Picnic in Provence (28 page)

I must be crazy. A decade in France is long enough to figure out that leaving things to the last minute is a recipe for disaster. They shouldn’t give you a French passport if you’re not pessimistic enough to leave a little extra time for things to go mortally, catastrophically, wrong. But here I was, me and my American expectations, about to blow up the most important French process I’d ever been through. For some reason, this situation made me want to shout expressions I’d learned in junior-high-school French class and hadn’t heard since. We’re going to be late for the immigration lady!
Sacré bleu!

The reason for my hubris is simple: I’ve been the recipient of too much dumb luck. Take my study-abroad application. It was the end of my sophomore year in college. I was at Kinko’s at 10:00 a.m. on the day before the application was due, filling out a form for FedEx. When I handed it to the man behind the counter, he shook his head. “This is a PO box. FedEx doesn’t deliver overnight to a PO box.” I was just about to crumple with panic and self-loathing when the guy behind me in line said, “My mom lives there. I bet she knows him. Let me call her. Maybe you can send it to her house and she’ll take it over.” I sat on the floor of the Kinko’s while the nice man behind the counter let my would-be savior use the phone. “Sure,” he said when he hung up. “She’ll get it to him. But anyway, he’s not leaving till Sunday; his son has a basketball game.” I almost kissed him. There are twenty thousand students at Cornell, and that morning, in that line, was the kid whose mom lived next door to the overseas admissions director, who happened to be leaving a day late because of his son’s basketball game. It’s the very definition of dumb luck, and it’s made me residually cocky.

After nearly drowning on the highway and running through a muddy field to retrieve my documents from the translator, we pulled into the parking lot of the prefecture at 9:52.

The immigration lady didn’t look friendly. Fifty-something with a blond pixie haircut, chunky bracelets, and high black boots, she didn’t return my smile. I opened my notebook. Her face brightened when she saw my score on the French test.
“Très bien,”
she said, disappearing to make a photocopy. I thought of the Algerian man who took the exam with me who had never seen a bubble form before and who clearly needed glasses. No doubt his French was better than mine. No doubt his score was not.

Her mood improved again when she saw I had all my papers in order. She even apologized that we had to drive all the way back there next week for the official interview.

WHAT SHOULD I
wear? I know they’re not going to deny me citizenship if my scarf isn’t tied correctly, but even so.

I feel like I need a relative with me today. I can’t decide which of my grandmothers should accompany me. In the end I went with my father’s mother, putting on a pair of her earrings—golden scrolls (brass, really, set with tiny green stones). She was an immigrant herself, and I think she would understand how I am feeling today. Both my paternal grandparents came through Ellis Island; my grandmother’s Russian birth certificate is on display at the Ellis Island museum. When Gwendal and I took his parents to New York for our wedding, it was among the first places I brought them.

When we arrived at the prefecture (in plenty of time), there was another American woman in the waiting room with her three kids. She scolded in a singsong voice as they slid under chairs and kicked the counter. “They’ll
never
give Mommy her French papers if you keep running around like this.”

Gwendal took Alexandre to the bathroom—and the vending machine.

“Oh my
God!
What is that?” I stared in horror as Alexandre tore the wrapper off a Twix bar.

“They didn’t have anything else.” Gwendal shrugged. “He was hungry.”

I watched Alexandre shove the chocolate happily into his mouth. I looked up at the other American mom and smiled meekly. “They’ll never give me
my
papers if they see my son eating a Twix bar at ten in the morning.”

Industrial chocolate for breakfast aside, the immigration lady softened at the sight of Alexandre. I guess he is living proof of my assimilation. He played his part by walking through the bright fluorescent-lit corridor to her office and saying,
“Oooh, c’est beau ici.”

Are you involved in any
associations?
This is an important question in French life. It’s not enough to have a job and pay your taxes. You have to have hobbies, be involved in the local community.

“I give English lessons at the village school.”

“Bénévole?”
she asked.

“Oui, bénévole.”
It’s also important that you do it for free.

“Are there any children from a previous union?”

Gwendal looked up from the dinosaur he was drawing for Alexandre and smiled. “Not that I know of.”

I looked at him, aghast.
Not that I know of?
Are you out of your mind? My mental telepathy was beaming his way.
Does this seem like a good time to be funny? My life is hanging in the balance and you’re cracking wise with a French immigration official.
If it wouldn’t have caused an awkward yelp, I would have kicked him under the table.

Her face was a block of stone. “No,” I said. “No children from a previous union.”

We went to a café when it was over. I ordered coffee, though I could have used a double vodka on the rocks. I ate
chouquettes,
shoving the choux pastry into my mouth until my heart rate slowed. (I’m not French
yet,
I have another year to kick my emotional-eating habit…) Suddenly I realized: it was done. Unless I murdered someone in the next twelve months, by next Christmas, I would be French.

T
here’s no way you’re going by yourself.”

“Great,” said Gwendal with a sigh as I tripped down the front step in my platform boots.

“I’m coming with you.”

“There’s no need.”

“I don’t want you to break the cake.”

“I don’t want you to break your ankle.”

These were the darkest days of December, and Gwendal was practicing his ice cream cakes. Somehow I had trouble imagining this as an art form. The ice cream cakes of my youth were not sophisticated creations; they were layers of vanilla and chocolate soft-serve separated by crunchy chocolate kibbles and topped with my name written in transparent pink gel. As the birthday girl, I was entitled to the largest chalky icing rose.

The French take their
bûche de Noël,
the traditional Christmas Yule log cake, much more seriously. Gwendal had been training at school, and he came back with snapshots of his gleaming white
glaçage,
slick as black ice, decorated with a forest of bitty spun-sugar pine trees and spotted meringue mushrooms. Who knew my husband had such talents? I was bordering on jealous when he came home with a foolproof recipe for proper Parisian macaroons. We decided to use one of our signature flavors, honey and fresh thyme, for the outside of our
bûche,
with a layer of tonka-bean mousse and a center of apricot sorbet for acidity and pizzazz. Though nothing was quite official, we already had orders for Christmas and New Year’s—some friends, some prospective restaurant clients—but Gwendal still had no oven in his test lab, so we were stuck shuttling sheet pans of rich buttery
pâte sablée
base from our house down to the construction site in the middle of the night.

We drove down and parked the car next to the garbage cans, near the turnoff for Alexandre’s old babysitter. The new building where our production facility would be was no more than a shell, so our new landlord had kindly loaned us a room near the site as a temporary test lab. Now all we had to do was get across the Route Nationale with our tray of pastry. Trucks, big trucks, drive this road at night. The only advantage of the darkness was that we would see an eighteen-wheeler coming from quite far away.

“How is it that you picked the spot with no crosswalk, no light, and a fifteen-foot drop?” I asked.

“There’s a wall.”

Is that supposed to be comforting?

Between the two of us, we managed to shimmy down the embankment with the sheet pan held reasonably level. For anyone watching through a slit in the curtains, we must have looked like a pair of clumsy cat burglars. I kept waiting for the gendarmes to pull up and arrest us for trespassing.

Gwendal unlocked the door to the temporary test lab and turned on the fluorescent lights.

I went to take off my coat, then thought better of it. “You realize it’s the same temperature in here as outside.”

“Mer-de,”
mumbled Gwendal, his head in the freezer. When my husband is particularly frustrated, the French word for “shit” has two syllables. Our cookie sheet was a centimeter too large to fit. As we attempted a transfer, the
sablée
began to crack, fault lines appearing in the delicate layers of pastry. Eventually, using a system of cantilevers and waxed paper, we managed to get it all in the deep freeze.

Back on the embankment, Gwendal gave me a leg up, and my boots sank farther into the mud. “This must be in the fine print,” I said, peering into the night for oncoming traffic. In situations like these, I tend to evoke our French marriage contract, the twenty-page legal document I signed during our civil wedding ceremony, that, at the time, I could not read.

“You know what I found out today,” said Gwendal after we’d gotten into the car. “The guy from the ice cream machine company, the founder, Hubert Cloix, was a Résistant. I looked him up.”

I wiped my muddy hands on my jeans. “Do you think if we told him René Char wrote poetry in our guest room, he’d give us a discount?”

AFTER WE RAN
our badges through the electronic barrier, we were confronted with a twenty-foot-high plastic cone topped with rainbow swirls of gelato. At least we knew we were in the right place.

We were on our first ice cream business trip—a weekend in Rimini, Italy, at SIGEP, the world’s largest gelato-and-coffee trade show. Because we are chronically disorganized, we had to fly to Milan, rent a car, drive three hours to Rimini, and then, after we toured the trade show, turn around and do the whole thing in the opposite direction the very next morning. Our 4:00 a.m. start was just the beginning of a very long day.

There was a cacophony up ahead, cheering and loud whoops. We had stumbled on the international barista competition. Projected on a giant video screen was a close-up of two hairy hands making what looked to me like a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci in cappuccino foam.

We walked until we had blisters. Fascinating, how a single industry has its tentacles in so many things: cones and plastic cups, paper wrappers for cones and plastic cups, big neon signs of cones and plastic cups, metal garbage cans for cigarette butts and cones and plastic cups, not to mention the powders, pastes, and purees to fill the cones and plastic cups with artificial strawberry gelato. And, this being Italy, the most magnificent, shiny-like-a-Ferrari chrome espresso machines to accompany your cones and plastic cups.

There were not as many scantily clad women as I’d hoped. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Italian soupçon of vulgarity, and the women’s uncanny ability to navigate cobblestones in stilettos. (They must teach it in high school, right after Dante.) One stand for industrial gelato mix had eight-foot-high sculptures of brightly colored macaroons; next to each one was a girl in a pleated black micromini, green-and-white-striped kneesocks, and platform heels. We sent a photo to Rod:
Wish you were here.

Our central errand in Rimini was to shop for our ice cream display case. I imagine this is what it must be like to buy a sports car, considering line and color, modern or retro. It would be our most visible (and most expensive) investment. Too dinky, and no one would take us seriously; too grand, and you could blow a year’s operating budget on curves and custom-made plexiglass. We spotted one model we had seen before, shiny white and curved on top like a space capsule. A thirty-something man with a shaved head, a well-cut suit, and chic, heavy black-framed glasses walked up to greet us.

We quickly exhausted our Italian greetings and switched to English. When he heard my American accent, he warmed up in a hurry.

“Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said.

“Me too; I went to the French Culinary Institute. In another life I used to be a chef—so I have a lot of sympathy for people going out on their own.”

“This is a nice model,” he said, patting the display like it was a pet schnauzer. “But what we mainly do is these.” He pointed to what looked like a cash machine recessed in the wall. “It’s self-serve.”

“Oh, I’m American, but he’s French, so he wouldn’t know from TCBY.”

“Yeah, I figured.

“It’s the new fad in the States.” His tone changed, going to a preformatted sales spiel. “That way, you only need one person in the shop, and your employee doesn’t have to know anything about making ice cream. The customer pays by weight—”

“So they feel virtuous,” said Gwendal, cutting him off, “by choosing a small cup, and then they fill it with exactly as much as a large one.”

The man nodded in silent (slightly embarrassed?) agreement.

It was, in its way, the ultimate American business model—absolute freedom, endless choice, maximum efficiency achieved with minimum skill, and all from a lever in the wall and a salad bar full of M&M’s and broken Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. No ritual. No excellence. No interaction. No poetry. It was the absolute antithesis of what we were trying to do.

“It works,” he said, a little bashful. What was a former chef doing selling ice cream ATMs? “Everyone’s eyes are bigger than their stomach.”

Well, not everyone’s.

We couldn’t explain that we were worried about exactly the opposite problem. How were we going to get very traditional French eaters to accept free tastes of weird flavors like ras-el-hanout ice cream and beetroot sorbet? How were we going to get French women, who spend their entire lives watching their figures, to order three scoops of anything? How were we going to make ice cream from high-quality local products and still be able to set a price that wouldn’t feel punitive to local families with three kids? The whole idea of a French person walking up to a wall, pulling a lever, and strolling away down the street eating an overflowing tub of candy-covered soft-serve seemed unimaginable to me.

By lunchtime we’d been up for twelve hours; we were exhausted. I was dying for something savory to offset all the samples of pale pistachio gelato. Proget, one of the largest manufacturers of ice cream displays, had had a very smart idea; the company had set up a huge stand with a chef making focaccia with freshly grilled vegetables, cutting jagged chunks off a giant wheel of Parmesan cheese. We sat down at a table and waited for a sales rep to approach.

A half an hour and an excellent sandwich later, we bought our ice cream display. It was sleek but not flashy, with a flat top to put my three-tiered cake stand on. The list price for this model in France was twenty-three thousand euros; we paid just under nine thousand. That’s still a very expensive sandwich.

GOOD NEWS, OR
at least crazy news, travels fast. Lisa and Johann, a Franco-American couple who host truffle hunts and tastings on their property, heard about our ice cream adventure and contacted us to see if we could partner on a black truffle ice cream for their clients. There was something incongruous about buying truffles with the last of Gwendal’s unemployment checks, but hey—sometimes you have to spend money to make money. I know I read that somewhere.

It was a bright day in February. When we left for Cadenet, there was a low-hanging fog in the valley. The sun crept out as we climbed the hills behind Saignon.

The road to Lourmarin is one of the scariest—and most beautiful—roads I’ve ever been on. You are basically driving in a crevice between two cliffs, hugging the side of the mountain and hoping there’s not a speeding local coming round the bend in the other direction. It had been raining nonstop; this was the first sunny day in what feels like weeks. Rays penetrated down into the canyon, making the wet leaves sparkle. There was water everywhere. Streams that are normally stilled to a trickle by the time the tourists arrive in May were rushing torrents.

We were told to wear our muddiest boots. (Now that I’ve lived in Céreste for a while, I actually have a pair of muddy boots.) We could see the house from the bottom of the hill, perched above a terraced field of olive trees, a beautiful two-story farmhouse with red shutters. Johann and Lisa shared the house with his grandparents. I knew his grandfather had been in the Résistance during the war; I wondered if he had known Char.

Gwendal, Alexandre, and I, along with another family, gathered by the gate. The morning started out with a minor disappointment. “When the dogs come,” said Johann to Alexandre as he piled acorns in a corner of the yard, “you must not play with them.” My son looked a little confused. “They are going to work. So you stay with us, and we will follow the dogs and watch them do their work.” Alexandre accepted the rules with relative good humor and continued his collection of acorns.

The dogs arrived with Jean-Marc, a childhood friend of Johann’s who is a part-time truffle hunter. Mirabelle and Pupuce circled excitedly around Jean-Marc’s feet, no doubt as happy to see the sun as we were. They are part shih tzu, with shaggy coats and very short legs—a muddier version of the dogs you see accompanying older women on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. “You can use any kind of dog,” said Johann as we walked toward the fields, “as long as they don’t have hunting in their DNA.
Sinon,
they’ll get distracted and go after a pheasant. If you have a Labrador, that’s very good, because they always want to please you.”

We stopped in the shade of a white oak. “The dogs start when they are tiny puppies. Jean-Marc puts a truffle inside a tennis ball. The dogs learn to identify the smell.” I watched the pair of them, twenty feet ahead of us, sniffing and snuffing in circles, sometimes retracing their path before focusing on a certain spot.

“You can also hunt truffles with pigs. The problem with pigs is that they love the taste. You can always tell a farmer who hunts truffles this way,” said Johann with a grin. “A piece of his index finger is missing.” I thought back to Didier and Martine’s nefarious porker, the one we’d met the day of the saffron harvest. I bet you could lose a hand trying to get a truffle out of his mouth. It’s a long way from
Charlotte’s Web.

Every time the dogs started to dig in earnest, Jean-Marc knelt down and gently turned the earth with his hands and the prod of a large screwdriver. If he spotted a truffle, he extracted it. The dogs stood at attention, waiting for their treat. When Jean-Marc handed the first truffle off to Johann, he studied it, rolling it around in his hands, putting it to his nose, inhaling deeply. He passed it to each of us, getting us accustomed to the sweet smell of damp earth.

“Size doesn’t matter. For me it’s the smell.” Johann pressed the truffle gently between his thumb and index finger. “And it has to be firm.” He cut it open in the palm of his hand. Inside, it looked like a tiny brain, a dense black mass threaded with hair-width white veins.

“If the veins are very thin, that’s how you know you have a real black truffle—
Tuber melanosporum.
”

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Johann noticed a green jeep snaking slowly up the road. He frowned. “Don’t look at the car,” he said, as if we were undercover agents on a secret mission. “This is all our land. We have only two neighbors, and I know their cars. Most of the time we pretend we are looking at trees. But when they see the dogs, they know.”