A Homemade Life (9 page)

I
am one of those people for whom college was just okay. I liked my classes and my professors and the people I met there, but I never felt completely at home. I always imagined college as a place where I would tumble, not unlike Alice falling down the rabbit hole, into some sort of lovely, wacky, self-contained world: a close-knit group of friends, a fully-formed post-teens family of sorts. Instead, I found myself living in on-campus theme houses with people who largely kept to themselves, and where the cook put a padlock on the freezer so we wouldn't eat the Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough he kept there. I learned a few things, but it wasn't quite what I wanted it to be.

So when the opportunity arose to study abroad during my junior year, I pounced on it. I applied to my university's Paris program, writing a breathless essay about le Quartier Latin and that visit when I was ten. That fall, I packed an enormous suitcase, hugged my parents, and flew to Paris, where I was greeted by my host family.

My host mother was tall, trim, and proper, with a singsong voice and a name that, when properly pronounced, rang like chimes at Sunday mass. She moved through the house as though en pointe—softly, gracefully, decisively—and wore silver bangle bracelets that clicked sweetly against each other when she lifted her hand to secure the barrettes in her long brown hair. She was Catholic, very Catholic, in fact, as these
things go. She had four children, ages nine to seventeen, a Labrador puppy, and a husband who'd lost his job and had gone to Canada to find work. Things were complicated. It must have been exhausting. She did an admirable job, but she often fell asleep in the bathtub after dinner.

Aside from her role at home, my host mother was also the French equivalent of a Tupperware saleswoman. She tested and sold silicone baking equipment, the bendy, nonstick baking pans, molds, and sheets that have become so popular in recent years. I was lucky enough to live under her roof, and within wonderfully close range of her kitchen, for six months. You can well imagine the glory that might have been, had I not taken down the crucifix she'd hung on my bedroom wall.

I was barely twenty-one, with a wardrobe that consisted largely of the color black, a long wool coat that made me look like Neo from
The Matrix,
and a short, spiky haircut. I was also mainly a vegetarian. (I never could give up my father's hamburgers, and I also liked the occasional piece of fish.) My host mother liked to tell me about her previous American student, a blond, all-American Mormon girl with whom she hit it off famously. She also liked to tell me, without the slightest wink of amusement, that she had specifically requested not to host a vegetarian. But she sensed that, under all the black eyeliner, I was very eager to please (still my greatest weakness, I'll freely admit) and so she took me on, gently correcting my French, delivering clean sheets to my door with admirable regularity, and teaching me about aged cheeses and soufflé.

As part of the hosting agreement, she was required to provide me with breakfast and dinner five days a week. Each weeknight at precisely eight o'clock, I'd climb the stairs from my bedroom to the second-floor kitchen, where my preteen host brothers and chatty teenage host sisters were waiting at the table. My host mother would have prepared something small and light for us to begin with: a simple salad of grated carrots or cubed beets in dressing, or half a grapefruit, its segments loosened with a thin, curving knife. Sometimes there would be a platter of warm steamed leeks with vinaigrette, everyone's favorite. The boys would argue over the white end nearest to the root, the sweetest, softest
part. Then, depending on the season, we'd move on to a savory tart; pasta with a sauce of oil-packed tuna, chopped tomatoes, and sautéed onions; or
tartiflette,
a wintry casserole made from potatoes,
lardons
(graciously absent from my corner of the dish), and Reblochon cheese. Then came the cheese plate. It was at that table that I first learned of France's nightly cheese ritual, pungent and addictive, eaten with hunks of baguette from the
boulangerie
next door. And after that, there was always dessert: homemade applesauce topped with a sheet of crisp meringue, a butter cake with apples or pears, or, in January, a
galette des rois,
brought in from a nearby
pâtisserie.

At least one night each week we'd have a “Flexipan dinner,” a meal centered on a recipe that my host mother was testing in her silicone molds. Her individual tartlets of caramelized endive with goat cheese were staggeringly good, as was her flourless chocolate cake, which quickly became part of the regular dessert rotation. But my favorite were the
bouchons au thon
(literally, “tuna corks”), an odd, homely, and surprisingly delicious mixture of canned tuna, tomato paste, crème fraîche, Gruyère, and eggs, baked in muffin molds.

Canned tuna isn't usually something I go crazy for, but these
bouchons
were special. With a texture somewhere between the filling of a quiche and a freshly made country pâté, they tamed the flat pungency of canned fish with the sweetness of tomato and the rich butterfat of crème fraîche. We ate them warm with roasted potatoes, and, for lunch the next day, cold with a green salad. They were unlike anything I'd ever had. They tasted like what I imagined France itself would taste like, if it were small enough to fit in my mouth. I gave thanks almost daily for all that France and its Flexipans brought to my life, but mainly for those
bouchons au thon.

As luck would have it, that winter, when my host mother went to visit her husband in Canada, she left me and my fifteen-year-old host sister alone with a freezer full of
bouchons
. I had just met a young Frenchman (more on him in a minute) and, seizing the opportunity, I invited him over for dinner. We ate
bouchons,
roasted vegetables and herbed potatoes, pricey cheeses, and baguette. For the grand finale, I
baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. It was a pure, starry-eyed triumph all around, right on through to the next morning, when he went home, and though my skinny French cigarette pants might have helped things along, in all truth, I credit the
bouchons
. I also credit them with earning me, upon my host mother's return, my first and only
“Mo-lee, ce n'est pas un hôtel!”
(Molly, this is not a hotel!) speech. I was almost as stunned as she was. I didn't know I had it in me.

It was only the beginning, in all sorts of ways.

BOUCHONS AU THON

y
ou can use either solid white or chunk light tuna.

 

One 6-ounce can tuna packed in water, drained well

1 cup lightly packed finely shredded Gruyère

¹
/
₃
cup crème fraîche

3 tablespoons tomato paste

3 large eggs

¼ cup finely chopped yellow onion

2 tablespoons finely chopped Italian parsley

¼ teaspoon salt

 

Set an oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease 8 cups of a standard-sized muffin tin, and set aside.

Put the tuna in a medium bowl, and use a fork, mashing and poking, to break it up into small pieces. There should be no chunks larger than a dime. Add the remaining ingredients and stir well with the fork, mashing a bit as you go, until the mixture is thoroughly combined. It will be a soft orange-pink color.

Divide the mixture evenly among the 8 prepared muffin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the
bouchons
look set on top and around the edges. Transfer the tin to a rack, and let cool for 5 minutes. Carefully run a small, thin knife around the edge of each
bouchon
to make sure it isn't stuck, then carefully remove them from the tin. They will collapse a bit as they cool.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

 

Yield: 8 bouchons, enough for 4 light eaters

I
promised to tell you about that young Frenchman, and it is kind of a good story, so I won't make you wait. I met Guillaume on a clear January night, in a club called Le Batofar. I am not much for clubs, but my friend Keaton had talked me into going. The two of us were in the same program in Paris that year, and she always knew what was hip. (I always knew where to find the best pastries.) Le Batofar was an old converted lighthouse boat docked on the south shore of the Seine, and it was the new hot thing, with an up-and-coming DJ spinning almost every night. So we went and danced a little, and I wore those same cigarette pants, and as we were getting ready to leave, about 10 minutes from the last subway of the night, I spotted him across the dance floor. He was tall and lanky, with olive skin and short, messy black hair. He was gorgeous.

We stared at each other. To be perfectly honest, I assumed that he was looking at Keaton, with her blond hair and pale, milky skin. Pretty much everyone, male or female, looks at Keaton. I gave him a hard stare—a close imitation, I hoped, of De Niro's “You lookin' at me?” from Taxi Driver—and he crossed the floor and stood in front of me. My hands were shaking. His name was Guillaume, he said shyly. He was gorgeous across the dance floor, but now he was really gorgeous. We talked awkwardly, yelling over the music. He was eighteen and in
his second semester of college at Jussieu. He was studying some sort of physics in school, and he had a sweet, broad smile, and I was sweating through my coat. I had just missed the last subway of the night, and my host family's house was halfway across town, out of the question on foot.

Panicking, I tried to excuse myself to go find a cab, but he wanted to help. He gave it a good shot, too, even chasing one down the street, but none of them would stop. We walked back to the club, and he gestured to one of the cars outside. He could take me home, he suggested carefully. My mother would
kill
me, I thought, remembering her admonishment, back when I was in grade school, to never get into cars with strangers. In fact, as I write this,
I
want to kill me, just thinking of what could have happened. But I did it. I accepted. Guillaume had come to the club with his friend Sébastien in Sébastien's mother's tiny white hatchback, and the three of us piled in together. There was a reggae mix tape in the stereo, and the car smelled cold and clean. They lived in Drancy, a suburb to the northeast, and weaving through the dark, narrow streets of southern Paris, where my host family lived, they were instantly lost. I pulled out my Métro map and began to navigate, using the subway stations as landmarks. Half an hour and several miracles later, they delivered me to my doorstep. Guillaume gave me a kiss on each cheek, and in return, I gave him my phone number.

The next week, for our first date, we decided to meet outside my school. I was nervous, so I had my friend Clare wait with me on the bench by the gate, and Guillaume showed up with his friend Vincent. The two of them saw us off, and Guillaume steered me to a café around the corner, Café Charbon, where we ordered coffee and started to talk. Then we took a walk around the chilly city, and the afternoon faded into evening, and he bought me roasted chestnuts from a street vendor on the Place de la Bastille. They were warm and burnt at the edges, and we ate them from a newspaper cone as we walked. He was wearing one of those white cotton headbands that only a young Frenchman can get away with,
and he'd written “JAH IS MY KING” down one strap of his backpack. He told me that his birthday was December 30, and I decided not to think about how recently he had been seventeen. When he kissed me on a platform in the Concorde Métro station, I was so dizzy that I almost fell onto the tracks. The next day, Clare told me that after Guillaume and I left for the café, Vincent confided to her that Guillaume, feeling shy, had asked him to escort him to meet me. Clare laughed and admitted that she had done the same for me.

That was it. I was in love. First love is supposed to be misty and sweet, a slow-motion video set to a medley of meaningful songs, and mine was just that, except that our songs were a mix of reggae and the
click-click
of subway turnstiles. We would have two children, I decided, one with his black hair and the other with my red, and we'd walk them to the
école maternelle
each morning, listening to their perfectly bilingual voices ricochet down the city's ancient streets. I would live in France forever, but each summer we'd go to Oklahoma to see my family, where Guillaume would buy his first cowboy hat and help my father make French toast. All would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

We loved the foreignness in each other, the mispronunciations and bridged gaps. The first time I spent the night in his narrow bed under the eaves of his parents' house, he woke up early and went out for enormous croissants from the bakery around the corner. We sat sleepily next to the kitchen window, drinking hot chocolate from café au lait bowls. I invited him to my host family's house for the infamous
bouchon
-fueled sleepover, and the next morning, we ate oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for breakfast on my bedroom floor. He invited his friends to join us for a homemade dinner of
raclette
—buttery cow's milk cheese from Savoie, melted and poured over boiled potatoes, pearl onions, and lacy sheets of ham—and I invited my friends to meet us at La Belière, a tiny bistro with lots of smoke and a piano in the corner. It was there that, after a carafe of cheap red and a bowl of mussels in broth, he introduced me to tarte Tatin.

A classic among classic French desserts, tarte Tatin is essentially a sexed-up apple pie—a housewife in stilettos, you could say. It starts with wedges of apple caramelized to a deep amber, their juices mingling with butter and sugar to yield a complex flavor that verges on hard cider. Covered with a sheet of puff pastry, baked to golden, and then inverted, the apples sit coyly atop their many-layered blanket like Ingres's
Grande Odalisque
on her chaise. Dolloped with crème fraîche, tarte Tatin doesn't dally with small talk. It reaches for your leg under the table.

Guillaume and I both had school the next morning, and so we kissed good night on the street outside, him to his train and me to mine. His mouth tasted like baked apples and cigarette smoke, a combination more delicious than I should probably admit. He gave me a jar of chestnut cream that his mother had brought back for me from a vacation in the Ardèche, and he hugged me hard. Then he never called me again.

I cried for a week. I didn't say a word to my host mother. I was sure she would think I deserved it. A few more weeks passed, and spring break came, and my stay in Paris was over. I packed my suitcase and flew back to college.

Six months later, I found a letter from Guillaume in my post office box at school. He told me he was sorry, and that he had been afraid. I sobbed the whole way home. We wrote back and forth a couple of times, but it was hard for me, and eventually we stopped.

A year later, the fall after I graduated, I went back to Paris to take a job. I didn't tell him I was coming; we hadn't been in touch for months. But one afternoon, I was sitting on a café terrace on the Place de la Bastille and he walked by. In a city of almost 12 million people, he happened to walk by. He was with his friend Arnaud, who had been with us the night that we ate
raclette,
and he recognized me and pointed. Guillaume shook his head and looked at the ground, and I broke out in a cold sweat. Then he walked over and hugged me, both of us shaking.

Every now and then, we still e-mail. He usually finds me about once a year, and we swap letters for a week or so. It's always awkward,
but still, I'm glad for it. Sometimes I can't help but wonder how things might have been if I hadn't had a return ticket, or if he hadn't been eighteen. For a long time, I dreamed about that bed under the eaves. Some nights, I even thought I could hear our perfectly bilingual children twittering like birds between the rafters. But most of the time, I just bake tarte Tatin.

TARTE TATIN

t
his recipe was inspired by Julia Child's classic method in
The Way to Cook.
Don't be intimidated by its length. It's surprisingly simple. And I'm pretty verbose.

Also, about the puff pastry: you can certainly make your own, if you're into that sort of thing, but I use store-bought, either Dufour brand or Trader Joe's. Thaw according to the directions on the package.

 

Juice of 1 lemon

1½ cups granulated sugar

5 to 6 large Golden Delicious apples

6 tablespoons (3 ounces) unsalted butter

About 14 ounces puff pastry

 

In a large bowl, stir together the lemon juice and ½ cup of the sugar.

Peel and quarter the apples, trimming away the cores such that each quarter has a flat inner side. Put the apples in the bowl with the lemon juice and sugar and toss well. Set aside for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, in an 8-or 9-inch cast-iron skillet set over medium heat, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter. Add the remaining 1 cup sugar, along with 3 to 4 tablespoons of the lemon-sugar juices. Stir to mix. Cook the mixture over medium-low heat, stirring regularly with a wooden spoon, for about 15 minutes, or until the mixture is a smooth, bubbly, pale caramel color.

Remove the pan from the heat and carefully—hot caramel makes a nasty burn—add the apple pieces, arranging them rounded side down in a decorative pattern. Arrange a second layer of apples on top wherever they fit, closely packed. The second layer need not be terribly neat. Cut the remaining 2 tablespoons of butter into dice, and distribute them evenly over the apples.

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Cook the apples over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes. Stay
nearby while they cook, so that you can frequently spoon the bubbling caramel over them; this will help the uppermost layer of apples to cook. (This is, incidentally, a good time to make any phone calls you've been putting off. It'll help pass the time.) From time to time, press the apples gently with the back of the spoon. Don't worry if they shift a bit in the liquid: just move them back to where they were. The apples are ready when the liquid in the pan has thickened slightly and is amber in color. The apples should still be slightly firm. Do not allow them to get entirely soft or the liquid to turn dark brown. Remove the pan from the heat.

On a floured surface, roll out the puff pastry to a thickness of about 3/16 inch. Using a sharp, thin knife, trace a circle in the pastry about 10 inches in diameter. (I often trace around the bottom of a 10-inch cake pan, or around a 9-inch one, leaving an extra ½-inch border all the way around.) Trim away any excess dough. Carefully lay the pastry circle over the apples in the skillet, tucking the overlap between the apples and the side of the pan.

Place the skillet on a rimmed baking sheet, and bake for 25 to 35 minutes, or until the pastry has risen and is dry and golden brown. Remove the skillet from the oven, and let it rest for a minute. Then tilt the pan slightly and look down the inside edge: there will be some juice down there. Pour as much of it as you can into the sink or trash can. Then place a serving platter upside-down over the skillet and, working quickly and carefully—
it's hot!
—invert the tart onto the platter. Rearrange any apple slices that may have slipped or stuck to the skillet.

Serve warm, preferably within an hour or two of baking. Puff pastry can't hold off sogginess for long.

 

Yield: 8 servings