I say, call a Brit. Mollie and David have been making their own jams and chutneys and sealing them in neatly labeled jars for years. I’d been politely bugging them about it since June. Like an afternoon with Maria Callas, one has to sign up early.

As I walked in the door, I was enveloped in the steam coming from the stove, the sharp edge of vinegar and fresh ginger softened by cinnamon and the sticky, slowly dissolving sweetness of the figs. David was standing over a large cast-iron pot measuring the level of syrup with a T-shaped wooden implement that had three distinct notches. “It’s an old crepe spreader,” he said. David has the longish, curly-white hair of a poet who works by candlelight, and great bushy eyebrows that could invent things all by themselves. I began to wonder if to master proper canning technique you had to be the kind of practical yet creative type who would think to fashion a measuring stick out of an old crepe spreader.

Mollie and David’s kitchen is the stuff of dreams. There’s a rustic front kitchen with heavy beams, well-scrubbed wooden counters, and a groaning red range with room for six bubbling pots. There are glass-fronted cabinets with crystal tumblers and a shelf of neatly labeled spices in squat glass jars. Discreetly hidden behind the stove is the doorway to a smaller room—a full pantry, lined floor to ceiling with white cabinets, an extra freezer, and a deep slop sink. It’s like
Upstairs, Downstairs,
but without the servants.

By the time I arrived, they had the whole thing set up like a cooking show. There was an almost finished pot simmering on the stove. The glass jars were at the ready, fitted snugly into a large roasting pan, covered lightly with a paper towel to keep stray insects or dust from flying in. Just beside the jars were all the ingredients for the next batch: red wine vinegar, finely chopped onions, fresh ginger, ground allspice berries—ready to start all over again. Just like Nigella Lawson showing you how to make a chocolate cake and then, in the name of instant gratification and a half-hour time slot, whisking a finished one from the oven just as the other goes in to bake.

They clearly had this down to a science. About ten minutes before pouring the chutney, Mollie placed the roasting pan full of jars in a hot oven for ten minutes. Using a silicone oven mitt, she transferred the hot jars onto a foil-lined tray and got ready to pour. “Normally, there’s a lot of swearing during this bit. But maybe the fact you’re here will keep us in line.”

The chutney was thick, like the blob in a B horror movie. Big chunks of fig slid through the flowered ceramic funnel in satisfying gloops. Every now and then a drip would escape. “Oh, bul—” Mollie began, and then stopped herself. I saw one of David’s Dickensian eyebrows shoot up and settle itself back in place.

“It makes the seal as it cools down, you see,” said Mollie. “I just tried to open one of last year’s jars in the pantry. Couldn’t loosen it.”

While Mollie was photocopying the recipe, I stared out the window of the office. The smell of a nearby pine drifted through the open window. I left the house, a warm pot of chutney in my hands, already dreaming of thick slices of sourdough bread and the butcher’s
jambon aux herbes
. “If you can bear the suspense,” said David, “leave it in the back of the cupboard for a few months. It’ll be that much better for Christmas.”

Not sure I can wait that long.

W
e can’t stop talking about ice cream. It’s like some kind of sugarcoated Tourette’s syndrome; we’re constantly blurting out comments about quince sorbet in inappropriate contexts.

It’s already October; we are aiming to open for Easter. The ideas are coming faster than our work. Definitely faster than our budget.

“What about petits fours,” said Rod one morning, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea.

I started thinking about tiny chocolate cups, no bigger than golf tees, each filled with a mini-scoop of ice cream and topped with
nougatine,
red peppercorns, candied ginger, dried figs.

“We could sell them like old-fashioned chocolates,” I said, getting ahead of myself, “in flat boxes with paper doilies and a tiny silver pincher for serving.”

“Do you know how much work that would be!” Gwendal looked like a vein was about to pop in his forehead. Like I said, I’m in charge of fantasy. He’s in charge of spreadsheets.

If
la rentrée
is the season of new beginnings, it’s also the season of unexpected costs. Christmas in reverse. Every day we add to the scroll-like list of really boring but essential things we have to spend money on. Like a professional water softener. Apparently, if we don’t do something about the level of calcium in the water, our sorbet is going to taste like the ring around someone’s bathtub.

Meanwhile, our dining room is starting to look like a badly dusted antiques shop. Everything Mom and I bought this summer is piled on the table, on the buffet, in every corner. I want to make homemade ice cream sandwiches for the shop, but are we prepared to pay extra baggage fees for five-pound bags of Domino dark brown sugar to make proper American cookies? Is that in the business plan?

It was still nice enough to work outside, so I was on my way to the café with my computer and a croissant when I ran into Tim and Bridget, well-heeled members of the Anglo crowd. A croissant is my treat when I’m having trouble getting started with my writing. I find the butter helps smear the fear of the white page.

“It’s so exciting,” said Bridget, giving me a kiss on each cheek. They must have heard the final bank loan came through.

“What’s your favorite flavor?” I asked, always in search of new ideas.

“Rhubarb custard,” said Tim.

“Ohhh. I love rhubarb.” More fuel for the fire.

That afternoon I called Marion. “
Non, non, non
. Rhubarb doesn’t grow here. It takes too much water. And the leaves are toxic. I’m always afraid I won’t cut off all the bad bits and I’ll poison someone.”

Okeydokey. Ix-nay on the rhubarb.

WE BOUGHT AN
ice cream truck today. Not just any ice cream truck; a banana-yellow Italian
triporteur
. If you’ve never seen one, a
triporteur
is an itty-bitty three-wheeled pickup truck, essentially a covered Vespa with room in front for one man and one dog and room in back for several crates of oranges and not much else. I’ve wanted one ever since I first saw a dusty model, with lights like cartoon eyes, chugging up a hill in Capri. It just goes to show, if you wait long enough, life presents an excuse to buy almost anything.

We’d found it on the Internet. There is a website in France called Leboncoin; it’s basically a nationwide online garage sale.

“I can go on Thursday,” Gwendal had said when we first spotted the ad, enlarging the picture to get a better view.

“No. You have to go tomorrow.”

“But—”

I didn’t let him finish. “Tomorrow. Call her right now and tell her you can be there any time after nine a.m.” I’ve looked for an apartment in Manhattan, so I know you don’t leave the good stuff sitting out there any longer than absolutely necessary.

The buyer was reluctant to let it go. It had belonged to her grandfather, who’d bought it in Italy in the early 1960s. She had painted it bright yellow thinking she would convert it into a juice business, but that didn’t quite work out.

I got to the parking lot just as Gwendal and Rod appeared on the rise of the hill. The Piaggio—that’s the Italian brand name of the
triporteur
—was loaded onto a flatbed trailer attached to the car. I admit it; I started spontaneously clapping. I’ve never seen a happier-looking object in my entire life. I think that was the day I realized that we were going into a business that was going to make a lot of people smile.

“It was amazing,” said Rod. “People were honking and waving at us the whole way.”

I put myself behind the wheel.
Vroommmmmm, vroom.
I’ve finally found a raison d’être for this whole driving thing. This must be how men feel about Lamborghinis. I want to go cruise for girls in my ice cream truck.

I couldn’t wait to show Alexandre. “Daddy bought the coolest thing in the whole world today,” I said when I picked him up from school. “Wait till you see.”

He looked at it, got in the cab, pushed three levers and a button, then leaned his head out the window. “It doesn’t work.”

Details.

“You can serve us some ice cream,” said Angela.

“More?” said Alexandre after ten minutes of handing pretend cones out the window.

Angela held her tummy. “Another one?”

“I’m American,” I said brightly. “I’ll have another one.

“So,” I said, taking a large lick of my invisible triple chocolate cone with extra whipped cream and colored sprinkles. “We should find a night for you and Rod to come over for dinner and a movie—where we talk about anything except ice cream.”

“Do you talk about it in bed?” she asked.

“Actually. We do.”

Angela took a last bite of her imaginary double coffee cone. “We do too.”

THAT NIGHT, I
sent around a picture of the Piaggio to my friends and family in the States.

Auntie Lynn was the first to write back:

The content of the message was three little words.

My mother couldn’t stop laughing when I got her on the phone. “Never a dull moment with you,” she said. “Are you going to have a bell?” This is my mother’s finest quality, an unwavering confidence in my—and, since my marriage, our—nutty ideas. In between chuckles, she defends me to the naysayers and duds. “Do people really send their kids to an Ivy League college to drive an ice cream truck?”

“They do now.”

ROCKIN’ SATURDAY NIGHT
chez
nous
. The kitchen looks like a bomb exploded in it. Two pots of quince compote and my Le Creuset of split-pea soup will not fit on the range at the same time.

It’s getting chilly, so I’m stocking the freezer with soup—big pots of soup, all kinds of soup. Last week I made
soupe d’épeautre. Épeautre
is spelt, and though in the States it might still be confined to the health-food store, in Provence, whole spelt grains are used like barley, to make soup, risotto, and cold salads. My
soupe d’épeautre
is a conjuring of the beef and barley soup at the Kiev, a now defunct all-night Russian diner on Second Avenue. My dad and I used to go for cheese blintzes after a late movie. We always sat in the narrow brick-lined back room, connected to the main restaurant by a heavy steel door. I think it used to be the meat locker. The soup was so thick you could stand a spoon upright in the bowl.

Tonight, our house smells like a candy factory with a bacon department (I hear that’s a trend). While I am frying the pork belly for my split-pea soup, Gwendal is in the dining room peeling and chopping quince to test a sorbet. Quince is somewhere between a very tart apple and a fuzzy pear. Some scholars believe it’s the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden. People in Provence grow up with
pâte de coing
—a condensed quince jelly; it’s the kind of thing grandmas make for Christmas. Despite the slightly grainy texture, we think it would make a superb sorbet.

Even though I’ve written a cookbook, nothing could be further from a professional kitchen than mine. I only just learned how to screw and lock the thingie on my food processor. I would have helped Gwendal with the quince, but we have only one peeler, and I surely would have hurt myself coring the tough fruit with one of my many dull knives. I know good cooks are supposed to have sharp knives—everyone says you are more likely to cut yourself with a dull one. My apologies to Escoffier and the rest, but that just doesn’t sound right. It’s not that I won’t cut my finger off with a sharp knife; I’ll just cut it off cleaner.

Alexandre, wearing his favorite truck pajamas, was playing with his blocks under the dining-room table. Every once in a while he would surface, lick the half lemon that Gwendal was using to keep the quince from turning brown, and disappear back beneath the furniture. No judge would believe me:
Your Honor, my son has eczema on his chin because he’d rather suck on half a lemon than eat a perfectly good
pain au chocolat.

Prince was the sound track for the evening. “‘Pu-pu wain, pu-pu rain,’” repeated Alexandre, watching us boogying around the sink. He must think his parents are crazy. Neither one of us is Fred Astaire. But who needs to be Fred Astaire when you’re dancing in your kitchen?

It was almost ten by the time we finally sat down to dinner. Alexandre insisted on tearing apart a piece of bread and stirring it into his soup.

“
Un vrai paysan
—that’s the way my grandfather used to do it.” Gwendal beamed. Only in France is the word
paysan
—“peasant”—used with such pride.

I thought back to other Saturday nights. Nights in black tie, nights reading or crying or studying, nights drinking margaritas or eating chocolate chip cookie dough out of the bowl. We may not get out much at the moment, but if I could be this happy every Saturday night for the rest of my life, I’d be lucky.

GWENDAL IS LEAVING
for his second week of ice cream school in the morning.

He’d been warming up the bed for ten minutes when I crawled in. “Well, I guess we can’t change the sheets tonight,” he said, turning the page of his book, “or you’re stuck.”

“Hey, don’t laugh at me. I’m a Jewish American New Yorker. I could be a lot more neurotic than I am.”

The neurosis in question is a simple one: I don’t like to let Gwendal go away on a trip unless we have slept, preferably
slept
slept, in the sheets currently on our bed.

My reasoning is straightforward, and rather morbid. If Gwendal were to die in a car accident or otherwise be eaten by wolves or abducted by aliens, my first instinct would be to spend several years in a wedding dress, Miss Havisham–style, sniffing his old pillowcase while the walls of the house crumbled around my ears. It’s not a particularly flattering self-portrait, but there you go. Somewhere in the ancestral, talisman-littered portion of my brain, our musty sheets keep him safe. What can I tell you; we all have our little quirks.

WHILE GWENDAL IS
away, Alexandre and I find our routine. I play piano concertos on my computer. Music seems to calm everything down. Alexandre lines up his knights for battle on the kitchen floor while I make dinner.

Tonight, after I read him a story, he crawled into my lap.
“
Tu me berces comme un bébé.”
As I held him in my arms, rocking him back and forth, he stuck his thumb in his mouth, something he does only when he is “playing baby.” He’s only three, but he’s growing up and sometimes needs to go back. I wonder if he knows how much I enjoy these little regressions. It’s like a do-over for me. A chance to savor something I rushed through the first time around.

“Yesterday,” he said, “I got a haircut with Mamie Nicole.” Lately Alexandre has been condensing time. Everything that happened in the past he talks about as if it happened “yesterday.” I wonder if he isn’t onto something. I read a play in college, J. B. Priestley’s
I Have Been Here Before.
In the play, time is not linear, it’s coiled, episodes stacked one on top of another like poker chips. The past is so near. You can take an experience from the bottom of the pile and slip it back in at the top. Relive it again and again until you get it right.

It’s a pretty swift philosophical insight for a three-year-old.

WINTER IS BACK
, along with my hibernation instinct, a slowing-down of the biorhythm. In Paris, the traffic, the streetlights, and ten o’clock showings of the new James Bond movie at the Canal-side cinema would keep this sensation at bay. In the village, there are no such distractions. At 6:00 p.m., the streets are deserted; eight in the evening feels like three in the morning.

I’m cold all the time. Each summer I forget, and each November I’m shocked again to discover I don’t want to get out of bed because it’s too damn cold to put my toes on the tile floor. I’ve discovered slippers, something I never thought would be a part of my fashion repertoire. I have fur-lined ones with bows and brown-and-white knit booties that, if I’m in a certain state of undress, Gwendal says make me look like a Swedish porn star. I’ve never seen Swedish porn, but if I were having sex in Scandinavia in the middle of winter, I see the merit of keeping your booties on.

TODAY I ACCOMPLISHED
something. I finally put in my French nationality application. I’ve been stamped and stapled, fingerprinted and translated. It was definitely easier to complete this process in Provence than it would have been in Paris. There was only one person in one office to call with my questions. If I was getting the wrong answers, at least I was getting the same wrong answers every time.

My appointment was for 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday. But last week, when I’d called the official translator to retrieve my documents, she said she’d be away on Monday and Tuesday. We would have to pick up my papers on the morning of.

I cursed myself as we got into the car. There are only forty days of rain a year in Provence, but when it rains, it
really
rains. It doesn’t rain cats and dogs; it rains camels and wildebeests. It rains like Noah’s ark is about to float down the stream behind our house. We’d be lucky if we could crawl along the highway thirty kilometers per hour under the speed limit.