Picnic in Provence (25 page)

For dinner, we snapped the tips off the slender haricots verts. He broke a few in half before he got the hang of it. Me
goûter
. Me taste. We counted as he marched the beans, like toy soldiers, across the table. One, two, three, four.
Un, deux, trois, quatre
.

I gave him the fork and let him stab the sweet potatoes, guiding his way when he came too close to my hand.

I admit it, it was a long hour. Before I left for the crèche, I had put a cake in the oven, and I checked it three times. Once at 5:23, once at 5:44, and again at 5:50.

Dinner was normal that night, uneventful.

MONDAY AFTER SCHOOL
, I picked up where I’d left off. When I entered the crèche he said, “Mama,” with a big smile and ran to me. He let me pick him up before he asked where Daddy was. “Papa’s working, sweet boy,” I said. “We’ll see him later.”

Today, I promised him we would make a cake together. He took a little red basket outside the superette and dropped the yogurts to the bottom with a thud. I tried to avoid the same treatment with the eggs. Alexandre wanted to carry the bag. “Too heavy,
Maman
.” He took one handle, I took the other.

We walked home through the tall grass of the public laundry lines to the mulberry tree (public, like the fig tree). The lavender field below was just beginning to color, the neat rows of violet rounded like powder puffs. “Want to go see if there are any berries on the mulberry tree?”
Wow, there’s a sentence I never imagined coming out of my urban mouth.
“See, look, you can only take the dark ones.”

Squashed berries littered the ground. “We’re a little late, Boo.”

“What a waste,” I said. “Wasst,” he repeated as he jumped over a pile of fallen mulberries.

He climbed to the medieval garden, threw gravel, climbed the steps, walked along the wall. Then did it again. And again. We marched like the elephants in
The Jungle Book.
I cupped my hand to make the sound of a trumpet: “Charge!”

It took us an hour to get home. A hundred yards as the crow flies. But when I had nothing to do but be with him, instead of being annoying, it was kind of nice.

Because of our leisurely walk, we were a little late getting started with the cake. He cackled every time we broke an egg. He has this great Wile E. Coyote cartoon laugh. I wish I could bottle it, the best medicine, the fountain of youth itself.

“Me
tourne
. Me
tourne,
” he said proudly.

“Yes, sweet boy, you stir.”

Every time I tried to remove the spatula from his hand, he started a low growl. So each time I needed the implement, I had to make an exchange, one spatula for a lemon and a grater.

I took some apricots, smooth and ripe, out of the fridge. “Let’s make a face,” I said, thinking back to my mother’s meat-loaf man. “
Pas abricots,
no apricots.” He changed his mind when he bit into one.

In the end, the cake with the apricot face made it into the oven. The batter looked a little lumpy. I think I used the wrong flour. I definitely took it out too early; there were soggy bits around the fruit. “This is the best cake I’ve ever had,” I said, as I cut him a second slice. And it was.

At dinner that night, Alexandre kept putting his forehead to mine. Petting my shoulder. “Gâteau, Maman, gâteau, Maman. Me
tourne
.”

Yes, sweet boy, you stirred all by yourself.

I felt so much better. He was the same happy boy, but suddenly, almost magically, I was a part of that happiness. I felt so thankful I could have cried all over again. I marveled at his easy forgiveness, his willingness to leap into something better. He let me in, as if I were the new girl at school, without fanfare or recrimination. He let me in, I suppose, because I finally took the time to knock.

That night I let Gwendal load the dishwasher while I went upstairs to read Alexandre a bedtime story. He pointed to the big book of Dr. Seuss. I picked it up. He pushed it out of my hand and reached over my legs, grabbed my shoulder. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing.
Oh, sweet boy.

He was trying to get up on my lap.

T
his summer I am looking at the market—at everything, really—with new eyes. All my favorite things are back in bloom. Maybe Alexandre and I can bake a raspberry tart this weekend. We should definitely test a tomato sorbet for the ice cream shop. One of the restaurants in town asked if we’d be making a tomato-basil sorbet, but that sounds kind of icky to me, like eating frozen spaghetti sauce.

My relationship with Alexandre has blossomed as well. It sounds crazy, but with the extra effort, in a matter of weeks, our relationship feels transformed. Every step forward I take, he takes two. I have finally found a place for myself in our little family. I no longer feel like an outsider.

Alexandre and I have continued our cooking time together. I love the proximity; he loves the cookies. He loves shelling white beans and peas and slicing zucchini. (For a kid on the cusp of his third birthday, he’s not bad with a knife.) I taught him the proper way to walk while holding scissors, which is just as well, because yesterday he almost tripped over his toy fire engine on the way to the herb garden to cut some thyme. While I was chopping a shallot, I asked him to transfer the beans from a plastic bag to the bowl, thinking it would take the better part of an hour. But Alexandre’s no fool; he emptied the whole lot in one go, scattering only three on the floor. He still uses beans for counting practice, curving them like snakes around the cutting board.

There’s a new stand in the Reillanne market; the man sells a mix of salad greens with edible flowers: marigolds, borage, nasturtium. They would look beautiful on top of an ice cream sundae.

Gwendal and I have been talking a lot about what we want the shop to be. We’d like it to reflect our personalities, be a positive addition to the community—and, of course, share all of the fabulous local products within arm’s reach. Alexandre’s music teacher in Reillanne had to stop her classes; it was too expensive to hire an employee to help her oversee the little kids. I wonder if there’s enough room for her to do it at Scaramouche. We could get a commitment from the parents, one extra adult every week to help.

In the town where I grew up there’s an ice cream parlor called Bischoff’s, family-owned since 1934. It’s where we went in our tutus after ballet recitals, where we bought Easter jelly beans and celebrated elementary-school graduations. The employees, young and old, wore small paper hats like upside-down rowboats. They still make wonderful cherry vanilla ice cream and their own wet walnuts. I’ve been working on a recipe for homemade hot fudge.

Instead of Bischoff’s brown Formica booths, I’d like wrought-iron garden chairs and a marble-top bar with a glass candy jar. I don’t know what we would do without Rod; he’s not just our business partner, he’s like our very own village Leonardo, finding quirky solutions to problems as they arise. At the moment he’s designing a curved bench that hugs the back wall of the cellar so we can hide the necessary water pump—and so a couple can sit side by side
en
amoureux,
sharing a banana split. Though it’s not very French, we’ve decided to put a banana split on the menu. I used to share one with my dad at the local Dairy Queen.

I picked out a pint of strawberries. Of course, to supply the shop we’ll need greater quantities than we can find at the Sunday market. We want our sorbets to showcase the very best of the local farms. For that, we need Marion.

MARION LIVES IN
a yurt; it gives her easy access to her fields. For those of you who have never had a friend who lives in a yurt, it’s like visiting a mini–circus tent, with an elevated wooden floor and a skylight in the center for light and ventilation. The canvas walls roll up and down depending on how much air you want—and how many forest creatures you are willing to sleep with. Marion has an outdoor shower with juniper bushes for privacy; she piggybacks onto her mother’s WiFi access from the main house using a metal post, a piece of wire, and an empty coffee can.

We sit down at the picnic table outside while Marion makes tea with thick local honey. Alexandre loves it out here. It’s the wilderness. He thinks we’ve come to hunt bears.

Marion had to glance only once at the list. She’s currently the president of the agricultural collective in the Parc du Luberon—and she knows everyone. I doubt she would appreciate the comparison, but she has the networking instincts of a Fortune 500 executive.

Listening to her talk about where we could find wild licorice root or the sweetest apricots was equivalent to having an imaginary map of Provence spread out on the table in front of us. Like Churchill moving miniature warships, she could pinpoint the best producers for each fruit—sometimes right down to the tree.

For the sour cherries: “I’ll give you his cell number. Tell him you want the last two trees on the left—just those. They’re the very best.”

For the lavender: “My neighbor has a field—it’s the size of a handkerchief, really, but he doesn’t use chemicals. Everyone else does—I don’t care what they tell you.”

For the lemon verbena: “You should go up the hill to Saint-Martin-de-Castillon. How is it you’ve never met Manon? Her mother’s American, you know.”

“I HOPE YOU
are going to move on to the chocolate soon,” said Paul, putting down his spoon with a sigh.

Mom and Paul are back in Céreste, and they’ve been the victims (if you can call it that) of our endless vanilla ice cream testing. Before we can dazzle anyone with carrot-orange-cardamom sorbet, the classics need to be impeccable, the best possible versions of themselves.

A great vanilla ice cream is like the Holy Grail—simple, impossible, and largely in the eyes of the beholder. We scraped the vanilla beans and boiled them, infused the milk for one day, two days, three days. We tried vanilla powder, which includes the ground-up pods as well as the interior seeds. I liked the coarser taste; I was quickly outvoted. Every day Gwendal came home with a new tub of ice cream for us to test—too thick, too thin, tastes like butter, tastes like water, sandy, icy, not quite up to snuff.

If I thought going into the ice cream business was going to stifle the intellectual in my husband, I was wrong. Gwendal spent the spring reading everything he could get his hands on about recipes, technique. This way of attacking a learning curve seems to run in the family. Gwendal’s father was a sailor; he learned his navigation skills out of a book before he ever took to the water.

Tonight, Gwendal has his nose in a tome from the Culinary Institute of America that could easily substitute for a season’s worth of weight lifting.

“No wonder it’s good,” he said. “They put sixty grams of vanilla beans in one liter of ice cream. That’s huge. We could never afford it.”

The recipes vary wildly, not only between chefs, but between cultures. Last week we tried a recipe from a hip American company that called for a whole teaspoon of salt—it was inedible. I was reading an article in
Bon Appétit
about another artisanal ice cream maker, and as proof of the ice cream’s quality, the magazine cited the product’s 19 percent butterfat. French ice cream is 8 or 9 percent butterfat, max. The American recipes are two-thirds cream, the French recipes two-thirds milk. We can’t figure out why. Does that mean we should tell the tourists our ice cream is low-fat?

MY MOTHER USED
to joke that she’d love to own an antiques shop but she’d never have the heart to sell anything. Now we have a whole ice cream parlor to decorate on a very limited budget—my mother’s favorite kind of shopping.

There are multiple flea markets every summer weekend in Provence. Some are big, with established dealers and tourist prices, but the best ones are in the small villages where anyone can rent a spot for six euros and clean out the contents of her grandmother’s attic. Of course you have to like what’s coming out of Grandma’s attic—stuff from eighty to ninety years ago. Right now that means art deco soup tureens and pink Depression-glass decanters with tiny glasses for after-dinner liqueurs.

It was a successful morning. We found six frosted-glass ice cream coupes (three euros for the lot), eight gold-rimmed saucers with illustrations of vintage cars (one euro), plus a vintage handbag (not a professional expense). We found an old children’s chalkboard with an abacus—we could put it outside to announce specials or new flavors. We barely had room in the trunk, but I couldn’t resist the two metal milk cans; if Rod drilled some holes in the bottom, we could use them as flowerpots. The real find of the day was a group of porcelain jars for kitchen staples in descending-size order—flour, sugar, coffee, tea, salt, pepper. It’s rare to find a complete set with all the covers intact. I don’t know quite where we’ll put them, but they spoke to me—so I’ll find a spot.

I THINK MOM
and Paul are finally getting the hang of village life. After the Sunday flea market in Mane, we found ourselves in Revest-des-Brousses eating an unseasonal but delicious
blanquette de veau
.

“What is this again?” asked my mom, sopping up the sauce with a piece of bread.

“Veal.”

“You could put cardboard under this sauce and it would taste good. Can you ask them how to make it?”

“I think I’ll have to come back for a few more years before I do that.”

“Why? Can’t you say we’re going back to the States and we want to make it?”

I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere, but I gave it my best shot.
“Ça fait plusieurs fois qu’on vient,”
I began, assuring the waitress that we were regular customers. “I can taste the nutmeg, but there’s a sweetness to the sauce that makes it exceptional.” Maybe I could flatter her into a confession.

“Ah,” she said, smiling coyly, “my husband caramelizes the onions. But he would cut off my fingers if I told you the rest.”

Alexandre wandered back to the table for his dessert.

I raised my eyebrows at my mom. “See.”

WITH MY MOM
and Paul here, Alexandre has acquired a jumble of new English words:
boat, red, turtle, moo, plum.

Back from ten days at the beach, Jean found his plum tree groaning with fruit, several buckets of which he generously donated to my kitchen.

Not to sound ungrateful, but plums irk me. Something about the raw texture, the slightly acidic density, makes me feel like I’m biting into a juicy baseball. But the abundance of the Provençal summer doesn’t leave a lot of room for discussion. Plums it is.

We have a new chest freezer in the cellar. I briefly considered tossing the whole lot in a Ziploc bag and shoving the issue downstream a few months. But another idea presented itself, inspired, of all things, by trips my mom and I used to make to a wholesale market in New Jersey. We would buy crates of overripe peaches and plums and come home and make compote. Where was that place? The details are a little fuzzy, for both of us. My mother was never a reliable narrator, and now that my grandmother’s gone, I’m starting to realize just how much is at risk of being lost. As a writer, this terrifies me. I should have started recording long ago. Why didn’t I know that my great-grandmother Rose was a milliner? Or that my great-grandfather Eddie entered the Jewish mafia by way of a Depression-era milk truck?

Gwendal’s paternal grandmother passed away this week. There weren’t many good memories; she and his grandfather were hard people, not particularly open to the wider aspirations of their children or grandchildren. But Gwendal still associates her with certain tastes. She would spend hours painstakingly shelling crabs to make him a
tartine
of bread and butter with crabmeat on top. A whole morning’s work devoured in a matter of minutes. He remembers picking blackberries for her jam—two for him, one for the pot—and the smell of burnt coffee, sitting all day over a low flame on the stove. He remembers the meticulous rows of their vegetable garden (like Jean, Gwendal’s grandparents demanded precision from their beans) and the tiny, rock-hard yellow apples from their tree.

Unlike me, my mother loves plums. This, coupled with some leftover red wine, leads to a fruitful development. I roasted the plums in a medium oven with the wine, added a split vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick, and the tiniest bit of sugar. The plums gave way, exchanging their springiness for a comforting sag. The wine bubbled into a spiced burgundy syrup, thick and glossy. I served it with
faisselle,
a mild spoonable cheese, though I sense that sour cream, Greek yogurt, or mascarpone wouldn’t go amiss.

This summer feels like a golden time: we have a new project simmering, our son is small enough that I can protect him just by closing the front gate, my parents are well enough to sit at lunch on a sunny terrace and watch Alexandre eat chocolate profiteroles and get whipped cream all over his face and in his blond hair. I don’t know what kind of food should mark this very simple gift. Something warm and sweet is a good start.