by Ann Mah
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 dec
lined 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 p
resent.
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.