Aveyron / Aligot
The thing about time is that it trickles by if you’re watching it, each second as slow and wearing as the drip from a tap. I had kept a vigilant eye on the clock for nearly twelve months, and now that it was almost over, I hoped it would pick up speed, succumb to gravity. But time being time, it continued at its own stately pace while I counted, with increasing impatience, the remaining weeks, days, and minutes until May 1, when my husband would come home.
“Only two weeks left? That went by so fast!” said an acquaintance when I ran into her in the embassy’s mail room. I smiled and nodded, because for her the time probably had gone quickly, enrobed as she was in her own routine of métro-boulot-dodo. My year, however, had been counted out in Calvin’s morning e-mails and our evening Skype sessions, in giant pots of soup portioned into weeknight meals, in the books I read while eating dinner, in walks taken on Sunday afternoons. It had been a productive, carefully structured, often solitary year, a year that had allowed me to create something unexpected: my Paris—not Calvin’s Paris or our Paris but mine, one of new friends and cobblestoned street shortcuts and pastry-shop discoveries of my very own, one for me to share with my husband once he returned. For the rest of my life, I would, I knew, remember my experiences in Paris, drawing upon them like a long, cool drink of water, as we moved through our other posts.
But a fast year? No, it had not been fast.
It is perhaps the fate of those left behind, this slow seep of time. Penelope knew it as she waited twenty years for Odysseus to return, weaving his shroud by day and unraveling it by night in order to foil her would-be suitors.
The spouses of thousands of deployed soldiers endure it, single-handedly juggling jobs and family, all the while keeping one wary ear cocked for the ring of the phone, praying it won’t be that call bringing unbearable news.
Other diplomats’ wives experienced it, like Abigail Adams, who spent most of her married life separated from her “dearest friend,” as she and her husband, John Adams, addressed each other in their letters. While he traveled as a circuit judge, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, and lived overseas as an envoy to England, France, and the Netherlands, she toiled in colonial New England with little hired help, planting and harvesting the crops, managing her husband’s finances, raising their four children. She spent months without hearing from her distant husband, the silence as much a product of his self-indulgence as of the unreliable mail service and his fear that spies would intercept his messages. And when John did write, he scolded his fretful wife for her complaints: “For God’s sake never reproach me again with not writing. . . . You know not—you feel not—the dangers that surround me, nor those that may be brought upon our Country.” And yet can you blame Abigail for worrying? Given the disease and danger that haunted the era, she probably feared that the silence meant he was dead.
Abigail spent most of her life dreaming about a stable family existence, hoping that every time John ended a post, his return home would be permanent. But as one more appointment turned into another, then another, then another, it became obvious that John was unable to deny the call to public service. Abigail feared that they had spent the best years of their lives miserably separated. “Who shall give me back Time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall?” she wrote in a letter to him. “How dearly have I paid for a titled Husband; should I wish you less wise that I might enjoy more happiness?”
In 1784, her children mostly grown and her father recently deceased, Abigail overcame her dread of ocean travel and joined John in Europe, where he was serving as an envoy. After thirteen years of “widowhood”—as Abigail referred to John’s long absences—the couple finally reunited, moving from Paris to London to the Hague as John fulfilled his diplomatic duties. They returned to the United States in 1788, installing themselves in their new farm, Peacefield, in Quincy, Massachusetts. Abigail hoped, of course, it would be their final move. She was wrong. It would be more than twelve years before they returned home permanently—and only after John had served two terms as vice president and one as president of the United States.
Abigail had sacrificed decades of family life—a sacrifice she believed was her patriotic duty, her personal offering to a country she loved—but she had not surrendered the years willingly. In her letters to John, her resentment toward his ambition glows like a searing cattle brand. “Do you not sometimes sigh for such a Seclusion—publick peace and domestick happiness?” she wrote to him in 1781. “I know the voice of Fame to be a mere weathercock, unstable as Water and fleeting as a Shadow.” Abigail’s domestic happiness didn’t arrive until 1802, when she was fifty-eight and it lasted only sixteen years, until her death in 1818. John’s career—more illustrious than either of them could have imagined when they married—had offered Abigail an uncommon, well-traveled, often lonely life, a life colored by her husband’s absences and her resulting strength and ingenuity, a life enriched by an economic and intellectual independence unheard of for most women of the era. Even so, you get the feeling she would have traded it all for a few acres of rural farmland and a pot of Yankee beans, had it meant spending more time with her husband. But for better or for worse, that was not her choice to make.
* * *
On April 29, I flew to Washington, D.C., to give a bookstore talk about my novel, which had been published a few months earlier. Afterward some friends and I ate dan dan noodles and fish poached in spiced oil at a Sichuan restaurant on K Street, and then we went home and I lay on their pullout couch, wide awake the entire night.
Early the next morning, I took a taxi to the airport, watching from the backseat as the sky slowly brightened from dawn into daylight. I checked in for my flight and waited in line for security, tapping my left foot, trying to peer around the crowd to see what was taking so long?! Couldn’t that businessman start taking off his shoes sooner? Why hadn’t that college student unwrapped her laptop before sending it through the X-ray machine? And how on earth could that woman forget to empty her pockets before passing through the metal detector?
Once clear of security, I re-dressed, reshod, and repacked before taking off through the terminal. I began to count the gate numbers, pausing to consult the boarding pass clutched in my hand—27, 28 . . . 29. I turned off the path and into the waiting area, which at seven o’clock was already full of business travelers, their faces lit by the cold glow of their cell-phone screens. Was he there? I quickly scanned the crowd. No, no, no. I took a step back. His trajectory had been complicated—Baghdad, Amman, Frankfurt, D.C.—there had been a lot of variables. Maybe he had missed one flight and, as a result, all the rest.
And then, in the corner, I saw him. His back was toward me, but I knew him from the shape of his head, the color of his hair, like chestnut honey. I ran over to him, and my bag dropped at his feet, and he sprang up when he saw me, and suddenly we were hugging before we’d even had a chance to say hello. I pressed my face into his chest, and his shirt smelled faintly soapy, even after so many hours of travel, and when we kissed, his cheeks felt scratchy and familiar, and as we hugged, I felt droopy with relief, and love, and gratitude. We were together, and the glow of fluorescent lights had never been so beautiful, the crackly boarding announcements had never sounded more musical, the aroma of stale coffee had never smelled sweeter. His assignment in Iraq was over.
A few minutes later, we flew to New York, rented a car, and drove to the Hudson River Valley. There, in a strident burst of spring, we celebrated the wedding of two beloved friends amid more friends, a heartfelt weekend strewn with tears that had as much to do with our collective joy as it did with the high pollen count. We drank sparkling wine and ate carrot wedding cake, and Calvin chatted with the bride’s new in-laws, and I joined the bride herself on the dance floor, and . . . well, life pretty much went on again as ordinary. Except not quite. Because after a year apart, being together would never truly feel ordinary again.
* * *
Back in Paris, we settled into our apartment, together enfin. Calvin started working again at the embassy, and I continued working at the American Library and writing my new novel. I bought a voluminous straw shopping basket, one that I could fill with vegetables from the outdoor market across the street. We watched Ernst Lubitsch films at the art-house cinema on Sunday afternoons and ate chic artichoke pizzas on Thursday evenings (well, I ate artichoke; Calvin ate ham and mushroom) and split raspberry financier cakes down the middle after dinner. We made lists of places to visit before we left Europe, and sometimes this led to talking about life after Paris, which always made us both a little blue.
“It’s going to be so hard to leave,” I said one afternoon as the golden late-summer sunshine played upon the marble mantelpiece of our apartment.
“I know,” Calvin agreed. I thought he’d change the subject or encourage me not to think about it, but instead he said, “We’ll come back one day.”
“When you retire?”
“Or sooner?”
“Well . . .” I took a deep breath and launched into the idea I’d been thinking about for a few weeks. “We’ve been saving money for a long time. Maybe we could buy a place here. Something small, where we could come on vacations. A pied-à-terre?”
“A foot on the ground.” Calvin smiled.
“Huh?”
“That’s the direct translation, right? Pied-à-terre. A foot on the ground.”
I started to smile, too. A foot on the ground, a permanent place—in Paris—was more than I ever could have dreamed of.
“Do you think . . . ?” Now it was Calvin’s turn to take a deep breath. “It could have two bedrooms? Just in case?”
“In case we have a baby?” I said slowly. And then I found myself nodding. “Good idea.” For a second we gazed at each other in a mix of excitement and terror, the kind that only the idea of parenthood could bring.
“When you’re ready,” Calvin said, smoothing my hair.
Cocooned in our domestic idyll, time did a flip turn and began to flit, then flee. And yet, even though my husband was home—even though we’d cooked the spaghetti and meatballs to prove it—something felt incomplete. Had we skipped a rite of passage, a ritual offering to the household gods? I puzzled over it for several weeks, but when at last I figured it out, the answer was obvious. We needed to go back to the beginning. We needed to visit the friends who had become our French family. We needed to see Didier and Alain.
Calvin called the brothers, and when he finally tracked them down, he discovered they were not in Paris at Le Mistral but down south, at their home in Aveyron. “Venez!” they urged. “Come down! Stay with us! We’ll pick you up at the train station.”
Aveyron is a département—akin to an American state—located in south-central France, 350 miles from Paris. With its lack of high-speed TGV or direct train service, the region remains relatively inaccessible. For most travelers, including Calvin and me, the journey from Paris takes a full day, starting with a train to Clermont-Ferrand, followed by a 125-mile drive south into a pocket of la France profonde, deep France, lost in time.
Calvin first visited Aveyron more than twenty years ago when he was an exchange student in Paris, taking Russian classes, and sharing an apartment in the twentieth arrondissement, one that featured views of the Eiffel Tower (if you climbed onto the roof via the fire escape and leaned over the side of the building) and a healthy cockroach population. One long weekend he joined Didier, Alain, and some other friends and drove down to Didier’s country house, a drafty half ruin perched on a bluff overlooking a wild ravine. It was midwinter, cold and damp, and the house had only an ancient fireplace to warm it. That night Calvin slept next to the hearth, fully clothed and still completely frozen.
In an effort to ward off the chill, the group drank the region’s coarse wine and ate its hearty fare—dishes like truffade, a golden cake of crushed potatoes studded with bacon and cheese; farçous, fried pancakes laced with spinach, herbs, and pork fat; local cured sausages and hams; and aligot, a fine potato puree beaten with melted cheese until it resembled molten lava. At the farmhouse table of Didier and Alain’s aunt, Louise, they debated French politics, history, and philosophy. It was while seated in her rustic kitchen that Calvin truly learned to speak French, to express his ideas with eloquence. When the freezing rain slowed, he discovered the region’s rough landscape, a juxtaposition of mountains and pastures, interlaced with river valleys dotted by stone villages.
That trip was the first of many that Calvin has made during his twenty-year friendship with Didier and Alain. When he and I got married, I joined him, to stroll along fields speckled with grazing cows and sheep, admire the elegant Romanesque church at Conques, sip wine at a café shadowed by the ramparts of an ancient château. During our visits we purchased folding pocketknives at the famous forge in Laguiole (pronounced “lye-ole”), viewed a Neolithic menhir standing stone that Didier had found and donated to the village museum, and one golden afternoon in late summer we lunched in the luminous calm of Michel et Sébastien Bras, the region’s celebrated Michelin three-star restaurant.
On the phone Calvin settled on a date for us to descend to visit Didier and Alain, a weekend they’d both be in Aveyron and not in Paris swapping shifts at Le Mistral. Later, when I scribbled it into my calendar, I realized it was the fourth weekend in November: Thanksgiving. How, I wondered, would we celebrate in deepest, darkest rural France? The germ of an idea began to take root. I wanted to cook for everyone.
* * *
Aligot is not a dish you’d find in a Julia Child cookbook. Unlike boeuf bourguignon, it is not cooked in home kitchens from Chicago to Melbourne. Unlike cassoulet, it is not worshipped by Brooklyn food bloggers doubling as homegrown charcutiers. Unlike andouillette, it is not divisive; it does not provoke impassioned disgust or delight. Unlike fondue, it is not synonymous with bell-bottom trousers; its equipment cannot be found stacked knee-deep at garage sales.
Aligot is none of these things because . . . well, almost no one outside France has ever heard of it. Even in France it’s hardly a household word.
All this makes little sense to me, because the first time I tasted aligot, at a restaurant in Laguiole, I fell in love. Our waitress delivered the family-style platter of whipped potatoes beaten with melted cheese and actually climbed onto a chair to tame the stretching, gooey mass, swirling scoops of it around two spoons so she could dollop it onto our plates. As I ate, I felt lost in a rapture of springy fresh cheese dissolving into silken puree, the tang of crème fraîche softened by sweet milkiness. When I finished the last bite, my heart gave a slight twinge of sadness (though it could also have been indigestion).
Aligot is a relatively simple dish, made with only a few ingredients, though these must be of pristine quality and freshness. The potatoes should be Bintje—a Dutch variety halfway between waxy and floury—and the cheese, called tome fraîche, must be less than three days old. The cheese is aligot’s not-so-secret ingredient, the key to its supple elasticity, and probably the reason it hasn’t traveled around the world.
Tome fraîche is simply a wedge of pressed cheese curds, similar to fresh mozzarella. It’s white and clean, speckled with tiny holes like a new sponge, and it squeaks between the teeth. The flavor, though bland—it’s completely unsalted—gleams with the pearly essence of fresh milk. As tome ages, it quickly loses elasticity; an aligot made with stale cheese lacks the dish’s characteristic ooziness.
If tome fraîche is allowed to ferment and mature, it becomes fromage de Laguiole, Aveyron’s renowned hard-textured cheese, dense and creamy, with a sharp, tangy bite reminiscent of aged cheddar. Awarded an AOC mark of appellation d’origine contrôlée in 1976, it is distinguished by its special scent of wild herbs and flowers, the result of summer grazing in high-altitude pastures.
According to local legend, aligot was first made in the twelfth century by monks at the Abbey of Aubrac, on a volcanic plateau in northern Aveyron. They mixed stale chunks of bread with water and tome fraîche, stirring everything together into a nourishing porridge, which they fed to pilgrims and other travelers who passed through their doors. Could their accompanying calls of “Allé cuit”—something to eat—have eventually turned into the word “aligot”? Another theory claims that the word comes from the Latin aliquid, which means “something.” Still another alleges that it comes from the old French verb alicoter, meaning “to cut.”
By the nineteenth century, potatoes had finally arrived from the New World to replace the bread, and the dish had spread to the burons, the steep-roofed stone huts that dot the mountainous Aubrac landscape. Cowherds, or buronniers, lived in these primitive structures during the summer months, climbing up in late May and descending in mid-October, an annual tradition called the transhumance that enabled their herds to graze on the surrounding high pastures. Traditionally the burons had only three rooms: one for sleeping, one for making cheese, and one for aging it. In the 1930s there were more than three hundred of these stone structures. Now only a handful remain, some renovated into summer holiday cottages, some turned into restaurants catering to tourists, others derelict. Not a single one houses herders or produces cheese. Instead fromage de Laguiole and its tome are produced at the Coopérative Fromagère Jeune Montagne, a gleaming, modern facility established in 1960, when the last buronniers began to retire and disappear. What it lacks in old-fashioned charm, the Coopérative makes up for in year-round production, hygiene, and efficiency, as I discovered when I visited the factory floor. It is the region’s best hope of sustaining its cheese-making tradition.
* * *
Though the burons have all but disappeared and the abbey, destroyed during the French Revolution, now lies in rubble, a few elements of the Middle Ages still remain on the high Aubrac plain. The landscape is still sweepingly beautiful, a series of elevated pastures undulating beneath an expanse of open sky. The locals still cook aligot, beating it in huge kettles with flat wooden spoons the size of rowboat oars, offering it to travelers and eating it on festive occasions. And pilgrims still journey through the region, tracing the ancient spiritual route of Saint-Jacques de Compostelle.
Travelers have walked the Chemin de Saint-Jacques (in Spanish called the Camino de Santiago), for more than a thousand years, joining the network of paths at various points throughout Europe—including England, Italy, Poland, and even Scandinavia—and ending at the town of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. In the ninth century, the body of Saint James the Apostle was purportedly discovered there in a Roman-era tomb, and the devout soon followed. During the Middle Ages, a pilgrimage took months, if not years, but the successful were rewarded by the compostellana, a certificate granting remission from purgatory.
All these pilgrims—and in the Chemin’s heyday, there were thousands—required basic services: shelter and sustenance, both physical and spiritual. Special churches were designated at five key points along the path, and the truly pious endeavored to make a tour of them all, to visit the saints’ bodies housed within. The five stops included the towns of Tours, Limoges, Toulouse, and Santiago de Compostela itself, as well as Conques, a small village laid out in the shape of a scallop shell—the symbol of the Chemin de Saint-Jacques—located in Aveyron.
The abbey at Conques honors Sainte-Foy, a young girl from Agen in Aquitaine who in the fourth century was tortured to death with a blazing-hot brazier because of her foi, or faith. In the eighth century, her remains were brought to Conques, abducted by a local monk—he allegedly spent ten years at a monastery in Agen gaining the trust of his superiors in order to kidnap the relic—and soon after, the abbey became a part of the Saint-Jacques circuit. Pilgrims flooded Conques, bringing different languages, cultures, and religious traditions. These early tourists took shelter at hostels marked with a scallop shell, they ate aligot, prayed before the gold reliquary of Sainte-Foy with its Roman head dating to the fifth century, and continued on their journey.
Today the Romanesque abbey, which along with the Chemin de Saint-Jacques is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, welcomes a small but steady stream of visitors. They are but mere specks amid the gaping space of the building’s enormous transepts, which were constructed in the eleventh century to house floods of worshippers. And yet, on the winding country roads of Aveyron, it’s not unusual to catch sight of a pair of modern pilgrims, recognizable by their scruffy clothes, walking sticks, and heavy backpacks. They lodge for a small fee at homes or hostels marked with a scallop shell, eat aligot, and chat with the locals who treat them with a gentle, almost protective kindness. And then, refreshed, they proceed with their journey, some to hike a small portion of the Chemin, others to continue on the path of nearly 720 miles that remain to Santiago de Compostela.
* * *
As I packed my bags to go down to Aveyron, it occurred to me that we, too, were pilgrims of another, ecumenical sort, Calvin and I—we were strangers in a strange land, bearing gifts that I hoped to cook: sweet potatoes, fresh cranberries, cans of pumpkin. And if we were the pilgrims, I guess that made Didier, Alain, and our other Aveyronnais friends the Indians, the natives who would gather to share a Thanksgiving feast with us (minus the smallpox blankets).
We arrived in Aveyron late in the night, after taking an after-work train to Clermont-Ferrand and meeting Didier there for the two-hour car ride south. Driving with Didier was like being strapped onto a luge against your will and sent down the side of a mountain. At his house, I crept into bed, feeling lime green around the edges. But lulled by the deep country silence, I fell asleep and woke refreshed to a frosty morning filled with the sounds of mooing cows, a fly buzzing fiercely at the window, and the clicking jingle made by Apache, the wirehaired dachshund of Didier’s wife, Chantal, as he scuttled down the stairs.
“Where are we going?” I whispered to Calvin when we had all gathered in the living room. Didier opened and closed every drawer in the house in search of Apache’s leash.
He shrugged. There was always a significant relinquishment of control that came with hanging out with Didier. We tended to spend a lot of time driving around in his car, stopping at quaint villages, throwing back a coffee at the bar of the local café, then getting into the car again. I never had any idea where we were stopping or, when we did stop, why—a state of oblivion that I used to blame on my inability to speak French, until I learned how and realized that no one knew the plan, perhaps not even Didier himself.
“Voilà!” With a spectacular crash, Didier pulled a leash from the junk drawer. Apache spotted it and ran to the door. We followed them to the car, buckled ourselves in, and plunged through space for a few terrifying minutes, eventually shuddering to a halt in Espalion, a neighboring town. We entered the café a few steps behind Didier. Everyone greeted him with a handshake or des bises—cheek kisses—and then turned to us with an outstretched hand, warmly welcoming yet also openly curious about these foreign FOD (Friends of Didier). We clambered into a booth, and Didier ordered a café serré—a coffee screwed into hypercaffeinated viscosity—and a tartine, which he proceeded to feed to Apache, who perched on his knees so as not to miss a single buttery crumb. Eventually Didier’s friend Jérôme showed up. Then his brother, Alain. And more friends, Jean-Louis and Michel. The five of them gathered at the café most mornings to drink a few serrés and shoot the breeze—their very own coffee klatch.
One minute everyone was talking loudly and drinking coffee and the next they were suddenly pushing their chairs back from the table and fishing coins out of their pockets. We strapped ourselves back into Didier’s bobsled and hurtled away. In the backseat I fixed my eyes on the horizon as we whizzed by herds of caramel-colored cows and the occasional stocky bull, a hefty, broad-shouldered, pin-legged creature who bore an undeniable resemblance to Didier. The landscape was as empty and sweeping as any I’d seen in France, a lonely expanse of prairie isolated by the surrounding Massif Central plateau, a country more populated by cattle than by people.
For generations of Aveyronnais, this region was the beginning, the place they had left to make their fortune. The Aveyronnais helped create modern Paris with their cafés. For me at least, it was impossible to picture the city without their zinc bars and chalkboard menus, the bentwood chairs at marble-topped tables, the small cups of coffee garnished with a paper-wrapped sugar cube, the names like La Butte Aveyronnaise, Le Charbonnier, L’Auvergnate. I couldn’t pass any of them without imagining the homesick Aveyronnais who had first opened it. Yes, Aveyron had left its mark on Paris. But, I realized now, Paris had also left a mark on Aveyron, in the sprawling new holiday homes built by returning sons and daughters, in the friendships cemented over long hours of toil in Paris cafés, in the siblings whose lives were dictated by tradition—the oldest son who stayed behind to run the farm, the younger who went up to Paris to run the café. This land had inspired a million nostalgic daydreams of broad pastures, herds of running cows, grapevines that climbed the hillside under the nourishing glare of sun.
It’s surprising how hungry you can get careening around the countryside. By one o’clock I was starving, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just out of relief that I was still alive. Didier stopped the car and announced, “On va déjeuner aux Bessades, chez Cathy!” Seconds later we were walking through a graveled yard and into an ancient farmhouse, sitting down around the long wooden table that filled the room.
Cathy and her husband, Jean-Louis, ran a table d’hôte, a kind of small restaurant operated from their family home that, I had the feeling, they tended more as a hobby than out of actual necessity. Eating here was like dining in a farmwife’s kitchen of half a century ago, with strangers and friends sitting on benches, the fireplace smoking, and a litter of kittens sleeping in a basket near the hearth. Cathy had inherited the business from her mother, who took over from her mother before her, and meals here have remained gently unchanged for a couple of generations. We started with la grande soupe, a rich, porky broth bobbing with cabbage and chunks of bread, self-served from a lion-headed tureen. Next came an oval platter of ham and sausage, made from Cathy’s own pigs, and then a flurry of her farçous, in this case savory, parsley-flecked fritters, eaten with spoonfuls of homemade red currant jam. A roast chicken followed, and then cheese: a wedge of moist, speckled Roquefort and one of fromage de Laguiole, golden and sharp. Except for the cheese and the sun-warmed wine we’d drunk to wash it all down, which had come from the local cooperative, everything had been produced on the farm by Cathy and Jean-Louis.
The three mecs in workman’s overalls were the first to get up from the table, heading outside to smoke before returning to their construction site. We’d see them later when we went to visit the eighteenth-century château that Cathy and Jean-Louis were rebuilding from a pile of rubble. Next to leave was a frail, white-haired couple who everyone had vouvoyé-ed throughout the whole meal. Jean-Louis got up to clear the table, and then there were just me and Calvin, Didier, and Cathy, the four of us sipping coffee from the same small glasses we’d used to drink water and wine.
This was my moment of opportunity, and I knew it. Calvin knew it, too. I could sense him looking for an opening in the conversation so he could help me chisel my way inside. Tomorrow we would gather here at Les Bessades for dinner, Calvin and me and a crowd of Aveyronnais, joined together to celebrate our American holiday Thanksgiving. The menu would be almost identical to the one we’d just eaten, with roast turkey replacing chicken, but I hoped to contribute to the meal—a spot of cranberry sauce, a dab of sweet potatoes, perhaps a pumpkin pie or two. I wanted to give the feast an authentic touch, and—I admit—I also wanted to show off in front of Calvin, to demonstrate how much my French had improved and how comfortable I felt here. I’d imported the ingredients from Paris just in case Cathy agreed. And that was why I was so nervous: I had to ask her if I could cook with her in her kitchen.
Now, let me clarify something. Cathy is not an intimidating person. She has a soft voice, two bright teenage kids, and blond hair cut into a long shag, reminiscent of the Monkees’. But she is also French, and I had noticed that the kitchen was sensitive territory in France. Though my French friends loved food, loved to eat, loved to cook and talk about cooking, their kitchens remained private, not, as in America, a place to gather and socialize but a room hidden behind closed doors. Cathy and I had met a few times, but we were more acquaintances than friends. Asking to join her in the kitchen was like asking if I could help her clean out her closet.
Cathy and Didier had been discussing the recent grape harvest, but now their conversation had quieted. Calvin caught my eye and raised his eyebrows.
“Is the . . . uh, turkey ready for tomorrow?” The last word stuck in my throat a little bit.
Cathy nodded. “On l’a tuée ce matin!” The turkey had been raised on their farm, of course, nurtured by Cathy since chickhood and killed by Jean-Louis. “It didn’t get pardoned by Obama like the one I saw on television,” she added, and everyone laughed.
I swallowed hard. “Can I do anything to help?”
“C’est très gentil. But just come at seven, with everyone else.”
“No, I mean, I’d love to help you cook . . . si c’est possible.”
“Oh!” She let out a little laugh, as if she hoped I was joking.
“I could make a pumpkin pie—une tarte à la citrouille. Cranberry sauce . . . sauce aux airelles. Sweet potatoes . . . patates douces. I brought the ingredients with me.”
“J’sais pas . . .” She bit her lip.
“Ann est très douée dans la cuisine.” Didier gazed into his glass, but his tone was persuasive.
My suggestion hung so heavily in the air I almost wished I could retract it. But as the silence grew, I realized how true it was. I wanted to be in the kitchen, to trade my American recipes for her French ones, to share not just the celebration of eating the feast but also the communal act of cooking it.
“Laissez-moi réfléchir un peu, d’accord?” Cathy said eventually. I understood her hesitation—she had her rhythm, after all, an intricate kitchen choreography perfected while preparing thousands of meals. But I couldn’t deny that I was a little disappointed.
“She didn’t say no,” Calvin reminded me as we walked back to the car. “She said she’d think about it.”
It was, we both knew, a polite, French way of saying no. Still, before we got into the car, we searched for a can of pumpkin that had shaken loose from its bag of groceries during one of our wild descents. Calvin eventually dislodged it from underneath the front seat. I slipped it into my purse, just in case I needed it the next day.
* * *
The turnoff is so discreet you would miss it if you didn’t know it was there, a small, subtle sign indicating a narrow, tree-lined road. But the next day we did find it, venturing through the trees and up the hill, where we saw a low-slung, sharp-edged glass house floating on the horizon, an unexpected outcrop of modern architecture emerging like a buron from the grassy Aubrac mountainside. This was one of France’s finest temples of gastronomy, the Michelin three-star restaurant of Michel et Sebastien Bras.
Calvin and I had eaten lunch there with Didier, Chantal, and Chantal’s daughter, Anne, a few years ago on a bright, late-summer day. It was a near-perfect meal, not just because of the food, which had been exquisite, but also because of the restaurant’s loving interpretation of place and culture and cuisine. Perhaps I was lightly tipsy on ambience and Champagne, but I thought I could read a story in some of the dishes. The gargouillou was like a warm-weather idyll of bright colors, summer vegetables, herbs, and wildflowers; a childhood sweetheart salad, tender and playful, drizzled with a delicate, chicken-scented sauce that hovered close to the safety of Mama’s hearth. In the slow-braised onion—cooked for seven hours—I saw the bitter, unyielding cold of an Aubrac winter, warmed by wood fires, and a protective robe of bread and truffle crumbs. The aligot told the history of a family, an unbroken line of generations surviving on the rough plain, passing down traditions from mother to son to daughter; in fact, our waiter told us, it was “une recette de Mamie”—Grandmother’s recipe—and until recently Michel Bras’s mother had made it herself.
It had been an unforgettable lunch, a love letter to Aveyron, and my memories of it—of the sun-scattered dining room, the smooth-moving wagon of a cheese cart, the parade of desserts marching past in a sweet blur—had stayed with me, would always stay with me, as one of my happiest, most heartfelt food souvenirs. But that was then, in the summer. Now it was November, and the restaurant was closed for the winter, its windows shuttered. Didier and Calvin dropped me off near the main entrance, and I scrambled down the hill to the back door. In the thin, late-autumn sunlight, the land appeared washed out, the fields dry and brown.
I had come to talk to Sébastien Bras, the son of Michel, who became his father’s partner at the restaurant. He waited for me in his office, a tanned man dressed in jeans and a sweater, with the lean build of a runner. (Indeed he had just run the New York City Marathon, he told me.) Like most Aveyronnais I’d met—like most French people I’d met—he waxed lyrical about his region.
“It’s a little crazy—here we are, lost in the middle of the Aubrac,” he said. “But we are very attached to this territory, and when people dine here, we invite them to share our history.”
That history is partly relayed through herbs—Bras’s “palette of expression”—some collected from the wild, others cultivated by a local maraîcher, still others nurtured in the restaurant’s garden. The gargouillou alone, a dish inspired by the summer countryside, gathers several handfuls of aromatic leaves, seeds, herbs, fruits, flowers, and nuts that change according to the season or to the chef’s whim. Even the restaurant’s logo is an herb, a delicate fernlike sprig of cistre, a type of wild fennel that grows only at high altitudes like the Aubrac plateau.
Aligot depicts another chapter of the region’s history, a peasant dish originating squarely from the Aubrac. “Farther south in the region, like Millau, it doesn’t even exist,” Sébastien told me. The restaurant still makes it in the traditional way, using a family recipe. “Aligot is not our signature dish, but it is part of our patrimoine”—their heritage—he added.
At this moment I sensed movement by the door, and then a slight, tidy figure entered the room, as if drawn in by the word patrimoine. It was Michel Bras. I swallowed a gulp of air. One of France’s most revered chefs was standing before me, and then Sébastien was introducing me and inviting him to join us, and now he was sitting and listening to my awkward, accented French, waiting for me to ask him intelligent questions. My palms started to sweat. Michel Bras has been described as famously reserved, monkish, elusive, a purist. His father was a blacksmith, his mother was the chef at a family-run hotel restaurant in Laguiole. As a child he began to cook at her stove, bypassing the traditional French system of kitchen apprenticeships for a self-taught, scientific approach. He rarely leaves the Aubrac and has notoriously declined to open a restaurant in Paris, though he does have an offshoot in Hokkaido, “lost in the Japanese countryside.”
“I am a native son,” he told me. “This is a rustic region. When we ate, we were dying of hunger. But this region allows an opening of the spirit, it permits us to open the eyes in a different manner.”
In the long silences that punctuated our conversation, I strove to connect the reticent, introverted man before me with the food I had eaten on that summer day, with the unfolding emotions of joy, whimsy, nostalgia, and resolve that I’d tasted on the plate. Perhaps, I decided, he was more comfortable expressing himself with food than with words.
Our discussion wound down, and I got up to leave. We stood for a few minutes making polite small talk. Sébastien asked me where I was staying, and I told them about Didier and Alain, about the dinner we had planned for the next evening.
“Do you know about our American holiday, Thanksgiving? We all get together—and eat!” I laughed a little self-consciously.
And Michel said quietly, “You know, that is really the true definition of gourmandise. Gathering around the table, with friends and family.”
At that moment their next appointment arrived—a Japanese camera crew filming a documentary—and in the ensuing flurry of activity I slipped away. But I thought about those words for the rest of the day and have considered them again and again ever since. There is no exact English equivalent for the word “gourmandise.” Gluttony? Greed? Yes, but it is also the enjoyment of a good meal, the art of fine dining, and something more—the cultivation of an educated palate, perhaps. It’s a quintessentially French term, developed most notably in a book of gastronomic essays, The Physiology of Taste, by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born in 1755, who was not a professional chef or writer but a magistrate in a provincial French town, an enthusiastic eater, a hobbyhorse philosopher who believed that the pleasure found at the table was one of the truest, strongest bonds of society.
At the root of la gourmandise—and the heart of Brillat-Savarin’s book—lies another word: “taste.” It is the development of this sense, he argued—the “act of judgment by which we give preference to things which are agreeable to our taste over those which are not”—that separates animals, who feed, from man, who eats. The link is not strong in English, but translate “taste” into French and you see it immediately—the nucleus of goût and its offspring “gourmandise.”
The word goût comes from the Latin gustus, or taste. Curiously, the English word “taste” has a completely different Latin root: tangere, which means “touch.” And yet in English we have our own derivative of gustus—the word “gusto”—that is, “zest.” Appreciation. Appetite. Enjoyment. Enthusiasm. Perhaps, then, this etymology proves that Brillat-Savarin was right: The deepest essence of our humanness is the gusto—the taste—we bring with us to the table. And the joy we find there with each other—the gourmandise—is the true luxury of life.
The baby veal was only three days old. She stood on shaky legs, her floppy ears spread like bats’ wings, her brown-and-white coat rumpled and downy. She was so sweet I wanted to kidnap her from the dairy farm and take her back to Paris. But Benoît, Didier’s cousin and the owner of the farm, assured me that she would enjoy a long and happy life as a milk cow, unlike her male counterparts, who were slaughtered and sold as . . . well, veal. He had just started to tell me how he and his daughter had found the calf—by chance, in a field—when Didier’s phone rang. He stepped out of the barn, away from the barking dogs and lowing cows, and returned a few minutes later. “On y va!” he called out, and Calvin and I followed him to the car. Soon we were zooming again through the countryside to yet another unspecified destination, which turned out to be Cathy’s house.
“Voilà! Les Bessades!” Didier parked the car. “I’m going to take the dog for a walk. Tu veux te promener, doudou?” he asked Apache. The dog shot out of the car, Didier close behind.
I stared at the pair of them—one broad-shouldered and tall, the other short-legged and long, each head topped with a curly, gray-streaked mop—as they wandered down the road, pausing to investigate the edge of a field. “What’s going on? Should we wait for them in the car?”
“I think”—Calvin turned around in the front seat—“you’re supposed to go inside and start cooking.”
Cathy’s kitchen smelled exactly like every other kitchen in America did on this fourth Thursday in November, wafting with the cozy, toothsome scent of roasting turkey. We kissed each other hello, and she gave me an impromptu tour, whisking the lid off a cavernous stockpot to show me her pumpkin soup, opening the fridge to reveal a vat of batter for the farçous, pulling down the oven door to rotate the gently sizzling turkey. In contrast with the rustic dining room, the kitchen gleamed with modern stainless-steel counters, fluorescent lights, and a small professional dishwasher.
I retrieved my groceries from the car and displayed them a little shyly, showing her the sack of fresh cranberries, the cans of pumpkin, the heavy bag of sweet potatoes, hoping she wouldn’t ask just how much I’d spent at La Grande Épicerie. I explained the recipes, circling verbosely around a few French cooking terms that I didn’t know. Calvin was next door in the dining room, reading his book at the table and ready to translate, but in the end I didn’t need his help.
I had brought along a cookbook, but it turns out that Thanksgiving recipes are pretty intuitive, for the experienced French cook anyway. Cathy had never tasted cranberry sauce, but she knew how to make a quick confiture, just as she knew how to puree the sweet potatoes—adding a dash of nutmeg—and whip up a custard for the pumpkin pie. She handed me the bumpy-shelled eggs laid by her own hens, and as I beat them together with milk, sugar, and spices, she made some pâte brisée right on the counter—no food processor for her—eyeballing the amounts of flour, butter, and water and rubbing them together with a practiced hand. She divided and rolled out the dough, pressed it into three tart tins, popped open a can of applesauce, and spread the contents on one of the shells. With quick confidence she peeled, cored, and sliced a pound of apples into slender, perfectly even slivers and fanned them into an elegant overlapping pattern. Meanwhile, I had barely managed to scrape the pumpkin out of its can.
We juggled for space in the oven, sweating lightly as we shifted the turkey from one scorching rack to another, maneuvering the uncooked pies above and below it. On the stove the cranberries popped, and steam from the puréed sweet potatoes fogged the windows. I thought about my parents, halfway across the world in California, my American friends in all the cities where I had lived, each preparing this meal, not an exact replica but sketched in the same broad strokes. I missed them, and I would continue to miss them for most of the Thanksgivings of my life. But there would be different meals together, feasts cooked to celebrate other holidays or the occasion of being with one another again.
By the time the pumpkin pies emerged from the oven—perfectly jiggly—the first guests had arrived. They sat in the dining room and sipped cloudy glasses of pastis as the room filled with more and more people and kids and dogs until it felt hot and sweaty and festive. I wondered how we’d all manage to eat dinner—standing up?—but the mystery was solved when Didier announced “À table!” and everyone headed through a door that I hadn’t noticed before, into another, larger room lined with long tables set for twenty, or perhaps more.
Everyone was turning to watch us as we entered the room, and I smiled to hide my embarrassment, not understanding why. But then Calvin squeezed my hand and I saw it—an enormous banner spanning the back wall:
THANKSGIVING EN AVEYRON
WELCOME CALVIN AND ANN-MARIE
A huge image of Les Bessades dominated the banner’s background, a cartoon turkey superimposed upon it; two smaller photos framed the text, one of the Capitol Building, the other of the Eiffel Tower—the United States and France. Our two homes, past and present.
I sat next to Sylvie, the wife of Jérôme, who owned a print shop and had made the banner, and Fred, a Belgian émigré. The chestnut-stuffed turkey was a triumph, moister and more tender than any newfangled brine-soaked, tented, high-heat/low-heat roasting could produce. Everyone agreed that the cranberry sauce was the perfect counterpoint to the meat, but I sensed less enthusiasm for the sweet potatoes. “My cows eat those,” I thought I heard someone say, though I might have misheard him.
Next to me Sylvie and Fred were discussing the finer points of rabbit breeding. Me: “Do you raise them for eating?” Sylvie: “Well, yes”—and with her words, I felt a pang, sharp and piercing, for our life in France. We still had two years left in Paris, but already I felt the looming shadow of our departure, and already I missed France. I couldn’t slow time down, but, I told myself, I could savor it, like the first spring strawberries eaten over the kitchen sink, or the gentle quiver of a soufflé au Roquefort as it traveled from oven to table, or the smear of sharp mustard daubed on a simple café croque-monsieur. I had fallen in love with the connection between food and history and place in France, and I would be a very poor Francophile indeed if I didn’t profité from life’s happiest moments and enjoy them one bite at a time.
Across the table Calvin was talking to Didier and Alain about his next assignment. “Maybe Washington, D.C. Maybe Beijing. Qui sait?” I heard him say. His career would continue to move us around the world in increments of two or three or four years, and our home would continue to be transient, the place in the world where we lived together. But after our year of being apart, the idea of a more permanent place had also taken root, a sunny spot we could dream about together from smog-choked Beijing or during blowhard bureaucrat dinner parties or the other unbeautiful moments of life. We had started looking for an apartment to buy in Paris, and though our budget limited us to a shoe box, we hoped to find a shoe box large enough for a table for two and, maybe one day, three.
The pumpkin pie was, I’m sorry to say, not a success. After a polite bite or two, the slices went ignored in favor of the apple tart. I feared I had made a mistake with the recipe—confused salt with sugar, for example—but it turns out I had underestimated the visceral French hatred of cinnamon. To me the pumpkin pie tasted cold and creamy, sweet and spicy, just like the pies of my childhood. I thought it was delicious, which proves that, even culinarily, some things can get lost in translation.
At some point the dessert plates were cleared, more wine was poured, and an accordion appeared in Cathy’s hands. She played a few jaunty bars in invitation, and then people were moving the tables, opening up the floor, and joining hands in pairs to bound across the room. I watched them advance and retreat, circle and release, and I imagined, a little romantically, all the Aveyronnais before us who had danced these same steps after a good dinner. And I knew I would dream of this meal forever, just as I dreamed of the spicy punch of my dad’s mapo tofu, or the doughy chew of a bowl of Beijing noodles, or the bright tang of cassis sorbet eaten in the brilliant light of a Paris summer evening—all the food memories dancing their own country jig, advancing and receding to make way for the next one.