Picnic in Provence (16 page)

Up until now, I would have told you this didn’t matter. When I was young, I was proud to be a little adult, serious, precocious, mature, responsible—all the adjectives that grown-ups use to describe children old beyond their years. I took it as a compliment. After my parents split up, my dad’s illness took up so much space, the breakup of our family became an ancillary effect, a footnote.

One thing I do remember very clearly: Just after the divorce, my mom wanted me to see a psychologist. She met several, and I was to pick one. We entered an office full of hanging plants and crowded bookshelves. A man stood up and reached out to shake my hand. “I’m Dr.
——
. I’m a child psychologist.” I remember looking up into his face; he had a short black beard and wire-rimmed glasses. “I don’t need a child psychologist,” I said. “I don’t have child problems.” That was the end of the interview.

It’s only now that I have a child of my own that I realize what I might have missed. A good childhood is something to cherish and emulate; a bad childhood is something to banish and fix. But no childhood at all? It was not until I had Alexandre that I realized the blank I was facing. In all my travels, childhood is the strangest land I’ve ever visited.

I always thought I would be a good mother because I have a good mother to look up to. But maybe what really makes a good parent—what I seem to be lacking—is the child I once was to look back on.

Jean’s wife, Paulette, and Alexandre were making a pile of bruised cherries to leave for the crows. I reached up into the leaves and popped a final sun-warmed globe into my mouth. If today is the best day I can remember, is that really so bad? Maybe it’s cheating, to be creating my own childhood memories at the same time as my son, but I don’t think Alexandre will mind me piggybacking on his pleasure. He might even show me a thing or two.

WHEN WE GOT
home, there was a brief moment of panic—now I had to figure out what to do with several kilos of ruby ripe cherries. Jean came to the rescue with two recipes he’d copied onto index cards in his neat square hand. The first, a classic
clafoutis,
uses the burst of fresh cherries for a wobbly breakfast flan. The second is for what he called “cherry marmalade.” Cherries are too watery for jam, but this is perfect—slightly wrinkled, toothsome cherries in a velvety syrup. Jean does all his own canning, and he has his own method of “insta-sterilization” that involves flipping the sealed jars and storing them upside down. As is often the case with family recipes, the instructions were lacking a few salient details, like the fact that the cherry syrup needs to be boiling hot when you’re doing all this. My seals didn’t take, so just to be safe, we’ll have to eat the whole batch of cherry marmalade for breakfast, lunch, and dinner this month. Come to think of it, that sounds like another thing my childhood self might have enjoyed.

W
e’d been warned.
Une maison dans le midi, des amis pour la vie.
A house in Provence, friends for life. Like clockwork, or should I say like a sundial, friends started calling on the first of February so they could reserve their train tickets for the long weekends in May.

We were suddenly the proprietors of the shabby-chicest, most disorganized bed-and-breakfast on the planet. I silently thanked my mother for the three extra sets of matching sheets I’d told her not to bring from New Jersey. I posted a calendar on the kitchen wall. There was a brief, guilty rush of relief when someone canceled at the last minute (forty-eight hours to hang my underwear on the line without anyone seeing!). We are booked solid from now until the first of October.

I genuinely love entertaining, but now I know why the locals savor the long, lonely winters. The population of the village has doubled with the warmer weather—and that’s without the tourists. Les Marseillais have opened their summer homes for the season. With the Parisians in their convertibles parking every which where, it is easy to get curmudgeony (and easy to forget that a mere twelve months ago, we
were
those Parisians). We’ve got to get rid of our Paris license plates; we’re still getting honked at.

Thanks to the thirty-five-hour workweek and all the built-in religious and civic holidays, summer weekends often begin on a Thursday morning and end on Tuesday. We’ve perfected the all-inclusive four-day tour of our tiny corner of Provence. It goes something like this: Put on the sheets. Buy haricots verts and sea bass for six, eight, or ten. Open the wine. Sleep in. Have a late breakfast of croissants and
pains au chocolat.
Explore the village. Drive down to Apt market to buy cheese and strawberries; hike up to Montjustin to admire the view of the Alps. Go to Carluc to admire the chapel; go to Pertuis to taste the wine. Check if there’s a flea market, sit at the café, play in the garden, grill lamb chops. Strip the sheets. Wash the wineglasses. Repeat.

At least we don’t have a swimming pool. Everyone told us it would be worse if we had a swimming pool.

Nicole came to hide chocolate bunnies in the garden with Alexandre for Easter. Paul and Catherine, old friends of Gwendal’s from university, came down from Paris with their three boys (five people, two carry-on-size suitcases—French parents are nothing if not efficient packers). Fans of my first book from San Francisco came by for lunch and a cooking lesson—we produced a very successful apricot-almond tart. Bachir, a documentary filmmaker, and his wife, Nicola, a scientist, dear friends living in Canada, stopped by with the kids en route from Montreal to the family’s summer place in Brittany. Jessica, a friend of mine from college days, and her husband had just sold all their worldly goods to go on a trip around the world. They were making a pit stop in Europe before heading off to South Korea. My auntie Lynn came from New York. She got stuck in the middle of a herd of sheep while crossing the street; I took a picture and had it framed for posterity. Even my parents are slowly acclimating themselves to the rhythm of village life; once they accepted there was nothing to do, they were quite happy to sit at the café with the
International Herald Tribune.
The reactions to our new life were fairly consistent: This makes no sense. You seem so happy.

THANKFULLY, THE LOCAL
ingredients multiply at almost the same rate as the guests.

Summer cooking in Provence does not leave a lot of room for free will. Exceptional ingredients come in tidal waves; no sooner have you finished gorging yourself on cherries in June than you find yourself drowning in melons in July.

My favorite of the recent culinary tsunamis are the zucchini flowers. These bright yellow blooms epitomize the beauty—some might say the urgency—of French seasonal cooking. Picked at dawn, still dripping with dew, by the following day they are practically useless, a wilted, shriveled shadow of their former selves. This is not pragmatic, plan-ahead cooking. This is impulse cooking, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants cooking, follow-your-heart cooking. Delicate, with a surprisingly intense flavor, zucchini flowers are often fried and served as beignets. I prefer to stuff them: goat cheese and fresh mint from our garden, wild rice, tomato and feta,
brousse de brebis
(our local sheep’s milk ricotta), and green olive tapenade.

The only real problem with all this holidaymaking is that, strictly speaking, Gwendal and I are not on holiday. We are playing house or, rather, playing hotel. It’s lovely—and completely unsustainable. He manages to sneak up to his office for a few hours after breakfast, reappears for lunch, disappears again, and magically turns up in the garden just in time to dole out the ice cubes and pour the pastis for the evening
apéritif.
There’s an increasing contrast between what goes on up in his office and what goes on down here. I don’t know if our guests can feel his frustration. But for the past year, Gwendal’s been acting like a nine-to-five French civil servant, deftly steering the conversation away from his career and back to the view.

Gwendal used to love talking about his work. He’s been passionate about film since he was a child. Breaking into the industry as an outsider was not just a question of professional development—he’d conquered the stonewallers and the snobs and adopted the American habit of projecting himself into a bright future. He loved shepherding the transition to digital cinema throughout Europe—the biggest shake-up in movies since the introduction of sound. But what five years ago had felt like a revolution was suddenly business as usual. It was time for him to move on.

As for my professional obligations, as I mentioned, I am a master procrastinator. Without an imminent deadline, writing is the easiest work in the world to ignore, especially in favor of my other favorite activity: hostessing. I’ve always loved the idea of an old-fashioned house party, the kind you see in the movies, with croquet on the lawn and cocktails under the wisteria at dusk. (We’re lacking the butler, the maid, the gardener—and, come to think of it, the lawn. I’m happy to fill in for the cook.) It’s wonderful to watch our friends relax, squint into the sunshine, shut off their phones, drip melon juice on their trousers, and peel off the chestnut leaves around the Banon to reveal a ripe, gooey goat cheese. This may not be real life—but it’s a lovely hiatus.

I fetch my zucchini flowers out of the oven while Gwendal opens a chilled bottle of rosé. There is something about biting into a flower that surprises, then delights, our guests. If they didn’t feel like they were on holiday before, they do now.

WHEN I WAS
little, my grandmother kept an old cookie tin of beads in her closet for me to play with. I would spend hours studying the colors and textures, letting the different weights fall through my fingers. That’s how I feel when I pick out my cherry tomatoes
chez
Marion.

I met Marion at the small Thursday market in Céreste. It’s only a few vendors: Christophe, who sells olives and
saucisson,
and my precious, dedicated fishmonger who makes the one-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer trip from the coast each week. Marion sets up her trestle table next to the couple who make their own goat cheese.

Marion grew up here; she has a small organic farm in the fields below Céreste, in the dimple between the village and the Luberon hills. If you arrive early, her stand is heaped full of colorful beets and slim tapered carrots, Swiss chard, bouquets of purple basil, and chives. In addition to zucchini flowers, she sometimes has pumpkin flowers, slightly larger, slightly sweeter, and completely new to me.

Marion favors colorful sarongs and large mismatched Indian earrings. Her brown hair is often pulled off her face in two loose pigtails. Her appearance is well suited to her métier—she has the full cheeks, ample bust, and beneficent smile of an earth goddess. In fact, she smiles more than any French woman I’ve ever met.

The mystery of French women is an enduring one. I recently had this conversation—yet again—with an American woman living in France. “What
is
it with French women? Do you have any female friends here? Why don’t they like us?”

I considered my answer, the cumulative experience of ten years on the fringes of French female life. “It’s not that they don’t like us. It’s that they don’t
need
us.” A French woman’s life is very full—she has her work, her kids, her family, her childhood friends, her university friends, maybe even a lover. By the time most of us American women arrived, in our late twenties or early thirties, the roster was simply full. Of course, there are the exceptions that prove the rule. But if you’re looking for a gaggle of girlfriends to pour your heart out to, you’ve come to the wrong place.

I had a feeling Marion was different. It started with the dirty carrots. One Thursday morning, I picked up a stubby triple-pronged carrot that bore a striking resemblance to a sex toy.

Reading my mind, she broke into a huge grin. “I have a whole collection.” She wrote down my e-mail address on the pad where she adds up her clients’ bills. The next day I had three salacious vegetable photos in my inbox.

I knew I was onto something. I also knew I had to bide my time. Americans are used to instantaneous everything, including friendship. We get giddy, a little desperate. Making a friend in France is like training a lion; you have to approach slowly, over time. Pretend you are totally in control of the situation. There’s a period of adjustment. You don’t get to pet until they’re good and ready.

When I arrive at the stand, sometimes Marion is on her own, but often she is chatting with another client, usually about cooking.

“J’ai fait un gratin,”
said an older woman with chic bobbed hair as she picked out her zucchini. “
C’était
super
.”

“Do you put cream in your gratin?” asked Marion.

“Just white wine and onions—and a bit of Gruyère on top at the end.
C’est plus léger.
”

She saw me listening as I filled a paper sack with slim baby eggplants.

“A few years ago,” said Marion, “I started putting together a book of recipes from friends and clients. I can print you out a copy if you like.” She made another note on her pad.

I began browsing the beets. Marion grows several varieties of beets, some purple-black, some yellow, some a lighter pink. One was striped inside, like a candy cane.

“Do you want them with the greens or without?” she asked, ready to twist off the bunch of long green leaves veined with fuchsia that sprouted from the head of the beet.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “What do you do with them?”

“I sauté them, like spinach—they are a little sweet.”

“Pourquoi pas?”
I’ll try anything once.

I served the beet greens with tuna steaks for lunch. Wilted with a little olive oil, garlic, and sea salt, they were delicious—slightly bitter at the top, sweeter near the root. The only problem: they cooked down to nothing, and Gwendal was scraping the bottom of the pot with enthusiasm. Next week I’d have to buy double the number of beets, just for the leaves. Maybe dig deep into the Ashkenazi archives and make borscht.

A few weeks later, I rolled up to the market with Alexandre.

“Tu dis
bonjour,
Alexandre?”
I’m trying to get him into the all-important habits of French
politesse,
which in a village this size involves saying
bonjour
and
au revoir
to perfect strangers. We’ll have to revise the rules on our visits to New York.

Marion weighed my cherry tomatoes and wrote the sum down on her pad. “Is he named after”—and then she spouted the long title of a book I’d never heard of. “It’s one of my favorites. Do you know it?”

Dirty vegetable photos, recipes, and book recommendations. All the things I look for in a friend.

I COULD SAY
I’ve been cooking this summer—but
cooking
would be a distortion. Between the guests and the heat, it’s more like arts and crafts, combining, stacking, slicing, and dicing a few essential summer ingredients: tomatoes, melon,
jambon cru,
peaches, plums, figs, tomatoes. And did I mention the tomatoes? I haven’t turned on the stove in weeks.

The Provençal tomato is a thing of wonder—it can be as small as a marble, large as a human heart, red like a valentine, yellow like a sunflower, pale green like a brand-new leaf, orange like the sun in a child’s drawing. My favorite is the
noire de Crimée,
a tomato that’s purply-olive, like seaweed seen through moving water. I take my tomatoes home in a wooden
cagette,
stem-sides down. They are too delicate, too perfectly ripe to be jumbled together like gumballs.

There have been other religious moments in my discovery of French cuisine. I felt a rush of lightning in my veins when I gutted my first fish. The heavens opened and angels sang the first time I tasted homemade mayonnaise. But nothing quite equals the simplicity, the sublime transcendence, of the Provençal tomato.

It helps to understand that I grew up on tomatoes with the texture and taste of wet sawdust. It doesn’t matter what you think about organic, locavore, slow food, and so on. To eat a tomato ripened in this relentless sunshine and picked from its stem that very morning is a conversion experience. I’ll never again forget that a tomato is actually a fruit.

There’s no messing with perfection. (Okay, a little messing, just for fun.) A few crystals of coarse sea salt, a drizzle of local olive oil, and a sprig or two of purple basil. Sliced and layered in a white ceramic dish, the tomatoes often match the hues of the local sunsets—reds and golds, yellows and pinks. If there were such a thing in our house as “too pretty to eat,” this would be it. Thankfully, there’s not.

If I’m not exactly cooking, I have done some impromptu matchmaking: baby tomatoes with smoked mozzarella, red onion, fennel, and balsamic vinegar. A giant yellow tomato with a local sheep’s milk cheese and green basil. Last night I got a little fancy and layered slices of beefsteak tomato with pale green artichoke puree and slivers of Parmesan. I constructed the whole thing to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I love to think of the utterly pretentious name this would be given in a trendy Parisian bistro: