Picnic in Provence (19 page)

Alain and Evelyne live next door to a musicologist and internationally known bagpipe player. In a village of thirteen hundred, what are the chances? We sprawled out on the grass as he began his plaintive melodies. The stars feel closer out here.

JUST BACK FROM
a run, Courtney put her iPod on the kitchen table and sat down with a glass of water. “I guess you can’t walk around with your headphones here.” True enough. I now know half of the village by sight, a quarter by name. There’s no question of rushing past in a hurry. Every person on the street merits a nod and a
bonjour;
every neighbor a quick chat. I need to ask about Laura’s broken ankle, Helen’s roses, Thierry’s roof repairs. These are small conversations, but over time, they build up into genuine
liens
—links that hold the village together, like the almost invisible layer of cement between the stones of the château. I’ve grown attached to this aspect of village life. For someone like me, a young mother and a writer with no formal office to go to, these encounters are a welcome part of my day. I’m positive I speak to more people on a daily basis here than I did in Paris.

This level of social interaction also has a real effect on my eating habits. Courtney once talked to me about the secrecy of binges. “I would go to three different stores,” she said. “Because I was too embarrassed to buy everything in one place.” What strikes me is the anonymity of the process, the solitude of it.

I tried to imagine myself staging a similar raid in Céreste. First of all, there aren’t three different stores. Even if I wanted to buy ten croissants at five o’clock in the afternoon every day for six weeks, what would I tell the baker’s wife? I bought a donkey? I’m harboring refugees? What would
she
tell everyone else? Even if I could think that fast on my feet, the system of lies would quickly become so elaborate that I’d be unable to keep up.

In France in general, and in Provence in particular, there is
nothing
anonymous about my food. Every week, the chicken man makes it a point to greet me by my first name. The cheese monger wants to know when I’m going to get started on my driver’s license. The fishmonger knows better than immigration how much time I spend in the United States; if he doesn’t see me for two weeks, he gets worried. I’ve traded dirty carrot photos with the woman who grows my tomatoes. This intimacy makes you accountable. Food involves so much human connection here, there’s almost no way to sneak it. I don’t shop alone; I don’t eat alone. Every gesture involving food is woven so tightly into the social fabric that it is very hard to rip—to tear off on a bender.

I SET A
bowl of sausages and lentils in front of Courtney. This is her favorite French meal, and I make it at least once every time she comes. What surprises me, now that I’m privy to the logic of how Courtney eats, is how closely her carefully controlled diet resembles traditional French eating habits, particularly those of my mother-in-law.

Like Nicole, Courtney doesn’t eat between meals. When she’s done, she’s done. She eats a full plate of food (and, at our house, cheese), but she skips the hors d’oeuvres and doesn’t pick. For her, picking spells disaster, the start of a binge. For me, it’s a family tradition.

Because my mother is diabetic, she is denied a lot of what she considers “real food.” She is always hunting around for something good to eat. That’s the refrain I heard my entire childhood. I would watch when she came home after work, shifting around the containers and the plastic bags: “I’m looking for something good to eat.”

She ate sugar-free biscotti, sometimes an entire extra meal of leftover pork roast or Muenster cheese at four or five o’clock. If she wanted something sweet, she would settle for a diet chocolate-cream soda with ice cubes and milk—her version of a milk shake. When I go home, I always find Weight Watchers raspberry-swirl pops in the freezer. They’re not bad; they’re not good either.

This is perhaps the biggest difference between my eating habits in the States and in France. When I am in France, I don’t eat fake food.

I grew up in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, so I spent a lot of time around fake food. I remember Kraft macaroni and cheese, Devil Dogs, and Oodles of Noodles with great affection. The sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of my adolescence was studying for my finals doped up on Pillsbury vanilla frosting mainlined with a plastic spoon.

I suspect one reason why fake food plays no part in my life in France is that I don’t own a microwave. I buy very little prepared food, and because I cook mostly one meal at a time, there are not a lot of leftovers to reheat.

When I serve cheese after dinner, I see Courtney avoiding the bread, neatly cutting cubes of cheese and eating them delicately with her fingers. My mother-in-law does the same thing. When I first arrived in France, Nicole showed me a diet book from the late 1980s that she used. It’s called—a riff on Descartes—
Je mange, donc je maigris
(
I Eat, Therefore I Lose Weight).
You must avoid bread with cheese, not because bread is bad, says the author, but because,
traditionnellement,
that’s not the proper way to eat cheese. Looking back to move ahead—it’s classic French. That’s the way I feel about fake food versus real food. Sometimes progress isn’t really progress. Sometimes you have to look back to move ahead.

“I’M
SO
HUNGRY.
”

“Me too.”

On this, Courtney and I are in perfect agreement.

We like to be hungry.

Maybe it’s our collective immigrant past, maybe it’s the undying ethos of bigger and better, land of plenty, but Americans can’t stand the idea of being hungry. It’s the fear that leads us to keep power bars in our purses, juice boxes and bags of Cheerios in kids’ strollers, jumbo cup holders in cars. God forbid anyone, anytime, anywhere, should actually experience hunger.

Courtney has a fraught relationship with hunger. “It used to scare me, because I was always on a diet and I just felt like I’d never be full. But now, for me, being hungry—not starving, but hungry—is a good thing. It lets me know my body is functioning normally, that I’ve eaten the right amount and now it’s time to eat again.”

“I think it makes the food taste better.”

Because the French don’t snack, one is likely to arrive at mealtime genuinely famished. There might be an
apéritif
before dinner but no opportunity to stuff yourself; your hostess will probably put out a small cereal bowl of potato chips for eight people. You are forced to pace yourself.

For me, being genuinely hungry can make the simplest meal taste like something special. This works particularly well for foods I’m convinced I don’t like—chunky
pâté de campagne
or the classic French rice salad with tuna and chopped tomatoes.

When you’re hungry, textures take on a particular pleasure. Cold rice moistened with the juice from the tomatoes and a bit of olive oil feels summery yet substantial. The crackle of a fresh baguette is suddenly the perfect partner for toothsome bits of ground pork; even the slippery bits of fat find their place. It tastes even better if you’ve spent the morning walking uphill.

Tonight we are making pasta.

That’s one thing that’s great about Courtney’s approach. She’s been through enough crazy diet fads to know that there’s nothing she should outlaw—it’s all about moderation.

I do things slightly differently when Courtney is around. I measure the pasta servings. I find that if I do that, I concentrate on the mouthfeel, on chewing each piece and putting enough good stuff on top to make it a real meal.

Thankfully, the end of August is an avalanche of tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, and peppers. There’s simply too many of them. There’s only so many times a week a girl can make ratatouille, so in the afterglow of fresh tomato everything comes (what’s a girl to do)
roasted
tomato everything.

There’s something a little greedy about roasted tomatoes. Slick with olive oil and mellowed with garlic, pulpy like a supermarket romance novel, they are my attempt at pleasure hoarding. I want to be able to peek into the freezer in December and know I can use this spark of sunshine to light up a winter pasta sauce or guarantee a sensational base for braised veal shank or white beans. Of course, the nature of greed means that I couldn’t wait until December to explore my pasta fantasies.

For tonight’s dinner, I used a tablespoon or two of the roasted tomato oil to sauté some eggplant until tender, then added some raw shrimp, the roasted tomatoes, a splash of white wine, and a pinch of cayenne pepper at the end. I divided the pasta among my favorite shallow bowls. They have relatively small interiors with large white rims. Just like paintings on the wall of a gallery, food looks better if there’s lots of white space around it.

I prepared everyone’s plate individually in the kitchen, like a chef in a restaurant, piling the vegetables and shrimp artfully on the pasta. (I would count this as another diet trick: everyone gets his or her full portion up front; no one expects seconds in a restaurant.) I garnished each plate with ripped fresh basil. I was pretty pleased with the result. It looked like something you might order at a luxury resort. The blue-plate special at Canyon Ranch.

THE FACT IS
, there is no way to be on a real hard-core diet in France. It’s simply impolite. You need a diet that allows you to eat with enthusiasm at five-course luncheons. Unless you are in danger of going into anaphylactic shock at the table, it’s unheard of to call the hostess to ask what she is serving or, heaven forbid, mention what you will or won’t deign to eat. A French diet is a balancing act. If you eat a little extra dessert at dinner, you have a bowl of soup or a plate of steamed vegetables the next day for lunch.

I call it the quiet diet. It’s nobody’s business but mine.

By the time Courtney packed her bags, I had a rough idea of what I needed to do to lose the extra weight. That’s the fact of most diets. We know what we are supposed to do; we just don’t do it. It’s my leftover American habits that get me into trouble: making too much food, eating when I’m not hungry, nibbling at night. I know when I’m doing something counterproductive, but I didn’t grow up with a French superego to rap me on the knuckles every time I broke the rules. My id grew up in a place where a pint of Ben and Jerry’s was a single serving.

Still, my friend in the States is wrong: I do have some skills. What most Americans call dieting—no snacking, smaller portions, single servings, lots of fresh seasonal vegetables, yogurt or fruit for dessert, nothing but 70 percent cacao dark chocolate in the house—the French call
eating
. There are times when the structure, the rigidity, the tradition-bound aspects of French life are a drag. But where healthy eating is concerned, it’s actually very helpful.

I’ll just have to keep doing what I’m doing. Cut down on the dried figs. Cross my fingers about the thyroid pills. I’ll take the exercise question under consideration.