A Paris Christmas: An improbable tale of good food and true love

by John Baxter

  Previously published in the UK in 2011

  with the title Cooking for Claudine

  For my French family

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. A Good Tooth

  2. Stranger in a Strange Land

  3. George

  4. Ninety Degrees of Christmas

  5. The Food of Love

  6. The Servant Problem

  7. The Ghosts of Christmases Past

  8. Oysters

  9. Thank Heaven for Little Girls

  10. A Dissertation on Roast Pig

  11. All in the Mind

  12. Apples

  13. Cheese

  14. The Grip of the Grape

  15. Does Madame Burn?

  16. Bread

  17. The Right Way to Walk

  18. The Spice Box of Earth

  19. Christmas Eve

  20. The Ghost of Christmas Present

  21. Green Christmas

  22. A Sense of Place

  23. Project Piglet

  24. Simple Gifts

  25. Getting It Together

  26. à table!

  27. The Dinner

  28. Washing Up

  Appendix 1

  Appendix 2

  About the Author

  Also by John Baxter

  Copyright

  Preface

  I was preparing dinner with the help of my friend, the Movie Star.

  “When you first meet people,” I said, “do they ask you when you first knew you wanted to be an actor?”

  “Not very often.” He wiped his hands on one of my aprons. “Where do you keep the English mustard?”

  “Fridge door,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

  He dumped a teaspoon of canary-yellow Colman’s into the paste of soft butter, flour and black pepper, and began to cream them together.

  “Not really. I’m not sure I could tell them anyway. I think you’re born with it—like being able to waggle your ears.”

  “And yet people always ask me when I first decided I wanted to cook.”

  “Oh, well, yes; they ask me that too. All the time. They see me making a soufflé or boning a chicken, and they say, ‘Where did you learn that?’ As if it was something unnatural …” With a soft spatula, he started to smear the butter and mustard mixture onto the côte de boeuf we’d be eating for dinner that evening. It creates a crust that keeps the juices in and makes the beef particularly succulent. “Who can remember, anyway?”

  I can.

  I was five; maybe six. Our family was spending two weeks at a tiny seaside resort on the Australian coast called Wottamolla, south of Sydney. It’s in the middle of a national park, so there are almost no houses today, and there were even fewer then. Our hillside shack was mostly verandah. We could see the only store in town from the front door, which is why I was given a metal billycan with a wire handle and a tight lid, and told to walk down and buy two pints of milk.

  When I hadn’t returned in an hour, my father went looking—and found me sitting on the beach. I’d taken the lid off the can and was carefully trickling handfuls of white sand into the milk.

  The Movie Star stopped massaging the last of the paste into the beef.

  “And this taught you what about cooking, exactly?”

  I remembered how the grains glittered as they flowed from my hand, and the way the milk snuffed out that brilliance. The sand looked so light, it surely must dissolve, I thought to myself. Yet when I stirred the milk with a stick, I could feel the drag. The sand hadn’t melted. It was still there, a sludge at the bottom of the can.

  “It taught me that sand might look like sugar or salt,” I said, “but it didn’t act the same.”

  “You don’t say. Before you uncork any more revelations, let’s get this in.”

  We skewered the beef with the rod of the rotisserie and slotted it in place in the centre of the oven, which was already up to 450 degrees. I closed the door, reduced the heat to 175 degrees, and set the timer. With a stately motion, the beef began to turn. Sex, drugs and rock and roll are all fine in their way, but give me a good oven every time.

  “Even at five,” my friend said, “I knew sand from sugar. It’s only actresses who are dumb.”

  Well, of course I knew the difference too. I just didn’t know why they were different, and what that difference meant in practice.

  “That must be why you’re the movie star,” I said, “and I’m just a common scribbler.”

  “Must be.” He topped up our glasses from the bottle of Château Lafitte Rothschild. Nice to think that part of his salary for the last piece of TV tripe was being spent in a good cause.

  “So… you discovered sand wouldn’t dissolve in milk,” he said. “What then?”

  “Oh, that was when it started to be fun.”

  From understanding why sand was not sugar, and sugar not salt, it was a short step to butter and oil, and why foods acted and tasted differently if you cooked them in one or the other, or a combination of the two; why egg whites made things light and yolks made them heavy; why it was important to know whether to put the salt in at the beginning or at the end; why you never used chicken skin in making stock, why chopped garlic tasted different to crushed, and why, in baking an apple, you never cut out the whole core… the important things, that make the difference between food that is just edible and something that feeds not only the body but the soul.

  So you see the capacity to cook will see you across more frontiers, make you more friends, give you more pure satisfaction, win you more admiration—even love —than any language or skill. Food can provide solace, it can sustain, it can satisfy and seduce. I had arrived in France as a foreigner not speaking a word of the language, and within a few weeks, without ever having had a cooking lesson in my life, found myself preparing Christmas dinner for twenty members of my new French family in an eighteenth-century château in the presence of my formidable mother-in-law, Madame Claudine.

  How did this happen?

  Well, pour yourself a glass—because it’s a long story.

  1

  A Good Tooth

  I’ve noticed that people who know how to eat are never idiots.

  —GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

  When our daughter was eight, Marie-Dominique and I overheard her talking to another child as they bounced on a trampoline at a beach in southern France.

  “Je suis une petite australienne,” Louise explained, “et mon papa est cuisinier.”—“I’m a little Australian, and my father is a cook.”

  Neither statement was quite true, nor quite false either. Louise does hold dual Australian and French citizenship. And I do cook our meals, and have done so ever since I moved to Paris eighteen years ago to marry her mother. And each Christmas, for some years, I’ve also prepared Christmas dinner for my adoptive French family, up to twenty people.

  In hell, it’s been said, the drivers are Italian and the police French, while the lovers and, worse, the cooks are English. The Australia of my childhood still thought of itself as an outpost of the British Empire, and ate accordingly. Scandalously for a country abounding in succulent fish and seafood, fresh greens and salads, in mangos, papayas, and pineapples, Australian cuisine comprised hot dogs and meat pies, fried fish and chips, overcooked roasts, soggy vegetables, and canned fruit with canned cream. Meals were less a case of “chips with everything” than “chips instead of everything”.

  I can see most of my life as a flight from the horrors of the Australian table. It’s ironic that, almost
as soon as I left for Europe in 1969, its food began to improve, until today there are few countries where one can eat and drink so variously and well. But by then it was too late. I was launched on a voyage that would take me, via the cuisine of a score of cultures, to safe harbour in the gastronomical capital of the world, and cooking Christmas dinner in Paris.

  That a person raised in rural New South Wales, in the heart of the meat-pie-and-peas country, should end up preparing Christmas dinner for a French family with roots deep in the soil of medieval France, and, moreover, do so in a country house dating from before Australia was even discovered, seems the height of improbability.

  First, I had no training as a cook, no experience in a restaurant, no diplôme from the Cordon Bleu school of culinary art. What I knew about food I’d learned the hard way, as a means of survival and to satisfy a craving to taste interesting things. Some people are born with a knack for drawing, the ability to sing in tune, or that flair for theatricality Noël Coward called “a talent to amuse”. My inborn talent was more selfish. In Australia, anyone possessing a healthy appetite is said to have “a good tooth”, and my qualifications for this title were impeccable.

  Second, I was not French—a fact my new in-laws felt as keenly as I did, but were ready to endure because I made Marie-Dominique happy and because, far more important, we had added a child to the family.

  My third deficiency was social. How could I become integrated into a distinguished French dynasty when my forebears were so low class? Specifically, the Australian branch of the Baxters was descended from a criminal, albeit a not very skilful one. In the early nineteenth century, my English great-great-great-grandmother stole a bucket and was transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay, never to return. (She was one of the lucky ones. Had there been anything in the bucket, they’d have hanged her.)

  As it turned out, I was wrong to worry that Marie-Dominique’s family would think less of me for my convict forebears. The French are no strangers to vice. Indeed, they invented many of the more interesting ones and have worked hard for centuries to perfect the rest. To the French, sin—provided it is conceived with imagination and carried off with flair—is like the dust on an old bottle of burgundy, the streaks of grey in the hair of a loved one, the gleam of long, loving use on the mahogany of an ancient cabinet. It’s evidence of endurance, of survival, of life.

  2

  Stranger in a Strange Land

  A fine dinner should be a ceremony, an evening’s entertainment.

  —JULIAN STREET

  A Christmas dinner was the first event I attended in France as a member of what would shortly be my French family. It was the winter of 1989 and I’d only been in Europe for two weeks.

  Struck down by that helpless love which the French call un coup de foudre—a thunderclap—I’d abandoned a comfortable life in Los Angeles and, on the spur of the moment, moved to Paris to be with the woman I loved. That I should relocate so suddenly and completely seemed lunatic to my Californian friends—even more so since I knew no more French than one can pick up from movie subtitles.

  A week later, as I brooded in Marie-Dominique’s tiny studio apartment on the Île de la Cité, in the heart of Paris, staring out at this grey European city swept by a freezing wind straight off the steppes of Russia, I could almost agree with them. Was I out of my mind?

  What kept me from getting the next plane back was my lack of a good overcoat.

  If my cultural and linguistic skills were unequal to France, my wardrobe was worse. In Los Angeles, we adapted to winter by switching from short-sleeved shirts to long, and on really cold nights—when the temperature dropped to the sixties Fahrenheit, say—draping a scarf around our necks.

  On my first Sunday in Paris, I made the mistake of accompanying Marie-Do on a walk with no more insulation than a sweater under my jacket. After I’d turned an ominous shade of blue, we took refuge in a café thick with cigarette smoke—mixed, I was later to discover, with the microbes of that virulent bug the French call la grippe. It put me in bed for a week. By the time I felt well enough to flee back to California, it was too late. Christmas had arrived.

  That Christmas Eve, in the late afternoon, we drove west out of Paris, following a sun that was already, at four p.m., sinking below the horizon. Speeding through the leafless forest of the Bois de Boulogne, we followed the périphérique along the Seine, then swung across the river at Saint-Cloud, and headed for Versailles. Fifty kilometres beyond was the village of Richebourg, and Christmas dinner in the country home of Marie-Do’s formidable mother, a retired university professor, long-widowed, whom I would learn, in time, to address as Claudine.

  Once we turned off the highway into a maze of country B-roads, the France through which we drove was one in which the three musketeers would have felt completely at home. Farmhouses of brick, hulking and two-storied, squatted amid vast unfenced fields, their ploughed soil dark and rich as chocolate. Geese in the barnyards hooted indignantly as we passed.

  Every few kilometres, a high stone wall and a carefully tended wood behind it announced the presence of a château. From the road, we glimpsed only the tall wrought-iron gates, a gravelled drive, a façade of pale grey stone, chill as a glacier.

  The country home of Claudine—she also kept an apartment in Paris’s sixth arrondissement, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens—proved less daunting than these stately homes, but only just. I stared in awe at the stone fireplace, large enough to lie down in. The gnarled, toffee-coloured chestnut beams, held together with wooden pegs rather than nails, still bore the marks of the adzes with which the carpenters, now more than two centuries dead, had shaped them.

  Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the garden, dotted with old peach and cherry trees, sloped away under a sky pricked with stars. In my state of mind, no landscape could have looked more desolate.

  I loitered around the living room, clutching a glass of something sweet and alcoholic that might have been sherry but wasn’t. Around me bustled the preparations for a French Christmas dinner—activities in which I was supremely useless. I examined paintings or watched flames devour the logs in the fire. Occasionally, I circled the dinner table cluttered with crystal, porcelain, and silver, and counted again the fourteen chairs, wondering which would be my particular hot seat.

  Periodically, a car drew up, and cries from the kitchen announced the arrival of more relatives. Dutifully, Marie-Do brought them to meet me. The first, her tante Françoise, a commanding woman who was also her marraine—godmother—regarded me from over her spectacles and politely wished me “Bonne fête”.

  Each new arrival brought something for the feast. Françoise’s contribution was a bowl of chocolate mousse, thick and dark as the soil we’d seen in the ploughed fields on our way here.

  “Riche,” I suggested.

  Françoise raised her eyebrows and turned down the corners of her mouth. “Ce n’est pas …” Remembering I was a foreigner, she shifted into her limited English. I was to get to know this effect—rather like a marathon runner who’s been pelting along on concrete suddenly slogging through deep sand.

  “It is … hmph hmph … not so rich, I think. Just … rph hmph … the cream, the chocolat, some … er, cognac, and … hmph … comment ça se dit …” She muttered through numbers, one of the hardest things to learn in any language. “Un, deux, trois … vingt-cinq … umph, twenty-five eggs?”

  Jean-Marie, Marie-Do’s brother-in-law, could hardly have been more different in style. He arrived on a Harley, with Marie-Do’s sister Caroline on the pillion. From the worn leathers and the grease under his fingernails, I’d have taken him for a mechanic who’d married out of his class. In fact, he was a highly placed civil servant, while Caroline ran the Paris campus of a major American university.

  Jean-Marie offered a hand as thick and rough as an oven mitt. “Bonne fête.”

  “Er … bonne fête … um … aussi.”

  He peered into my drink.

  “Ah, le pineau de Charente.
” He sorted through his limited English vocabulary. “You like?”

  “It’s OK. I was wondering what it’s made of.”

  He looked blank. I fell back, as I was increasingly forced to do, on sign language, dipping a finger, tasting, miming a query.

  “Oh. Il y a du cognac, et …” But mime could only go so far—where was Marcel Marceau when you needed him?—and I had to buttonhole Marie-Do to translate his motions of squeezing … crushing …

  “It’s brandy,” she explained, “mixed with fermented grape juice, crushed from the skins and seeds after they’ve made the wine. You like it?”

  Like Françoise, Jean-Marie had brought something for the dinner. Wandering into the kitchen, I watched him remove it from the pannier of his bike. Unwrapping half an issue of France Soir, he revealed a large glass preserving jar. Inside, immersed in golden fat and looking like the organ of a very ill alcoholic, was an entire goose liver.

  As carefully as a surgeon handling a beating heart, he slid it from the jar onto a board.

  “Cuillère,” he demanded.

  Someone handed him a spoon. He scraped off the fat—to be reserved for the creation of baked potatoes, crunchy golden on the outside, meltingly tender within.

  “Torchon.” A cloth completed the cleaning.

  “Couteau.”

  Decades of use had weathered the knife’s handle almost white and worn the blade razor-thin. Judiciously, Jean-Marie sliced the liver into slightly more generous portions than one would receive in even the best restaurant—a demonstration that this was “family”.

  He’d just finished, and the women were arranging the slices artistically on a dish, flanked by the small, crunchy, pickled cucumbers called cornichons, when Françoise returned. Following her was an imposing white-haired man in his early seventies, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, silk tie, and white shirt—her husband, and, as I’d been warned by Marie-Do, the famously reticent and moody alpha male of the family, Jean-Paul.