A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  Lisieux had once been a walled and fortified city, but as Thérèse had told me, it was hard to credit Pont l’Evêque with the same. It sat on a broad, flat, marshy plain riddled with rivers: the Touques, the Calonne (which emptied into the Touques just north of the town), and the Yvie. I showed my passengers how the smaller, less trafficked of the roads from Lisieux toward the coast met Pont l’Evêque’s main street, fumbled to maintain its direction, lasted another block, and finished abruptly in back of the jail and the glass-recycling bin, in a parking lot next to a long-unused covered lavoir that the Syndicat d’Initiative kept up as a monument to happy bygone times when women knelt and scrubbed. The other road, I explained, continued north from Pont l’Evêque and branched off to meet the coast at Honfleur and Deauville; that was the route along which Guillaume Apollinaire had driven, the route that Henry V’s brother Clarence had followed on his way to take Lisieux, the route that Lindbergh had later used as a map to guide him toward Paris from the coast, and that Louis XVI followed in the opposite direction, on his triumphal march.

  Pont l’Evêque, having suffered its most recent truly serious battering in the religious wars of 1590 and having remained architecturally tranquil for the next 350 years, was practically obliterated during the liberation of 1944. Most of what was to be seen in Pont l’Evêque was therefore modern, apart from some sixteenth- or seventeenth-century remains. When the smoke cleared after the battle of Pont l’Evêque in August 1944, the thirteenth-century limestone church of Saint Michel was still standing, though it had lost its spire and all its glass. At the western end of the town (closest to Caen, the birthplace of Charlotte Corday), where some half-timbered sixteenth-century buildings had escaped the bombing, we got out of the car to wander. Swallows nesting in their crevices darted among the old houses and snatched insects from the streams and small canals they overhung. I pointed out one of the practical functions of the picturesque Renaissance style in which the second story juts out beyond the first: here, as elsewhere, these remnants of the style ancien had privy holes cut in the floor over the water.

  Its being Sunday afternoon, and after lunch, and raining, Pont l’Evêque sagged in replete stupor. Shops that had flourished for trade that morning now looked abandoned and belligerently for sale. That would change the next day, I explained: Monday was market day.

  I showed them Pont l’Evêque’s hospital, the pharmacy, a shop where one could find a newspaper and another where one could not, two quincailleries (for hardware and bottled gas), a droguerie (for dry goods such as toilet paper, brooms, paint, steel wool, brushes of all sorts, turpentine to fill any bottle the customer supplied, mirrors, and toothbrushes), four bakeries, three charcuteries (for prepared meats or such cold dishes as celeriac or deviled eggs or crushed ham forced to look like a partridge, as well as cuts of meat whose country of origin was the pig), a shop for furniture, a shop for saddles, a shop for cloth, one for calvados, one for boots and shoes, another for clothes, three butchers, and two all-purpose grocery stores. Everything was closed up tight.

  Ben, a generous and impulsive shopper when it came to supplying a friend’s table, made impatient noises from the backseat. “Everything’s closed! What about cheese?” he asked. “Aren’t they supposed to have cheese?”

  There was no shop for cheese alone, but I showed them a charcuterie where the next day, if they conferred with Madame, she would select for them a Pont l’Evêque (the cheese for which the town had been famous since the thirteenth century, though it used to be called Augelette) that would be ready to eat either then and there or on some future day of their choice. They could follow her progress and her muttering commentary as she tested each one with her thumb.

  “If your will is perfection as well as conversation, that is the way to shop, as you know. I know that,” Ben affirmed. “You say market day is tomorrow? We’ll come in tomorrow and buy everything. Cheese and whatever else you want, we’ll buy it, and maybe some other things as well.”

  TWENTY

  Moved either by generosity or by the vacation spirit of adventure, Margaret and Ben and company were eager to go shopping next day, Monday—market day in Pont l’Evêque.

  “The wine we had last night, was that something you particularly enjoy? or—well, we’ll see what else they have,” Ben said. He’d taken heed of everybody’s warnings before heading to Europe and had supplied himself for the visit with large red flannel sleepwear, in which he was adding color to the breakfast table. He and Margaret and Teddy had been discussing whether or not they wanted to drive to the other side of Caen to find a village boasting a street called Place Donnelly, named after a friend of theirs who had brought one of Churchill’s so-called amphibious tanks through the town (this one had floated, rather than sinking, like the first he commanded) during the liberation in 1944. But everyone was concluding that the best way to spend a rainy day in Normandy, aside from participating in market day, was in the solitude of the farm.

  “It’s seductive just sitting around this big house,” Ruth said, “and figuring out what you should do with it.”

  The previous afternoon—because I myself hoped to sidestep this bit of local color this time, if I could—I had made a point of showing them the covered market in and outside of which organized gangs of competing farmers, shopkeepers, and traveling chair caners, clothes- and boot-sellers, florists, and merchants in trinkets once a week set up shop. The marketplace was off the main street, next to a small park edging one of the rivers, the Yvie, where men played boules unless it was raining very hard or there was something better to do. I had explained how when the circus was in town, the camels and llamas and elephants were staked out in this area under the poplar trees, to spend the day chewing and waiting for the evening’s performance. All morning on market day the town would be bustling, and I generally tried to avoid coming in at all because even the quickest errands would take forever.

  “It could be quite a mob,” I warned. “But then again tomorrow, to make up for it, most everything will be closed.”

  Fortunately for me, the proposed excursion represented part of what my friends had come here for, and we sat around the table drinking coffee and making a list and watching the rain, listening to it drip from weak points in the gutters. Above us, the doves talked comfortably of doomed love.

  Teddy and Ruth were turning out to be perfect guests because they were perfectly sympathetic: their house in Amsterdam, they said, was also falling down. “But with an old house, it takes a long, long time,” Teddy consoled me. “Much longer than you have.”

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Ruth called from upstairs. “Does somebody want to stand in that horrible closet underneath to catch me when I fall through?”

  Friend looking out upstairs window, 1994. Photo S. Holstrom

  “It worked for me,” Teddy yelled up. “Just don’t put both feet in the same place at the same time.”

  My guests were more eager for food adventures than their host, who kept worrying about the plumbing and wondering what bribe he might offer to prevent Margaret from telling his wife (and their absentee hostess), Julia, everything. Perhaps food would be the best approach? Could I confuse them by taking them to a restaurant in Deauville where they must study the menu and ask questions of the smirking waiter, such as “What is verjus?” My classical education, with detours down medieval alleys, had left me with a fleeting impression that in the fifteenth century, after the juice was pressed from the grape to, foam into the beakers of the rich (having been transformed in God’s good time into wine), the skins were soaked in water and the mess allowed to fester into a drink thought suitable for peasants; somewhere between indifferent vinegar and dreadful wine, this was, I seemed to recall, called verjus. But if this was so, why would the tuxedoed waiter brag that the master chef, wearing his crown of Michelin stars, had been cooking his fish in it?

  Julia and I always traveled poor, ever alert, especially when accompanied by children, to the virtues of bulk, simplicity, and value, and
anxious that any foodstuff purchased should not present itself again immediately in the diaper. Our children consequently, once they became adults, felt they had been wronged; and some of our guests in Normandy may likewise have wondered why we came such a long way to put such unexotic things into our mouths. We forgot that for some people, cooking and eating were a form of entertainment, and that for others, more serious, closer to art.

  When I was alone I thought in terms of meals that could be assembled in ten minutes and eaten in eight, with enough left over to fry or inundate with salad dressing for the next meal but one. And my expertise on wines might be called into question once I was seen contentedly drinking a glass of Château Intermarché with my canned mackerel and leftover-potato salad. Since I was often redolent of turpentine, it did not make a great deal of difference to my taste buds what I ate.

  But I could rise to the culinary occasion if a bribe was called for. Here we were in Normandy, so my guests should be regaled with something Norman in the way of food. The advertised cuisine of the region depends heavily on cream, apples, cider, and calvados, this last being the epiphanic derivative of the hard, mean, green cider apples that are so dear to the cows, who trim the underneath planes of the orchard trees to precisely the toothgrip reach of the longest-necked of their number. A whole school of nineteenth-century French painters based in Rouen celebrated this browsing gesture of the cow in heroic canvases. Calvados is a brandy with a good deal of character, especially when new, and many people dislike it. But if I wanted to cook something Norman, it should surely contain apples, butter, cream, and calvados—through which ingredients almost anyone should be able to walk a chicken, a potato, or a pastry crust with a reasonable expectation of getting a tasty outcome.

  The Norman tradition of cooking is simply a variant of classic French cuisine, in which the aim is to mold as much fat as possible into a shape that will support the intrusion of some alien non-fat substance such as flour, sugar, or an exhibition of meat, vegetable, or fruit; the whole is then covered with a rich sauce (sauce normande, for example, is made from a base of cream and egg yolks). One can follow this basic plan and arrive at either stewed chicken or the Norman tarte aux pommes. My mother, when let loose in her Norman kitchen after thirty years of exile, proved to be a wizard at making the custards of her youth—even using the self-extinguishing gas stove that we cursed and did sentry duty over for many years until an engineer friend invented a valve to regulate the air flow and prevent us from filling the house with propane.

  During one of the many summers we were together in large numbers in the house, we hired a woman from the area to come in once a week to help with the cleaning and do a bit of cooking. She arrived on her first day moving in a stately fashion with an odd muffled puttering sound that we understood only after she separated herself from the motorbike she had engulfed. Mme. Lecoq was a creature of Farouk-like proportions who subscribed to the old traditions. She produced a version of scalloped potatoes the very thought of which still causes my arteries to narrow: how so much cream and cheese and butter, all steaming hot, could manage to hold its shape, and how those elements maintained the illusion that potatoes and onions had been admitted to their company, we could not fathom. Julia and I did not attempt to duplicate such feats, a Puritanical awareness of the danger posed by saturated fats having intervened in the years since Mme. Lecoq’s stint in our kitchen.

  In the past, when Julia and I were alone with our children, we had often found ourselves feeling marooned in a Norman countryside flooded with things to eat. The cows groaned with rich milk and cream; they lay in their pastures, allowing the earth to support the burden of their heavy udders, and delivered themselves of veal in their hours of repose. Apples fell from the trees and immediately began to exude cider. Wild rabbits were just starting to come back after their bad time with myxomatosis, so they were not eaten, but their comestible domestic brothers and sisters were raised in hutches outside farmhouses; one of the favored daily occupations of many old men, women, and children was to take baskets through the fields and roadside ditches and gather greens for the rabbits. In some butcher shops in Pont l’Evêque it was still the etiquette, left over from past days of privation, to present the otherwise naked body of a rabbit with its furry feet and long-eared head intact, so that the customer could be sure of not purchasing a cat.

  The dining room with Mrs. Frieseke, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

  A friend visiting from Italy would come back from the woods with delicious mushrooms that did not kill us. The hazel bushes provided nuts. Wild strawberries and blackberries, cherries and elderberries interposed themselves on the walks, and the children picked them. People fished the rivers for trout and salmon, and the nearby coast produced fish and shellfish in abundance. Our very young Christopher pulled snails from the tombstones in Mesnil’s churchyard and tried to eat them raw. Veal, lamb, horse, pork, turkey, duck, goose, and guinea hen clamored for attention everywhere, whether on the hoof or in shop windows, where we could gaze on their complete displayed corpses or their intimate parts (the birds tucking their heads under their wings and laid out in flocks, the pigs’ heads jolly with ivy wreaths and apples), or lovingly prepared roasts and scallops, or precooked and decorated individual portions ready-to-eat and looking like jewelry assembled for an African prince. All of that may have been fine for persons careless of the bottom line, but we were always getting by on an academic’s salary, and Julia and I had to fall back on the countryside itself.

  We had all the milk we wanted, from the farm; the children shook jars filled with cream until we had butter. Once Mme. Vera’s garden was producing, there were shallots, onions, peas, beans, lettuce, potatoes, parsley, leeks, and so forth; and she sold us eggs that were perhaps freer in range than intended by the inventor of that term, who may not have envisioned the ovulating hen pecking at the severed head of a goat before the dogs could wrest it away from her, to tumble fighting down the hill into the marsh that used to be the horse pond, next to the bleaching field. The connection between mortal agony and the table was always intimately present on the farm, as in the restaurants in town (to which Julia’s mother, a welcome visitor, sometimes took us). In Pont l’Evêque’s Lion d’Or hotel, the trout offered on the dinner menu swam in a large tank that decorated the dining room, keeping fresh until the waiter netted it and whacked its head against a marble sideboard before carrying it to the chef. Even now, as we drank our coffee, I warned the shoppers, condemned rabbits, ducks, and chickens waited in the marché in Pont l’Evêque, trying to recall their prayers, crouched in baskets next to implacable farmwives who sat smiling at the deliberating crowd, holding their penknives ready at breast level, their little sharpening stones poised on knees gaily draped with flowered prints. It made the captive lettuces and fennels and creams and cheeses and pears and cockles and sausages seem equally alive in their baskets and trays, I told my guests: and similarly doomed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Margaret and I, recalling her visit some years back, were agreeing that protein was a major consideration for the poor, among whom we included the budget traveler with children. Some of what seemed exotic to us in a cuisine such as China’s in fact had to do with the ancestral scramble after protein: why else eat owl, or certain kinds of worms? Why else would snails, however attractive to a two-year-old, win pride of place on a nation’s table?

  Some years, after Julia and I had stretched our budget far enough to get the family to Normandy in the first place, there was not much left, and we settled down to a fare reminiscent of that enjoyed by fortunate peasant farmers in the Middle Ages—fortunate, that is, because it included milk and eggs in addition to cabbage and root vegetables and bread.

  Once all Gaul was divided regionally into nine hundred jealous breads, just as it was into local wines (or beers or ciders) and cheeses. Each region had its own orders of ancillary fungi, specialists all. The cheese called Pont l’Evêque, under its old name Augelette, used to come in a variety of antic shapes incl
uding crescents and stars, as well as in the small square tile that was the sole remaining form the cheese now assumed under this name. It depended on a microbe native to Le Breuil en Auge, several kilometers distant from Mesnil—the same microbe of which the crevices of our downstairs kitchen harbored their own particular strain, which we could take advantage of whenever we wanted to make cottage cheese. My mother, who had been known, as I have said, to see things, claimed that in her youth she could pick up one of the cheeses curing in the cool room and watch its black mold climb from it onto her fingers and, heat-seeking, move slowly up her arm.

  “So put cheese on the list,” Ben said. “And bread. What kind of bread, and how much?”

  The long, crusty, and nutritionally empty loaf called a baguette, designed primarily as an excuse for eating butter or as a sponge for sauce, was once only the regional bread of Paris. If well made, it is delicious within the first three hours of its baking, but it will not keep. Because it is photogenic and the press interfered, it is now known to Americans simply as “French bread,” having elbowed its compatriot breads out of the footlights.

  In Calvados the local (and sole available) bread in my grandparents’ time was the pain brié. This was a dense, hard, salt-rising bread with a thick crust that had some of the virtue of kapok inasmuch as it resisted damp, its dough containing almost no air. After all, why should a Norman matron, careful with her money, buy air? If she wanted air, she could open her mouth and breathe, couldn’t she? She didn’t have to open her purse as well. Pain brié lasted, and it was good enough, especially when toasted, spread with butter, and sprinkled with salt (pain brié, grillé et salé). But it was out of favor now: few people bothered with it, tourists didn’t know its name to ask for it, and some village bakeries in Calvados, the district in which Mesnil finds itself—its name hearkens to more spirituous matters— no longer even sold it. It was traditionally made in several shapes, among them the crown or couronne forbidden by the Germans during the war—whether because it was too frivolous or too patriotic, I could not say. In my grandparents’ day, when there was no local alternative to pain brié, my grandmother was famous for her homemade American beaten biscuits. Our friend Charlotte, who was my mother’s age and aunt to Thérèse, still mentioned my grandmother’s biscuits (which she called petits gateaux) every time I saw her, with a nostalgia so poignant I feared she might be disappointed if Julia made a biscuit for her now.