A Place in Normandy

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “A lot of local color is just poverty,” Margaret interjected as I was recounting my mother’s tale of eating a meal at the house of a friend in Mesnil when she was a girl. After the main course was consumed, she remembered the plate’s being wiped with a chunk of pain brié and the bread eaten before the dish was turned over and its underneath used for dessert, perhaps stewed pears with a dab of custard.

  Julia’s and my family’s past diet of roots caused us to notice the protein existing all around us, profuse but for the most part unattainable. During one of our hungrier summers, a pig was butchered by the farmer, M. Tonnelier, providing a startling education for our children, whose faces were pressed against the library window thirty feet away.

  Mme. Vera Tonnelier’s father-in-law, M. Braye, lived in the second cottage on the farm, at the library end of the big house, which overlooked the part of the pasture where the butchering was done. He was the expert in charge. The occasion made for a family festival that included rowdy fun as well as labor. By the time we figured out what was happening, the animal was already hanging by its hind legs from the limb of a crooked apple tree, bleeding into a dishpan held by one of a group of women whose aprons and bare arms became bloodier and bloodier as the work proceeded. The dogs grinned, the ducks and geese gobbled in the bloody mud, hawks circled, and only the wood doves moaned—but they were always moaning. The beast was gutted, scalded, and shaved, and everything that had been inside it washed and picked over, sorted and saved. A small fire was kept burning, with the pot hung over it making the scene reminiscent of frontier life. Now and then something would be put into the pot or taken out. The majority of the carcass swung in the weather for most of a week, flanked by the tubs and the round crank-operated whetstone.

  M. Braye’s house, 1992. Photo Christine Livet

  At the end of the week, with the butchering completed and the Tonneliers’ dogs gamboling down the hill crazed with delight at the largesse of vertebrae that was finally rewarding their testy patience, M. Braye, accompanied by his dog—whom the children called “Frisky” Braye because of his abominably frank family approach to matters of mating—came to our kitchen door with one of his periodic gifts.

  The dog’s name may have been supplied by the children, but I later took impertinent delight in hearing that the natives of Frieseke’s hometown, Owosso, Michigan, also pronounced his name that way. The alternate pronunciations I was accustomed to were, first, that used by the art dealers in New York, who conspire to call him Freeseekee, and, second, the way I myself was taught, Freesiku, which is closer to the way it would have been pronounced in Friesland.

  “Il n’est pas méchant,” M. Braye always said, referring to Frisky Braye (meaning, “He’s not dangerous”: chien méchant is the French equivalent of our beware of the dog). When his (and Frisky’s) business with us was completed, M. Braye would finally march off, shaking his head and muttering, to Frisky Braye, “Ils ne comprennent pas”—“They don’t understand.”

  Since he and his wife lived on the place rent-free, being family of Vera’s, he liked to make a gesture now and then. Mme. Braye stayed in the house and except at butchering time was visible only when she came out the front door and went around to the far side of their cottage, to what we later learned was their privy. Although they slept upstairs, in a room that could be reached only by way of an outside staircase, we never saw either one of the Brayes on those stairs. M. Braye was gardener for the château in Mesnil, toward which we saw him walk in the morning and after lunch, and from which he returned before lunch and in the evening, bent almost double over his stick. The flower garden in the enclosure around their house was breathtakingly lovely, a higgledy-piggledy hodgepodge of color that put yucca and bachelor’s buttons side by side with lilac and floods of roses. By now the goats had got everything in M. Braye’s vacant garden patch save for the lilac and a rosebush or two; the roses themselves were eaten as they budded.

  M. Braye, while he lived, might turn up at the house one evening bearing branches loaded with cherries, broken from trees in the woods; or a bowl of blackberries; or flowers from his exuberant garden. This time Frisky was especially excited. The gift was a plastic plate covered with fat brown terete forms, intimate and slippery, which turned out to be the first example of black pudding we had ever tasted. We had seen this boudin noir being made under the apple tree but had not been able to isolate the nature of the product from the ferment of activity. The intestines had been emptied, trimmed, scraped, and washed, then stuffed with a mixture of pig’s blood and flour, spiced in a way that my tongue no longer recalls because the commercial boudin noir I have eaten since includes cinnamon, and M. Braye’s recipe dated from an epoch when a pinch of cinnamon was worth as much as a good hunting dog. With M. Braye’s gift of blood sausage, we had a measure of protein for ourselves and our young. Like boudin, certain other staples in the French cuisine that we euphemistically call variety meats (sweetbread, tongue, kidneys, heart, liver, lungs, brains) were once simply those portions that were most available to the pocketbook, because they were less desirable than an identifiable chunk of muscle such as an aloyau (sirloin).

  I did not want Margaret and Ben to have to go back home to Brooklyn and their dear deprived and say, “We stayed in a romantic if crumbling farmhouse in Normandy where we were afraid to use the bathroom and we ate turnips cooked six ways and it rained the whole time.” So their first night I had served them boudin noir fried with apples and onions. This was a genuinely French dish, if not Norman; I got the recipe from Madeleine, my godson Gabriel’s mother, who identified it as being Auvergnat, and thus native to the wrong part of the country—but under the circumstances, and on such short notice, I hoped it would take the place of local fare.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Everyone was being very kind about the water, which could be turned off inside the house, if not outside. It was raining and then clearing only enough to let us know that the sky was just taking a good breath before it started raining again. The birds and beasts outside passed through it all with indifference.

  Ruth came down from her shower and gave me the all-clear to shut off the main and thus the gusher in the cave and the slower leak from the upstairs cuvette.

  “Weather like this,” Margaret said (she was wearing sweaters and a blue bathrobe of my grandfather’s from the excess-clothing trunk, with heavy socks and slippers, but her breath steamed in the cold room like everyone else’s), “and Nick’s going on about the good old days of famine—well, it just makes me want to spend my whole day at the stove. That’s what I’m going to do on my vacation.” She was normally either in an office or making spot visits to evaluate day-care centers for the City of New York—that was where she got her accurate view of poverty and local color. “Let’s get something that takes forever to cook.”

  “Why don’t you find a wild boar in the woods? Or there’s tripe,” I suggested. “As long as you’re going to market, maybe you should add a few items to your list.” And I told them, based on the version published by Alexandre Dumas, what they’d need to make one of the true specialties of the region, tripe à la mode de Caen. “Select one whole beef stomach, paunch and honeycomb; salt, pepper (we have that), and quatre épices, which is sometimes agreed to be a combination of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon; lean bacon; onions and carrots to slice; bouquet garni and garlic; twelve blanched mutton feet (which will result in three slow sheep who have confessed everything) and one boned calf’s foot; a head of celery; twelve whole leeks; a bottle of white wine—pick up a white Château Intermarché, it’s just as good as the red—and a glass of cognac (or maybe we could use cider in place of the wine, and calvados in place of the brandy; with what’s left we’ll have a trou normand).”

  One didn’t see them as often now, those large, square, red old men wearing bright working blue, who used to be the visible prop and support of every village; they had almost disappeared. Something had made them healthy and careful about their figures and modish in their cl
othing, or else they had died of apoplexy brought on by hard work, hard eating, and hard drinking. In the old days people would look upon one or another of such specimens, shake their heads, and predict, “Too bad, he will not survive the next feast of Saint Clair”—for in those days a feast was a serious event, lasting many hours and many courses, between which the famous trou normand (or “Norman hole,” a fast gasp of calvados meant to revive the fainting digestive organs and trick them into wobbling into the next round) put many into permanent Norman holes, in the churchyards. The feast on the first day of Mme. Bovary’s wedding went on for sixteen hours.

  The Brothers of Charity of Mesnil were the remnant of an order established in the fourteenth century to provide Christian burial for indigents felled by the Black Plague; their members, all men, had sat apart in the choir of the church until the revolution (that is, the one led by Pope John XXIII, who forced the Mass into French and demanded the exchange of salutations among the congregation—which exchange we used, experiencing its reluctant execution, to refer to not as the “kiss” but as the “hiss of peace”—and mixed up the worshipers until there was no longer any perceptible difference between the classes or the sexes). For a feast held in 1867 to honor Saint Clair, the patron of Mesnil’s chapter of the Frères de Charité (which then as always numbered fourteen men; the women who cooked were not expected at the table), the copious supplies ordered included ten pounds of stew beef, eight pounds of ground beef, an eight-pound sirloin, a nine-or ten-pound leg of mutton, two beef tongues, two rabbits, and thirty pounds of bread and ten of cake, as well as however much cider each man could offer up from his own cellar, and calvados produced for each household by the itinerant distiller.

  “Anyway,” I went on, “to get back to the recipe for tripe: we’ll need two quarts of water, which I’ll get by opening the main—that’s easy—and eight ounces of beef marrow, which you’ll want to add to your list. It cooks for thirteen hours. Does that sound about right?”

  “Let them eat tripe,” Ben almost quoted. He was a lawyer and a potter, and much as he respected and enjoyed process, there were limits. “You want tripe, we’ll buy it ready-made.”

  A butcher shop in Pont l’Evêque sold the dish in the gelatinous state in which it was turned out by an establishment justly named La Tripe d’Or, or The Golden Tripe, because it had been awarded (twice) the gold medal for “les meilleures tripes du monde.” I myself was partial to tripe, but though tripe à la mode de Caen was one of the area’s specialties, I had not served it the night before because I knew it was not universally loved, being often more honored in the breach than the observance. American guests who meet tripe for the first time at our table cannot fail to know they are somewhere other than home; many look with alarm at the folds and frills and deep-sea-seeming convolutions of these cuts of beef intestine and wish for something less like a child’s nightmare of sex, and more like what they expect from a sedate French restaurant in the States: a neat portion complete with the accompaniment of a coulis and three perfect string beans julienned and laid out in a fan.

  Still, I wanted to bribe my guests, and I was certain that would require more than my merely being the first one up so as to turn the water on and make coffee. “Get me a rabbit,” I said. “You do whatever you want in my kitchen today, and tomorrow or the day after I’ll roast you a rabbit.”

  Select a rabbit large enough to feed five. Ask the butcher to remove the head (which would discourage everybody) and to stuff the body with lean sausage, leaving the kidneys and the liver in the cavity. Ask him then to truss the corpse and wrap it in a caul. The cut ends of the legs, from which the pattes have been cleavered after everyone has agreed that the animal is not now and has never been a cat, will be sharp and should be padded with foil. Slide the prepared animal into a heavy plastic bag (which may or may not say on it “Chez Lebon tout est bon”). Pour into the bag some calvados, olive oil, black pepper, tarragon, powdered garlic, and mace. Suck all the air from the plastic bag (which the sharp edges of cut bone will not pierce since they are padded) and tie the neck of the bag with a rubber band. Leave in the refrigerator for a day or two or three, turning from time to time. Then roast the rabbit for as long as it takes.

  As the others worked on making a list, Margaret went for inspiration to our small collection of cookbooks, but these came from my great-grandmother’s years of running a large household outside Philadelphia, and they assumed a different world, one of breathtaking abundance. She consulted Alexandre Dumas’s Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, from which we learned that in his time verjus had signified the juice of the green—that is, immature—grape, pressed out and preserved in a sulfurated bottle with the aid of salt or vinegar. We had that much accomplished, but the morning was getting on. Teddy went outside to walk Andalouse, the one wearing boots and a yellow slicker and the other dressed in black absorbent fur.

  “We could go out to eat,” Ben proposed. Playing solitaire and looking comfortable, he was being polite rather than truly courting culture shock in the form of a French restaurant. “Whatever you want.”

  We had had guests whose pursuit of the stars in the Michelin red guide led them, like the wise men in the story, to Deauville or Honfleur or Le Breuil en Auge, where chef and patron were forever scheming to dazzle them by, as my friend Madeleine said (she was an excellent cook herself, and an excellent shopper also), “preparing things the long way: when they need melted chocolate, they shave it, rather than just dropping a hunk into a saucepan,” she explained. And she swore that one could taste the difference.

  I could suggest a country inn not ten minutes away that for all its recent upgrading still had a dining room decorated with curling strips of flypaper suspended above each table, and where the fare was a heart specialist’s dream. The menu featured a three-course meal. The first course consisted of rillettes, a concoction of spiced lard containing strands of pork (like horsehair in torchis, to help it hold its shape), served in individual crocks and eaten with bread and pickles. This was followed by a three-egg omelette either nature (plain) or with Gruyère cheese. The third course was the plateau de fromages, which some thought best eaten with butter.

  Or we could try the Hôtel de Bernay in Blangy. If it had been good enough for Dumas’s Three Musketeers, who stopped there on their flight from Paris to the sea during the time of Richelieu (another item for Thérèse Chevalier’s book?), it was probably good enough for us.

  “I don’t want to go out, I want to cook,” Margaret called from the library, into which she had wandered. “That’s exactly what I want. What’s going on down the hill?”

  We followed her into my bedroom and looked out the window at a white panel truck laboring to negotiate the last third of the driveway. It had managed the steepest and most rutted grade, under the trees, but then pooped out on the shallower slope of wet grass. We watched it back down a short distance and then try again, and fail. It backed out of sight under the chestnuts, and we heard it roaring to pick up speed until it lurched once again into sight and foundered anew on the wet surface.

  “It’s the plumbers,” I said. I knew that truck, which had now backed down the driveway and disappeared again. We listened to confused vehicular activity. I saw Andalouse start loping down the pasture toward the commotion, with Teddy ambling behind her.

  “They’re giving up?” Ruth asked.

  View from the library window. Pencil drawing, 1930, by F. C. Frieseke.

  The wet air shook with a determined growl as the plumbers’ truck lurched backward uphill and into view, gravel and chopped green spraying outward at its wheels until it sagged to a halt at about the spot where it had been making itself at home before.

  “Plumbers get it up halfway,” Margaret said.

  “We’ll make that line into a bumper sticker and try it in Brooklyn,” Ben promised.

  We watched the plumber’s gars’ assistant open the truck and pull out some lengths of copper pipe, which he shouldered and carried at a trot through the rain up
to the house, past and among the cows that had been slowly gathering in the drive and pasture below M. Braye’s.

  I told my guests, “You go on to market and enjoy yourselves. Get me a rabbit. I’ll stay and play with the plumbers.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Teddy had brought his boots from Amsterdam. “I always travel with them,” he said. Ben had managed to find some that more or less fit him at the Intermarché during the morning’s expedition; I had mine, and the house supply provided for the women. The group having decided that the best response to the weather was denial, and the house in any case having become a playground for plumbers, we resolved to adjourn outdoors after lunch.

  “We noticed trees downed here and there on the property,” Teddy said, “Andalouse and I, roaming this morning. If you’d like, we could cut some wood. Where do you get your wood supply?”

  “From the same people who take care of the fences,” I told him. “I think it’s part of the deal.”

  “Then we’ll cut some, just in case,” Teddy said. But he was overruled: the consensus was that we should walk in the woods and not plan to do any useful exercise.