TWENTY-ONE

Margaret and I, recalling her visit some years back, were agreeing that protein was a major consideration for the poor, among whom we included the budget traveler with children. Some of what seemed exotic to us in a cuisine such as China’s in fact had to do with the ancestral scramble after protein: why else eat owl, or certain kinds of worms? Why else would snails, however attractive to a two-year-old, win pride of place on a nation’s table?

Some years, after Julia and I had stretched our budget far enough to get the family to Normandy in the first place, there was not much left, and we settled down to a fare reminiscent of that enjoyed by fortunate peasant farmers in the Middle Ages—fortunate, that is, because it included milk and eggs in addition to cabbage and root vegetables and bread.

Once all Gaul was divided regionally into nine hundred jealous breads, just as it was into local wines (or beers or ciders) and cheeses. Each region had its own orders of ancillary fungi, specialists all. The cheese called Pont l’Evêque, under its old name Augelette, used to come in a variety of antic shapes including crescents and stars, as well as in the small square tile that was the sole remaining form the cheese now assumed under this name. It depended on a microbe native to Le Breuil en Auge, several kilometers distant from Mesnil—the same microbe of which the crevices of our downstairs kitchen harbored their own particular strain, which we could take advantage of whenever we wanted to make cottage cheese. My mother, who had been known, as I have said, to see things, claimed that in her youth she could pick up one of the cheeses curing in the cool room and watch its black mold climb from it onto her fingers and, heat-seeking, move slowly up her arm.

“So put cheese on the list,” Ben said. “And bread. What kind of bread, and how much?”

The long, crusty, and nutritionally empty loaf called a baguette, designed primarily as an excuse for eating butter or as a sponge for sauce, was once only the regional bread of Paris. If well made, it is delicious within the first three hours of its baking, but it will not keep. Because it is photogenic and the press interfered, it is now known to Americans simply as “French bread,” having elbowed its compatriot breads out of the footlights.

In Calvados the local (and sole available) bread in my grandparents’ time was the pain brié. This was a dense, hard, salt-rising bread with a thick crust that had some of the virtue of kapok inasmuch as it resisted damp, its dough containing almost no air. After all, why should a Norman matron, careful with her money, buy air? If she wanted air, she could open her mouth and breathe, couldn’t she? She didn’t have to open her purse as well. Pain brié lasted, and it was good enough, especially when toasted, spread with butter, and sprinkled with salt (pain brié, grillé et salé). But it was out of favor now: few people bothered with it, tourists didn’t know its name to ask for it, and some village bakeries in Calvados, the district in which Mesnil finds itself—its name hearkens to more spirituous matters— no longer even sold it. It was traditionally made in several shapes, among them the crown or couronne forbidden by the Germans during the war—whether because it was too frivolous or too patriotic, I could not say. In my grandparents’ day, when there was no local alternative to pain brié, my grandmother was famous for her homemade American beaten biscuits. Our friend Charlotte, who was my mother’s age and aunt to Thérèse, still mentioned my grandmother’s biscuits (which she called petits gateaux) every time I saw her, with a nostalgia so poignant I feared she might be disappointed if Julia made a biscuit for her now.

“A lot of local color is just poverty,” Margaret interjected as I was recounting my mother’s tale of eating a meal at the house of a friend in Mesnil when she was a girl. After the main course was consumed, she remembered the plate’s being wiped with a chunk of pain brié and the bread eaten before the dish was turned over and its underneath used for dessert, perhaps stewed pears with a dab of custard.

Julia’s and my family’s past diet of roots caused us to notice the protein existing all around us, profuse but for the most part unattainable. During one of our hungrier summers, a pig was butchered by the farmer, M. Tonnelier, providing a startling education for our children, whose faces were pressed against the library window thirty feet away.

Mme. Vera Tonnelier’s father-in-law, M. Braye, lived in the second cottage on the farm, at the library end of the big house, which overlooked the part of the pasture where the butchering was done. He was the expert in charge. The occasion made for a family festival that included rowdy fun as well as labor. By the time we figured out what was happening, the animal was already hanging by its hind legs from the limb of a crooked apple tree, bleeding into a dishpan held by one of a group of women whose aprons and bare arms became bloodier and bloodier as the work proceeded. The dogs grinned, the ducks and geese gobbled in the bloody mud, hawks circled, and only the wood doves moaned—but they were always moaning. The beast was gutted, scalded, and shaved, and everything that had been inside it washed and picked over, sorted and saved. A small fire was kept burning, with the pot hung over it making the scene reminiscent of frontier life. Now and then something would be put into the pot or taken out. The majority of the carcass swung in the weather for most of a week, flanked by the tubs and the round crank-operated whetstone.

M. Braye’s house, 1992. Photo Christine Livet

At the end of the week, with the butchering completed and the Tonneliers’ dogs gamboling down the hill crazed with delight at the largesse of vertebrae that was finally rewarding their testy patience, M. Braye, accompanied by his dog—whom the children called “Frisky” Braye because of his abominably frank family approach to matters of mating—came to our kitchen door with one of his periodic gifts.

The dog’s name may have been supplied by the children, but I later took impertinent delight in hearing that the natives of Frieseke’s hometown, Owosso, Michigan, also pronounced his name that way. The alternate pronunciations I was accustomed to were, first, that used by the art dealers in New York, who conspire to call him Freeseekee, and, second, the way I myself was taught, Freesiku, which is closer to the way it would have been pronounced in Friesland.

“Il n’est pas méchant,” M. Braye always said, referring to Frisky Braye (meaning, “He’s not dangerous”: chien méchant is the French equivalent of our beware of the dog). When his (and Frisky’s) business with us was completed, M. Braye would finally march off, shaking his head and muttering, to Frisky Braye, “Ils ne comprennent pas”—“They don’t understand.”

Since he and his wife lived on the place rent-free, being family of Vera’s, he liked to make a gesture now and then. Mme. Braye stayed in the house and except at butchering time was visible only when she came out the front door and went around to the far side of their cottage, to what we later learned was their privy. Although they slept upstairs, in a room that could be reached only by way of an outside staircase, we never saw either one of the Brayes on those stairs. M. Braye was gardener for the château in Mesnil, toward which we saw him walk in the morning and after lunch, and from which he returned before lunch and in the evening, bent almost double over his stick. The flower garden in the enclosure around their house was breathtakingly lovely, a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of color that put yucca and bachelor’s buttons side by side with lilac and floods of roses. By now the goats had got everything in M. Braye’s vacant garden patch save for the lilac and a rosebush or two; the roses themselves were eaten as they budded.

M. Braye, while he lived, might turn up at the house one evening bearing branches loaded with cherries, broken from trees in the woods; or a bowl of blackberries; or flowers from his exuberant garden. This time Frisky was especially excited. The gift was a plastic plate covered with fat brown terete forms, intimate and slippery, which turned out to be the first example of black pudding we had ever tasted. We had seen this boudin noir being made under the apple tree but had not been able to isolate the nature of the product from the ferment of activity. The intestines had been emptied, trimmed, scraped, and washed, then stuffed with a mixture of pig’s blood and flour, spiced in a way that my tongue no longer recalls because the commercial boudin noir I have eaten since includes cinnamon, and M. Braye’s recipe dated from an epoch when a pinch of cinnamon was worth as much as a good hunting dog. With M. Braye’s gift of blood sausage, we had a measure of protein for ourselves and our young. Like boudin, certain other staples in the French cuisine that we euphemistically call variety meats (sweetbread, tongue, kidneys, heart, liver, lungs, brains) were once simply those portions that were most available to the pocketbook, because they were less desirable than an identifiable chunk of muscle such as an aloyau (sirloin).

I did not want Margaret and Ben to have to go back home to Brooklyn and their dear deprived and say, “We stayed in a romantic if crumbling farmhouse in Normandy where we were afraid to use the bathroom and we ate turnips cooked six ways and it rained the whole time.” So their first night I had served them boudin noir fried with apples and onions. This was a genuinely French dish, if not Norman; I got the recipe from Madeleine, my godson Gabriel’s mother, who identified it as being Auvergnat, and thus native to the wrong part of the country—but under the circumstances, and on such short notice, I hoped it would take the place of local fare.