As children we experience the world around us with wonder and amazement, using all of our senses. For Sara and me, France embodies the visual, tactile, and romantic personal histories we have carefully and thoughtfully carried into adulthood. Our memories are filled with images of old, faded, and peeling advertisements painted on the crumbling plaster walls of buildings, hand-shaped brass door knockers, saggy beds in slightly suspect hotels, crisp vintage linens with hand-stitched monograms, tiny Paris elevators with polished nickel doors, and the pale, pink light of summer evenings settling over vineyards and fields of wheat. The sounds of our childhood are as powerful, if not more so, than the visual memories. Squeaky wood floors from the eighteenth century, church bells every hour pétanqueballs colliding and clacking—all have left us with illustrated vignettes of our childhood.
Although we are ten years apart in age and have only become friends in the last several years, we share the unusual experience of having been American children in France. The common thread is our memories of food and place, whether gently unwrapping sugar cubes from papers and dipping them into our parents’ coffee at the café, or diving into the warm Mediterranean sea from the rocky calanques near Marseille to get an ice cream from the boat vendor. Paris to Provence is the story of two young girls discovering the beauty and wonder of how food, landscape, and travel are inseparable from our memories and experiences. The raw and unpretentious connection the French seemingly have to food, place, and each other is now part of our adult lives. The following stories, each narrated by us individually, reflect our unique memories, but through overlap and shared experiences here is a collective history of the food we discovered, places we visited, and people we knew.
The age difference between me and Sara at certain times seems like a generation and at other times insignificant. Sara and I grew up on opposite sides of the country, me in northern California and she in upstate New York, but strangely enough, we have a shared past, not a physical one, but an overlapping one. Our parents are not friends or even acquaintances, but were inspired travelers. They were drawn to France, where consequently, Sara and I spent many of our childhood summers, though not together or even in the same decade. After our first time working together as photographer and stylist, Sara and I quickly realized we had both spent our childhood summers piled into the backseats of tiny French cars, she with her older sister and I with my younger brother, traveling the small, winding country roads through terraced vineyards, lavender fields, and cherry orchards. Some years my family would begin our summer adventure in Paris, other times in London, taking the English Channel ferries to Calais or Ostend in Belgium.
My French life began in 1971, when my parents, graduate students in California, packed up their bohemian student life in La Jolla, California, along with me and our dog, and moved to France to raise goats and make cheese. Dreams of another life, a bucolic life very removed from the American residue of the staid and stifled 1950s and the trauma of the Vietnam War, are partly what brought my parents to France. They bought a farmhouse in the inner Var, a remote region of Provence once called “le pays perdu,” the lost country, because of its inaccessibility by train, airport, or highway. This became my childhood home.
I know their story, and even though I am not sure if the memories are mine or if they are family stories told over the years, they have become interwoven and inseparable from my own memories. However, my story begins at age three with roasted chestnuts and ultimately winds through my childhood and early teens, which I spent between Provence and northern California. The mix was unusual to say the least. I had my American life and I had my French life, and they seemed more often than not to collide with the subject of food.
The fall I turned two years old, shortly before we moved to France, my mother and I had traveled to New York, staying with Sondra Leftoff, a lifelong friend of my mother and now of mine. On that trip we bought roasted chestnuts wrapped in newspaper cones from street vendors in Manhattan. Our next stop was Paris, where we again had roasted chestnuts bought on the street. Once my family moved back to California, I don’t believe I ever had roasted chestnuts again until I graduated from college and made them myself. They exploded in the oven during a dinner party because I did not know to score the thick woody skins to allow the built-up steam to escape.
Although my family only lived a little more than two years in Provence with the goats and making cheese before returning to California where my parents became high school teachers, we returned every summer to our old stone farmhouse, leaving as soon as school got out, traveling there by various routes, and once settled in, exploring our world with day trips to the sea, to lakes, and to neighboring villages and castles. It was there, during those long, lazy summers with my family, that I learned the smells of the forest as we gathered wild herbs, the taste of truly fresh fish and vegetables, and the pleasure of lingering over the table.
Thus began my journey from Paris to Provence, starting and ending in Paris. I now visit my French in-laws who live in Paris, and in between, I share those long drives to Provence with my husband and twin boys, in a larger car, but still to visit my childhood home and friends.
Every other year in May, before my sister and I finished school, my parents would map out a different route through France, snaking our way through big cities and small towns. Some routes were determined by the availability of friends for our visit, others were determined by adventure, but no two routes were the same. A typical summertime journey would start in Paris, then swing over to the west to Rennes, include a little jaunt up to Saint Malo, then wind down to Bordeaux, then over to Lyon where my father went to medical school (and where my mom drove every weekend from Paris to visit him before they were married), on to Geneva, and would always end up in Provence. This is the reason why Paris and Provence memories are the strongest for me: our constant starting point and ending point.
We began these adventures in the early 1980s when I was three years old and my sister was four. What originally brought my parents to France wasn’t a change of pace or lifestyle, but because my dad had attended medical school in Lyon years earlier. They had always shared a connection to the people, the wine, the food, and French culture, and in turn, wanted my sister and me to experience some of the same adventures they had had in their late twenties and early thirties. Now that I am that same age at what I’m sure seemed to them a time of “endless possibilities of love, life, and travel,” I too am experiencing the pangs of French wanderlust. When I visit France today, I feel like I’ve arrived at my second home, and I want to eat and drink my way through the streets of Paris, the wineries of Bordeaux, and the markets of Provence.
In this book are the sounds, the smells, the textures, and the tastes of my childhood summertime—picnics on the Seine with cheese and wine; late family hours-long dinners with course after delicious course (even though my sister and I were impatient and so badly wanted to get up from the table); white ham or jambon cru with butter on a cream-colored, soft, and crispy baguette; goûter (a simple snack of baguette and chocolate) after swimming in the Mediterranean for hours; roasted chestnuts and crepes with butter and sugar on a Paris street corner; picking blackberries in endless green fields with French friends (then eating them in secret tree houses!). Memories like these are some of the reasons why I am a photographer to this day. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Ethel experienced a very similar way of life during her childhood summers as well, and with these words, recipes, images, and journals, we reminisce what a luscious childhood our parents created for us.
To leave one’s home as a child and visit a foreign country forms impressions embedded for a lifetime. These memories are most often shared with siblings and parents who traveled together, but Sara and I discovered that we each understood practically down to the sauce on the meat and the faces of the elderly women who pinched our cheeks what the other had experienced in France. As children, we were different because no one else in our schools or on our blocks had traveled to France in the summers and eaten exotic foods such as snails, tiny fried fish, rich cakes, and salted hams. Ours were solitary experiences, ones not really made for sharing in the early days of September once back to school but for keeping to ourselves. Now years later, we are enchanted by our own childhoods, continually folding so much of what we experienced into our contemporary lives.
The recipes are the outline of the natural progression of our summer holidays, which began with the first steps off the plane, tumbled into long road travels to the south of France, stopped at open-air marchés, and followed by picnics, wanderings through ancient villages, and swims in the tepid Mediterranean Sea. As the days went on and we settled with friends and families, meals and drinks were shared in cafés, afternoon goûter with local children, and last, but possibly most cherished, long lazy meals with family and friends. The recipes were selected as bookmarks for our memories: individual ham and cheese quiches purchased at a bakery the morning of a long stretch of driving, oven-roasted tomatoes purchased from open markets abundant in the flush of summer, and always, at least once, butter- and garlic-drenched snails.
