by Ann Mah
“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.
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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 produ
ced 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.
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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.
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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 aliv
e. 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.