by Ann Mah
2 to 3 cloves plump garlic
¼ cup olive oil plus more to taste
Pinch of salt
1 cup grated Gruyère or Parmesan, or a combination
Preparing the soup
If using fresh beans: Shell and rinse the white and cranberry beans. In a large Dutch oven or soup pot, add the beans and cover them with 2 inches of cold, salted water (about 2 quarts). Bring to a boil over medium heat, skimming the foam from the surface. Lower the heat and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, until the beans start to soften.
If using dried beans: In a large Dutch oven or soup pot, add the white and cranberry beans and cover them with 2 inches of cold, unsalted water (about 2 quarts). Bring to a boil over medium heat, skimming the foam from the surface. Lower the heat and simmer for about 1½ hours, or until the beans are tender. The cooking time for dried beans varies greatly, so make sure to test the beans for tenderness before proceeding with the recipe.
While the beans are cooking, peel the zucchini, leaving half the skin on in stripes, and cut into 1½-inch dice. Peel and cube the potatoes into the same size. Add the zucchini, the potato cubes, and the segmented green beans to the pot of cooked beans. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer gently until the zucchini disintegrates (about an hour), using a fork to mash a few pieces of potato and zucchini against the side of the pot, to thicken the soup. Raise the heat slightly and add the macaroni, cooking until very soft. Taste and season the soup.
Making the pistou
While the soup is cooking, make the pistou. Peel and seed the tomatoes and blend them into a sauce or pass the tomatoes through a food mill. Pluck the basil leaves from their stems. Peel the garlic and chop it roughly. In a blender or food processor, add the basil leaves, garlic, olive oil, and a pinch of salt. Blend, pausing intermittently to scrape down the sides of the work bowl. Add the crushed tomatoes and puree into a smooth sauce, adding more olive oil if necessary.
Remove the soup from the heat. Stir in the pistou and combine thoroughly. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Serve, passing the grated cheese at the table. Soupe au pistou can be made in advance and reheated; it’s also delicious chilled.
Chapter 6
Toulouse, Castelnaudary, Carcassonne / Cassoulet
After weeks of summer indolence, Paris awoke with a start. One day it was sunny and still, people were licking ice-cream cones while their feet dangled over the banks of the Seine, and Calvin and I dragged our heavy bags back from the Gare de Lyon, closing our apartment’s volet blinds against the blazing afternoon light. The next day the calendar page flipped to September, the métro was crowded, the cafés were packed at lunch, and my husband kissed me good-bye and began his long journey back to Iraq. The apartment felt empty, as ghostly as the August streets of Paris, and yet now that it was September, those very streets had come to life again. I took comfort in their bustle, even as I squared my shoulders to begin again without Calvin.
La rentrée was like an alarm clock without a snooze button. Children returned to school and adults to work, people made resolutions for the New Year, pharmacies stocked their windows with diet pills. Dry cleaners unlocked their doors again, liberating clothes that had been held hostage for the entire month of August. Friends met at rentrée cocktail parties, falling into one another’s arms as if they’d been reunited after a natural disaster, not just a few weeks of summer holidays. La rentrée is a season of lunch dates and gallery openings, of new clothes and good intentions.
In the spirit of the moment, I made my own vow: I would start cooking more. And yet only a few days after Calvin left, I had already fallen into my old habits without him. Insomnia. Meals in front of the computer. An empty fridge. A diet that consisted solely of . . . well, I’m a little embarrassed to say.
Three times a week—on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays—an open market unfurled right below my living-room windows, stretching along the center island of boulevard Raspail. It was a beautiful market, a double column of stalls spilling with clear-eyed fish, pyramids of bright produce, cheeses oozing at room temperature, bins of olives that filled the air with briny pungency. If you wanted fresh pumpkin, the vendor would hack off a slice from a Cinderella-size gourd. If you wanted fresh oysters, the fishmonger would teach you how to open them, taking your hand in his to show you how much pressure to apply and where. If you wanted local strawberries, the produce guy might tell you, “Wait until next week. They’ll be sweeter.” I adored the market. It was one of my favorite things about living in Paris, a cook’s nirvana. And I had stopped going.
I could have blamed my schedule, which was busier now that the fall season of author lectures had begun again at the American Library. Marketing in France takes eons. You must wait in long lines, vigilant for impatient customers who edge in front of you. When it’s finally your turn, you must announce your desires to the vendor, describing the required ripeness of your avocados or the exact thickness of a salmon steak. Everything must be prepared for you—the tomatoes must be bagged for you, the globe artichoke plucked from a pile for you, the chicken breasts sliced into escalopes and lightly pounded for you. By the time you’ve visited three vendors, a whole morning has elapsed. (In fact, there are no quick transactions of any kind in France. A trip to the dry cleaner’s involves watching the woman ahead of you explain each stain on each item of clothing. Buying an ice-cream cone on a warm day means waiting for the server to beat air into each well of glace before scooping. When he was a student, Calvin used to dread borrowing the vacuum cleaner from his neighbors because it always entailed an invitation for coffee and an hour of small talk.)
So yes, shopping at the market is a slow endeavor. But even though I was busy juggling work and writing, I could have made time for it, because shouldn’t we make time for our favorite things in life? Instead, every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, I listened to the action unfold through my apartment windows—the bustle and slam of early-morning setup, the swooping call of the vendors hawking their wares—and I avoided it. Why? I thought I loved to cook, but with Calvin away I had an embarrassing epiphany: What I really loved was cooking for an audience. And now that I was cooking for one, I wasn’t doing much cooking at all.
Please note that I didn’t say eating. I was still doing plenty of that, at lunch with my colleagues, at restaurants with friends, or on my own at home. But in the kitchen I had regressed to the simple foods of my single days—scrambled eggs, pasta with butter and Parmesan, baked beans on toast. Peanut butter on toast. Avocado on toast. Buttered toast. Any kind of toast, really. Sure, I was making a few different versions: Toast spread with ricotta cheese and drizzled with honey. Toast with almond butter. Toast with a poached egg. There were even some international variations: Bruschetta, Italian toast rubbed with garlic and dribbled with high-quality olive oil. Or its Spanish cousin, pan con tomate, which swiped the bread with the cut side of a tomato and was particularly delicious on a hot night with a glass of white wine. Nevertheless, no matter how you sliced it, no matter the fancy vocabulary you spread on it, the truth was this: I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live for a limited period in cooking paradise, and the only thing I was cooking was . . . toast.
I started viewing Paris through toast-colored glasses, if you will. Strolling around my neighborhood, I began to rank the stores by the type of bread they sold, or rather by how well that bread performed in the toaster. The old-fashioned gilt-and-black boulangerie that sat squarely on a busy corner of rue de Rennes had wonderful baguettes—I liked the tradition, nicknamed “tradi,” crusty and chewier than its ordinaire counterpart—but they were a toaster failure, getting trapped in the slots and burning. The gourmet-food mecca known as La Grande Épicerie—where I regularly saw groups of female Japanese tourists squeal over bricks of salted butter—sold adequate loaves of pain de campagne, good in a pinch, though I found them a bit too salty and the crumb too soft. No, my favorite toast-supply store was Poilâne, perhaps the city’s most famous traditional
bakery, squeezed into a tiny, jewel-box boutique on the rue du Cherche-Midi. “Une demi-miche, coupée en tranches,” I’d order, and receive half a round loaf, cut by machine into thin, wide planks, which, though delicious raw (that is, untoasted), became, when grilled, a paragon of crunch and chew.
One morning I took a tour of Poilâne’s kitchen, climbing down a narrow staircase into a brick-walled basement room so small I would have mistaken it for a storeroom but for the cavernous wood-burning oven dominating the back. A skinny young man clad in a white T-shirt and long white shorts toiled away in the blazing heat. His name was Jean-Michel, and he was one of five master bakers who worked here in six-hour shifts around the clock, a continuous cycle of dough-to-bread punctuated by the regular stoking and feeding of the wood oven, which burned twenty-four hours a day. The oven dated to the seventeenth century, when the Couvent des Prémontrés occupied the site (or perhaps even earlier). Like many religious buildings, the convent was destroyed during the French Revolution, but the oven endured, serving one boulangerie after another until Pierre Poilâne discovered it. He opened his bakery here in 1932, bucking the trend of white-flour baguettes to produce oversize round loaves made of wheat flour, water, sea salt, and sourdough starter, the same recipe used today. In the 1970s his son, Lionel, joined the bakery, expanding it to three shops in Paris, one in London, and a factory in Bièvres. When Lionel and his wife died in a helicopter accident in 2002, their daughter, Apollonia, succeeded them, the third generation to run the business.
In Poilâne’s basement kitchen, the heat caused little rivulets of sweat to run down the nape of my neck, soaking my hair and making me want to pant. But it didn’t seem to affect Jean-Michel. He worked in a blur of constant motion, whirling around with practiced efficiency and always, always returning to the oven, the nexus of his activity. I edged as close as I dared, peering through the ferocious orange light to glimpse the loaves of bread baking within the domed space. The oven had been rebuilt several times over the centuries, but in shape and principle it remained the same as the original—similar even to ovens from ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia—a large beehive chamber, heated from below. Jean-Michel tended his loaves with a long-handled paddle, turning and manipulating them so that they browned evenly within the radiating heat. People had been baking bread this way for centuries, a task so central to French culture that many villages still preserved a communal oven. Jean-Michel thrust his paddle into the oven, gave a quick jerk, and then another, and whisked out of the heat two loaves, each dark, golden, and crackling a little. It was all so beautiful—the fresh loaves of bread, Jean-Michel’s balletic strength, the history flowing through the space—that I almost applauded. Later we went upstairs and ate sugar cookies and slices of raisin bread. Sometimes, I thought, living in Paris was like living in a museum—beautiful and poignant and untouched by time.
That evening I was in the kitchen making dinner—that is, waiting for the toaster to pop—and I couldn’t stop thinking about the oven that had helped produce my meal. Though I had loved witnessing Poilâne’s traditional bread-making process, it felt archaic, disconnected from the modern world, just as I still felt a little disconnected from Paris, an observer of the city rather than a participant. I spread some goat cheese on my toast and added a few slices of cucumber and I wondered, how can I make Paris feel more like home? Cooking was the obvious answer—but cooking what? I searched my mind for the most comforting dish in my repertoire. Lasagna? Matzo-ball soup? My dad’s mapo tofu? No, though I loved them all, none of them was quite right; each required special ingredients that would be difficult to get, making them too awkwardly foreign rather than organic and local. The dish, I decided, should be French, a recipe that had evolved over centuries from the terroir, something to cook slowly and fuss over. The description could have fit any number of French specialties, but when I closed my eyes and tried to picture the epitome of French comfort food, one thing came to mind: cassoulet.
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The first time I had cassoulet was in Paris, at a restaurant on the boulevard Saint-Germain called Aux Fins Gourmets. At the time Calvin and I were living in Beijing, but we’d come to France for a week’s vacation, to drink wine, revel in a city built on a human scale, and breathe in the golden, blue-skied spring weather. Our friend Adam had grown up around the corner from the restaurant, and his mother had recommended it to us—it had been a family favorite during Adam’s childhood. I loved it as much because I could imagine him there as a kid—scribbling on the paper-topped table between bites of roast lamb—as for its own outlandish, outmoded charm.
Aux Fins Gourmets had yellow walls stained from the smoke of ten thousand cigarettes, floors of worn tile, and, in one corner, an accordion-doored phone booth whose rotary telephone still accepted only French francs. Large mirrors reflected the bulbous bistro lighting as well as the clientele, an aging, elegantly dressed crowd—Madame in lipstick and coiffed hair, Monsieur in a corduroy jacket and a floppy cravat—who received the hearty handshake reserved for regulars when they entered. The menu came in a little folder, like something you’d use to present a school report, and had been typed—with a typewriter, if that were possible—onto sheets of ancient, yellowed stationery. The food was classic and sober, with entrées like leeks in vinaigrette or museau de boeuf (head cheese, I found out the hard way) or pickled herrings served à volonté from an immense terrine. Main courses were equally plain—omelets, roast chicken, steak frites—and some of them reflected the owner’s southwest-French heritage, like the confit de canard, served with an avalanche of sautéed garlic potatoes, or the cassoulet, which came with the promise of extra beans if you wanted them.
We sipped a little wine and discreetly watched the other customers in the restaurant’s mirrors. Was that handsome man with flamboyant hair Bernard-Henri Lévy? Calvin thought the life-size, well-preserved Barbie doll by the gentleman’s side might be the actress Arielle Dombasle. We were discussing what a French philosopher and his impossibly thin wife might find to eat on the menu when our food arrived, an enormous crock of cassoulet, bubbling gently around the sides of its golden, bread-crumbed crust. Calvin broke in with a spoon, scooping up a wealth of tender white beans in a rich sauce, digging deeper to unearth chunks of sausage and confit de canard. The beans were hot enough to scorch, but they had a plush texture, and their flavor—once they had cooled enough to taste them—unfolded in a luxuriant richness, redolent of pork, duck fat, and a subtle hint of cloves and nutmeg. The hunks of garlicky sausage and confit de canard, which was really just duck preserved in salt and cooked in its own fat, added a toothsome heartiness, but it was the beans that I loved most, creamy and lush.
At first we ate with restraint, conscious of our long-suffering arteries. But as the level of cassoulet dipped lower and lower, we began to rationalize. “How many times in our lives will we have the opportunity to eat cassoulet in Paris?” Calvin asked. (As it turns out, a lot. We just didn’t know that then.)
“What about the red wine we’re drinking? Doesn’t that counteract the fat?” I took another sip to illustrate my point. After this argument, of course, we felt obliged to order another pichet, and before we knew it, between the extra sips of wine and just-one-more spoonfuls of beans, we had finished the entire vat of cassoulet—a small vat, but a vat nonetheless.
“Voulez-vous encore des haricots?” Our waiter hovered above our table.
More beans? I opened my mouth, and—perhaps I was drunk on wine, or legumes, or duck fat, or all three—I felt my lips begin to form the word “Ou—”
“Non, merci.” Calvin interjected. “On a très bien mangé.”
I heaved a small sigh of relief and a little disappointment. But it was true—we had eaten very well indeed.
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I thought cassoulet came from Toulouse, but once I decided to travel there, to discover the dish’s true story and secrets, I learned that an entire region
of southwestern France claims it, specifically a cradle-shaped territory that forms the province formerly known as Languedoc. “Cassoulet is the God of the Occitan cuisine,” wrote the chef, culinary lexicographer, and author of the first Larousse Gastronomique, Prosper Montagné, in his 1929 book, Le Festin Occitan. “A god in three forms: God the father is the cassoulet of Castelnaudary; God the son is that of Carcassonne; and the Holy Spirit is that of Toulouse.” These three cities—Toulouse, Castelnaudary, and Carcassonne—lie in a line that curves gently eastward, connected not only by cassoulet but also by the seventeenth-century man-made waterway the Canal du Midi.
The territory of Languedoc takes its name from its language, the Latin-based langue d’oc, spoken there since the twelfth century. The word oc, which means “yes,” distinguished the language from the langue d’oïl, spoken farther north, where the word oïl eventually became oui. Speakers of the language of Oc were called oc-citan—Occitan—and they once covered most of southern France. Today the langue d’oc is still spoken by about a third of the region’s population, taught in the region’s schools, and broadcast on television and radio.
Until the French Revolution, the kingdom of France was organized into provinces—like the Languedoc, or Burgundy, or Champagne—their boundaries delineated more by common customs and traditions than political decree. In 1790 this system was abandoned in favor of the administrative départements still used today. Languedoc was divided, and Toulouse, the province’s ancient capital, became part of the Midi-Pyrénées, while the rest of the territory formed the Languedoc-Roussillon. This explained why my favorite French guidebooks, the Guide du Routard series, split Toulouse from Castelnaudary and Carcassonne.
Over the centuries Toulouse has enjoyed many waves of prosperity: as a central city of Roman Gaul, as a Visigothic and Carolingian capital, as one of medieval Europe’s great artistic and literary capitals governed by the counts of Toulouse, as a center of the Renaissance dye trade, and today as the headquarters of Airbus, one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers. Wandering the city in the famous southern sunshine, I noticed that everything and everyone seemed tinged with a rosy glow, the flush heightened by the reflection of sun on Renaissance architecture. They call Toulouse la ville rose—the pink city—and indeed the streets are a girlish paradise, ranging from sixteenth-century hôtels particuliers in shades of palest petal to the hot coral brick façades of the place du Capitole.