At Home in France

by Ann Barry

  Kitchen here is galley. The advantage is that everything is within arm’s reach. And I can state unabashedly that some of the best meals of my life came out of that pint-size room.

  As well as, once, a disaster, when I had a bout of food poisoning after eating an over-the-hill sausage called merguez. It was then that I learned, however, that one does not get sick from French food. When I reported my problem (intoxication alimentaire; I had looked it up) to the pharmacist, he nodded appreciatively and said, “Ah, oui, la crise de foie.”

  The French are known for their fixation on the liver; la crise de foie is as familiar as our common cold. A lesson in one of my French exercise books depicts a scene similar to mine in the pharmacy. Only there is no mention of food poisoning. Food poisoning? Despite the fact that it’s in the dictionary, it does not exist in France.

  The multitude of village food festivals is testimony to the average Frenchman’s culinary appreciation. A couple of years ago, for example, there was a fête de la noix, held on a Sunday afternoon in October. It took place in nearby Saillac, a small circle of a village with an especially charming little church. The festival promised—I came upon flyers in a local shop—an omelette géante. When I arrived, I discovered that tout le monde was there—the only spot for the car was down a country lane some distance away.

  On this sunny, warm day, the single restaurant was bursting at its seams, with midday diners spilling onto tables set up outdoors. Under a little tent in the center of the village, merchants were also selling anything and everything made from walnuts: pâtés, cookies, cakes, oils, liqueurs, and so on. A complete sucker for festival takeouts, I typically load up with more than I can possibly consume. As a child of parents who had lived through the Depression, perhaps I caught something of their stocking-up instincts. Or something of my father’s fetish for mail-order goods, a habit that far outpaced our small family’s consumption.

  The preparation of the omelette géante was announced for four o’clock. It was to take place on a stretch of roadway on the far side of a stone wall by the tent. As the hour approached, the crowds began migrating in that direction, jockeying for prized positions on top of the stone wall.

  The omelette géante, I learned, would consist of four thousand eggs. I couldn’t get my mind around this numbing figure. What would four thousand eggs look like? How were they amassed? Had every chicken house in the Lot been cleaned out?

  In the center of the road was a narrow waist-high metal trough, perhaps sixty feet long, affixed with gas jets. Perhaps a dozen men and women involved in the preparation were gathered alongside. At the appointed hour they began unloading cardboard cartons of eggs, each containing three hundred and fifty eggs. It was a hailstorm of eggs. Standing over or seated by enormous plastic buckets and pails—some the size of New York City garbage cans—they began cracking the eggs. One gentleman, who was particularly dexterous, could crack two eggs in each hand at the same time. The scene of people and eggs was something out of a fairy tale or, even more bizarrely, out of a Bosch painting. This went on for nearly an hour. As the buckets filled up, members of the crew began beating them with giant hand whisks or electric beaters. Finally, bushels of chopped walnuts—which were, after all, the point of the festival—were stirred in. The gas jets were lit. As the trough heated up, oil was poured in. When the agreed-upon moment for cooking the omelette arrived, a small brass band, smartly decked out in white uniforms with gold-braided caps, struck up a rousing oompah-pah. This had the effect of a start button: kids began scampering about, dogs started yapping, cameras began flashing. The omelette géante went on the fire. A half-dozen men, stationed alongside the trough, stirred it with great paddles—like cooking with shovels—over gas jets that had to be constantly adjusted.

  There was plenty to go around. It was delicious: creamy, with the slight crunch of walnuts. Plus, an omelette eaten while leaning against an old stone wall in the sunshine is never bad.

  When I reported on the festival to the Hirondes, they were duly impressed, and seemed a little disappointed to have missed it. They’d spent the afternoon at a strawberry festival and had found the tartes aux fraises substandard.

  5

  THE STAFF OF LIFE

  My part of France, the Lot, is superb bread country. Privately, I conduct an ongoing Best Bread Contest. For a while the Bétaille bakery headed the list. Its pain de campagne is a slightly domed loaf with a crisp crust that shatters when you slice into it and a dense interior. Then I advanced a bakery in St-Céré into first place, when, one noon, I picked up half of a fat saucer of warm pain de campagne. It had a moist yeastiness that Bétaille’s lacked.

  Though it was somewhat beyond the realm of my survey, on a trip to the neighboring département of the Dordogne in the early spring of 1987, I went out of my way to visit the village of Meyrals, having read some travel piece claiming its bakery had “the best bread in the region.” I was the first through the door when the tiny boulangerie opened—a cold, gray, foggy morning that called out for a comforting café au lait. I chose a pain de campagne the size of an automobile tire’s hub, stashed it in the backseat, and set off for Pech Farguet. On the way back, reason set in—I’d bought more than I could possibly eat before it went stale.

  I stopped at the Hirondes. After reviewing my trip to the Dordogne, I mentioned my purchase of what I’d heard was a superior bread. Would they care to try some?

  They looked at me rather blankly and politely declined.

  I asked which bread they regarded as The Best.

  Bétaille’s, they agreed without hesitation.

  I then explained that I’d probably bought too much of the Dordogne bread. Did they by chance have a freezer, where I might store a portion? Then I could take it back to the States when I left at the end of the week.

  They stared at me, barely masking their incredulity. The notion of freezing bread—in a country where you went daily for your noon and evening baguette—was apparently a novel one. They didn’t have a freezer, but the Servais did.

  The Servais had no real interest in sampling another département’s bread either. I interviewed them on their opinion of The Best Bread.

  They paused gravely before answering. St-Céré’s boulangerie near the Coq Arlequin restaurant had probably the best, in their opinion. Yes, no question about it.

  Madame agreed cheerily to freeze my bread.

  “YOO ’AVE NO BREAD IN YUR COUNTREE?” Monsieur asked.

  A few years ago, at one of the Wednesday markets in St-Céré, I sampled an enormous (of basketball dimensions) loaf I purchased from one of the traveling salesmen and had to further refine my list. It was the tops, with a rugged crust and a nutty, moist interior with big holes, as if the dough had belched and stretched in the oven.

  The young man grinned proudly when I said it was the best bread I’d tasted. Was there a way to purchase it on a more regular basis? I asked. He replied that his father made the bread and that his bakery, with its wood-burning oven, was located near Martel. On Fridays, I could purchase it there. The name was Rauley.

  “Près de Martel!” I exploded joyfully. Martel was a mere half-hour drive from my house.

  “À Cabriole, près de Quatres Routes,” he said more precisely, and wrote the name on a slip of paper.

  I was leaving before the following Friday, so I had to put off the excursion until the following fall. Then—a penetratingly cold Friday morning when the mist in the valley refused to budge—I studied my map and set out for Rauley’s bakery. I relish a mission; I love a find. At Quatres Routes, I passed a sign for Cabriole and took the winding road uphill. This took me past a small cluster of houses and farms. There was no bakery in sight—nothing of a commercial nature. It seemed that Cabriole was not a village but a little hamlet. I circled back. Not a soul was outdoors, so I started back to Quatres Routes to inquire. Along the way I spotted some men repairing the road.

  I tooted my horn. “Je cherche la boulangerie à Cabriole,” I shouted to the group, hangi
ng my head out the rolled-down window. The toot, and my accented French, momentarily stunned them. Then one of the men came forward.

  “La boulangerie?” he said, doffing his cap.

  “Oui, Monsieur Rauley, pour son pain,” I said, hopes dimmed but undashed.

  “Eh, beang, Rauley! Le garage, à droit.”

  Garage? Why garage? Could this be right?

  “Le pain, c’est bon!” He waved. This was encouraging, but confusing. I circled back in the direction he’d pointed, which was simply retracing my route. Once again in Cabriole, I saw on the right what could be taken for a garage—a graveyard of run-down, antiquated cars. I turned in. There was a ramshackle farmhouse and a small barn. Chickens and ducks scurried crazily in the car’s path. A peacock was perched incongruously on a retired tractor. When I slammed the car door, it fanned its glorious tail.

  The crisp autumn air carried aromas of baking bread. Could this be the place after all? I followed the scent to a small barn—the boulangerie? Rapping on the door, I waited, but there was no response. I could hear movement from within, so I tried the latch. A giant of a man stood with his back to me, shoveling bread with a long paddle from the open oven and stacking the loaves on open wooden shelves. Due to a severely shortened leg, he careened as he moved back and forth, his body skewed like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was oblivious to my presence.

  “Monsieur?” I said hesitantly, but he didn’t respond. Apparently he was hard of hearing. How could I approach him without startling him? I made a wide circle and came up alongside his stooped figure by the oven.

  “Monsieur Rauley?” I repeated in a loud voice.

  He righted himself and stared fixedly at the apparition that had invaded his premises.

  “Je viens acheter votre pain,” I explained, pointing emphatically to the bread. “Le meilleur pain du monde.” I smiled winningly, hoping to get us past the awkward moment.

  With the barest flicker of an expression, he opened the oven door, to show me the grand glowing-brick interior. The smell was as good as smells get, like new-mown grass, the air before rain.

  “Grand ou petit!” he boomed.

  “Petit,” I replied (petit being about the size of a large dinner plate).

  “Froid ou chaud?” he then asked.

  This threw me for a minute. Warm was inherently more appealing, but what would be the point, since it would cool off on the drive home?

  “Froid,” I said.

  He chose a loaf from the shelf and weighed it on a small scale. In paying, I accidentally handed him a quarter instead of a franc. Seeing my mistake, I quickly explained the error.

  “C’est le même?” he asked.

  “À peu près,” I said, with a wavy motion of the hand.

  He preferred the American quarter. He polished it on the sleeve of his jacket as he opened the door for me.

  Rauley’s bread took the blue ribbon that year, vaut le voyage (worth the trip), in Michelin terms. It was immensely satisfying to know it was never far away.

  The quest, nonetheless, is never ending. As I approached the covered market in Brive on a sunny morning the following May, I passed a dairy truck whose owner was gazing off into space with a look of contentment on his face, evidently savoring his petit déjeuner: a hefty tranche of bread and slices of saucisson impaled on the point of a sharp knife, which he deskewered with his teeth. I reached up—a gesture that summons up a childhood sensation of diminutiveness, paying for candy in the drug store—to place the change for a purchase of comté cheese in his outstretched palm. I asked who he thought had the best bread in the market.

  He pointed to a small truck across the way.

  “Le meilleur,” he pronounced unhesitatingly. “Même dans leur forme bizarre,” he added.

  Most bread sellers in the market offer other items, such as cakes and rolls, laid out on long wooden tables. This purveyor sold nothing but bread, which I took as a positive sign of singular devotion. In the open trunk of the small van were stacks of bread, but the line was long and they were going fast. Monsieur was right. I had never seen bread in such a variety of shapes, as if the dough had been tossed and slapped around—clearly the work of the hand—and shoveled into the oven in whatever shape it landed. They had the look of old leather shoes, misshapen and craggy, with shiny, smooth “soles” in an ashen-gray color.

  When my turn came, I quickly asked the robust woman in a blue smock if all the bread was the same. Did I hear titters from the line?

  “Ben, oui.” She nodded. “Épais ou mince?” A choice of thick or thin—a question, really, of more dough or more crust. It was a heated moment, with the press of the waiting customers at my heels. “Mince,” the woman behind me prodded.

  “Épais,” I found myself saying. “Mais plus petit?” I pleaded as she picked up a loaf the size of a garbage-pail lid.

  “La moitié?” she asked, knife poised.

  At the first bite, I judged it the best bread on the face of the earth. It combined all the qualities of the other great pains de campagne: moist, yeasty, wheaty, with a pocked interior and rugged crust. The “sole” of this bread gave it extra character and chewiness.

  When the next Saturday rolled around, I headed for Brive. My last stop was the bread truck. And there, big as life, was Monsieur Rauley serving the steady line of customers. I waited my turn.

  “C’est vous!” I exclaimed.

  He looked nonplussed.

  I reminded him of my visit to his place.

  “Peut-être.” He shrugged—as if to say, maybe I had been there, maybe not.

  Little did Rauley realize that he had beat himself in the Best Bread Contest. That’s when I more or less abandoned the whole idea of a competition—where had painstaking objectivity got me? The real winner, I decided, was the département of the Lot, where the great bread of France is found. Despite France’s reputation as a shrine to superb bread, I’ve tasted plenty of thin-crusted, cottony examples in other regions, even the neighboring Dordogne, also notable for its gastronomic riches. I’d even go so far as to say that Poilane, the renowned baker in Paris, can’t match Rauley’s. Just one former judge’s opinion.

  6

  HOUSE IMPROVEMENTS

  Owning a house, c’est toujours quelque chose, as they say. Often, I feel, my days are spent running from plumber, to bank, to carpenter, to bank, to the épicerie because I’m out of coffee, and so on. Trips are a combination of household business—from which I nonetheless derive a certain satisfaction since it is performed on foreign turf—and pleasure. I do read—or at least I sit with a book from time to time. Yet my degree of concentration is different in France. When I read on the subway to and from work in New York, I can burrow into a book and block out the world around me, including the crackling incomprehensible public addresses and vociferous panhandlers and preachers. At Pech Farguet, if I sit on the patio, my eyes will drift from the page to the view of the valley, or my ears will perk up at an unusual birdsong; if I sit in the chair by the fireplace, my thoughts wander to the next meal or are interrupted by the mysterious patter of feet on the roof. My eyes have traveled the words but not read.

  There is one book, however, that held me rapt for a long spell: Animal Treasure, by Ivan T. Sanderson, published in 1937, with thirty-two illustrations by its British author. I stumbled on it—the cover slightly warped and the pages a parchmentlike color—in an antiques shop in Bretenoux. Inside, its former owner had written, This book belongs to H. P. Mussell. From its opening sentence I was hooked: “The animals that crowd their little faces into the following pages lived, or are still living, in the deep virgin forests of West Africa, around a place called Mamfe, a place known to but a handful of the earth’s inhabitants.” The author then clearly states his viewpoint: to study both the true geneological classification of animals and the natural (or ecological) classifications. While this may seem to be purely scientific interest, it is, in fact, a highly personal account, by turns witty and poignant, of the author’s adventures
with both beasts and fellow explorers.

  Here is a passage—Sanderson’s reaction to a dead gorilla—that has to be among the most moving in all of such literature:

  I had always been taught to think of the gorilla as the very essence of savagery and terror, and now there lay this hoary old vegetarian, his immense arms folded over his great pot belly, all the fire gone from his wrinkled black face, his soft brown eyes wide open beneath their long straight lashes and filled with an infinite sorrow. Into his whole demeanor I could not help but read the tragedy of his race, driven from the plains up into the mountains countless centuries ago by more active ape-like creatures—perhaps even our own forebears; chevied hither and thither by the ever-encroaching hordes of hairless shouting little men, his young ones snatched by leopards, his feeding grounds restricted by farms and paths and native huntsmen. All around him was a changing world against which he bellowed his defiance to the end, rushing forward to eject the bits of lead and gravel blasted at him by his puny rival.

  At last the Munchis came and the sad old man was lashed to two young trees and borne away by thirty staggering, chanting humans; away from the silence of the mists, away from his last tangled stronghold; and yet not quite the last of the giants and not quite unmourned.

  I would often put the book down to absorb what I’d just read. It was too good; I wanted it to stick with me. I savored the book over two years (I leave it at the house), tasting it in small doses.

  Generally, I read at the end of the day, around sundown, when I’m winding down, or at bedtime when it will put me to sleep. Otherwise, there is always something that takes up a day. A day can seem short, a day can seem endless. When I return to New York, I feel I’ve been gone a long time, which, I think, has to do with the way I spend my vacation, living an everyday existence in another country rather than bustling about sightseeing.