Bastille Day Version 2
Joyeuse Fête de la Bastille! Last year’s Bastille Day missive was headed with the provocative title “We Hate France,” as we gleefully jumped on the Franco-bashing bandwagon along with those patriotic statesmen whose response to global turmoil was to change the name of French fries to “Freedom Fries,” certainly a matter worthy of the highest level government attention. But deep down, we couldn’t disguise the fact that our coeurs bleed bleu, blanc, et rouge, as well as red, white, and blue, and we tipped our hand in the subtitle: Because it’s so far away.
But you’d be surprised at the reactions we received to the “We Hate France” line. Apparently there’s a little bit of a literalist streak around these parts, because a number of people came up to our booth, saw the newsletter, and began spontaneously spluttering, “You hate France?!? Why, you ought to be ashamed!” And then we would sheepishly point out the fine print, and we could share a chuckle as political correctness was restored. But a couple of people read the title, looked at us in venomous affirmation, and proclaimed, “Oh, I hate the French too, they think they’re so big…”. Or words to that effect. It was hard to know quite how to respond to that. I’d like to say that we sold them a “Freedom Stick” (baguette in Star-Spangled disguise) and sent them on their way, but I don’t think it ended like that.
This year we’re dropping all coy pretense, and coming right out with our true feelings: “We Don’t Hate France, Just the Rude Waiters, Arrogant Hotel Clerks, Dismissive Shopkeepers, Unhelpful Tourism Officials, Pushy Metro Riders, and All the Rest Who Make Our Wardrobe Look So Crappy.” No, but seriously, they do make our clothes look crappy, and that’s unforgivable. Although, come to think of it, so do a lot of people here in St Paul. We’re going to have to rethink this.
We made our last trip to France in December of last year. We flew into Paris, hopped in our rented Golf and chugged off sleepily toward Champagne. We spent two days near Epernay. We walked and drove through a starkly beautiful landscape, the hillsides all stitched with vines, the sky a swiftly changing ceiling of gray cloud and silvery sun, the river Marne threading sinuously through the valley. And we sampled, well, yes, a certain amount of wine. At breakfast we stuck with café au lait, but otherwise—when oneself is within Champagne, should not one have some champagne within oneself? The concierge at the auberge where we stayed, a 17th century manor house, informed us that champagne is good for you, it contains vitamins (Veet-a-MEEN!, as she charmingly pronounced it). The air of Champagne is restorative, as well, she said. So: un peu du vin, un peu de l’air champenois: a very healthful regimen.
But one can be, perhaps, a little too healthy, so it was good to drive eastward from Champagne into Lorraine. Here we had an opportunity we’d never had before, to stay with actual French people in an actual French house in an actual French village, the tiny, somnolent burg of Onville. Actually, the situation in Onville turned out to be a bit of a United Nations experience. Our hosts were Regina, who is German, and Christian, French of Polish descent. Christian’s mother Charlotte was there too; she’s from Poland but has lived in France most of her life. Another American guest, Greg, arrived while we were there. He spoke only English. Regina spoke German, French and English. Christian spoke French, German, and Polish. Charlotte spoke Polish and French. We had our serviceable French and what we take for English. So: Christian and Regina spoke to each other in German, while Christian and Charlotte spoke together in Polish, and Regina and Charlotte conversed in French; we spoke to Christian and Charlotte in French, and to Greg and Regina in English. Some Swiss people arrived while we where there. I think they were Swiss. They’d been in Switzerland, at any rate. They all spoke French and some spoke English and who knows what else. Christian had a habit of opening one bottle of wine after another, from an apparently bottomless cellar. It gets a little fuzzy.
The house in Onville still has its original kitchen, with its original brick oven. For everyday use they have a small modern kitchen, but on special occasions they use the brick oven, and for the gala dinner on our second night Christian lit a fire to roast a couple of gigots, legs of lamb. Here was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up, so while shopping for dinner we picked up baking supplies to try our bread in a real French brick oven. But the thing is, you see, in France they have these boulangeries all over the place. Nobody makes bread at home, and the flour selection, in a giant supermarket in Metz, consisted entirely of five-pound bags of white flour. Bleached or not, it didn’t say. Gluten content, place of origin? There was no telling. At least it made our choice simple. Back in Onville we mixed up a couple of doughs: one with the white flour, which turned out to be rather soft, probably great for biscuits but not ideal for bread; and one with a multi-grain bread-machine mix that Regina had on hand. After I’d mixed up the doughs I took a little pinch of each, as I habitually do, and tasted them to make sure I’d put the salt in. The white dough was fine, but the other tasted extremely salty. I looked at the bag, which was all in German, and in the midst of a lot of ingredients with very long names, I found that the flour already contained salz. I took a bit of the white dough, and a little more water and flour, and kneaded it all into the salty grain bread, and figured it would have to do.
While the oven heated I shaped loaves while Mary, Regina and Greg prepared puff pastry canapés to top with tapenade, pesto, or slices of sausage. The fire was smoky at first, but once it got going it burned so hot that it was smokeless. The flames licked up to the domed ceiling of the oven and turned the brick white-hot. It was awfully convivial in the charming little kitchen hung all around with antique copper pans, with the roaring fire, a couple bottles of wine open, and all of us working companionably together, nibbling on salami, olives, and whatnot. When the oven was very hot we brushed some of the ashes aside and slid the proofed loaves of dough in. We had no idea how hot the oven was. Pretty hot, I think. We checked on the bread every few minutes, shifted it around to keep it from browning too fast.
Around this time the Swiss (?) contingent arrived, and everything became very jolly and confused. We forgot to tend the fire and the kitchen started to fill with smoke, what with the smoldering fire and the fact that everyone was smoking cigarettes—not Gauloises or Gitanes, but Marlboro Lights. It took a little while to get the fire back up to speed, during which time my bread took on a burnished hue and came out looking very rustic, to put it kindly, and carrying a definite aroma of wood smoke—pain fumé, if you will. I’m not sure if it will catch on.
Now the gigots were sizzling away in the oven as well, and Regina had prepared some flageolets beans, traditional with leg of lamb. We sat down at a very continental hour to our dinner.
The previous night we had sat up late talking with Christian, Regina, Charlotte, and Charlie, who helps Christian with his real estate business. Charlotte, who is nearly 80, did most of the talking, telling stories of when she was a young woman in occupied Poland. Her French was slow and clear, and amazingly comprehensible to both of us. Christian and Charlie also made a point of speaking so we could understand them, but the conversation went along at a comfortable pace. We went to bed that night thinking we’d made some kind of breakthrough—we could really understand French.
The night of the gigots and the pain fumé, however, was a different story. Once the talk got going around the dinner table the Francophones forgot all about their limited American guests. They talked in full-speed vernacular French, with their mouths full, with their hands in front of their mouths. Halfway though the meal I realized that I hadn’t understood a single word that anyone had said for the last twenty minutes. At one point Christian picked up a statue of Ste Jeanne from the sideboard, banged it down on the dinner table, and declared, in English, “Do you KNOW the story of Joan of Arc?” (he said it like John-of-Hark). Everybody roared, it was an inside joke that we were let in on the next night.
After the Swiss had left (but now I think they must have been French, for only the French could speak French so incomprehensibly), at an hour of the morning I hadn’t intentionally witnessed since college days, Christian treated me to a sip of some locally produced firewater, flavored with the little mirabelle plums that the Lorraine region is famous for. In the course of our toast he told me that he liked me, but he also told me, “Tu es fou,” you’re crazy, a writer and a baker who doesn’t talk about writing or baking. Or maybe he liked me because I was crazy. I told Christian I liked him, too, because he never balked for even one instant at popping another cork.
Which is not to imply that our hosts were lushes. They didn’t entertain like this all the time, but when they did it, they didn’t stint. This was what life was about for them, gathering at table with family, with friends both old and new, with whomever happened to show up. Welcoming, regaling, feeding, pouring the wine—tasting the wine, appreciating the food (they even had warm praise for my salty smoked bread), seasoning it all with talk that ranged from food to politics to John-of-Hark to popular American music (we searched and searched at the end of the night for the name of a female folk singer of the ‘70s, and finally got it—Melanie!). The French call it savoir vivre, knowing how to live. We’ve heard often in France the sentiment that Americans only care about money, while Europeans stress relations with others, and make a point of not being so busy that they forget to live their lives. It’s a generalization, of course, but one with some truth to it, I think. We came away from our visit in Onville knowing that we couldn’t have bought anything like it, not for a million euros.
From Onville we continued east into Alsace, and spent one night in the midst of the Alsatian wine country, in the town of Ribeauvillé, and one night in Strasbourg, which must be one of the most charming cities in the world, especially around Christmastime. All over this beautiful city threaded through with the channeled Rhine, there were little Marchés de Nöel, Christmas markets, selling handicrafts, regional foods, spiced warm wine from faux-rustic booths strung with Christmas lights . Santa Claus sat in a rowboat, fishing, in one of the canals. We walked and walked and walked, to take it all in, to create an appetite for wonderful seafood and choucroute, and the splendid, underappreciated Alsatian wines.
We took the train back to Paris, shouting out Salut! as we passed the vicinity of Onville, and installed ourselves (doesn’t that sound worldly, installing oneself?) in the Latin Quarter at the Familia Hotel (it sounded a little Mafioso, but it was delightful). In Paris we did what we always do in Paris: walk a lot, eat a lot, shop a little, look at some art. This was a new neighborhood for us, and a very fortunate one, from a baker’s perspective. Just a short walk from our hotel was the bakery of the renowned Eric Kayser, an Alsatian, as it happens, who now has several very successful boulangeries in Paris. The original, on the Rue Monge, was the one we visited.
Our first night in Paris we walked by the main bakery, where there is always a line, and peered in the windows, watching the bakers move baguettes from the couches (linen proofing cloths) to the automatic loader, slash them with a razor knife, and shoot them into a bank of hearth ovens. And oh, did my heart cry out! A few doors down from the main Kayser is his boulangerie biologique, an organic bakery. At a table outside this shop sat a lovely dark-haired woman, on her break, smoking a cigarette. She’d seen us peering in at the bakers, and when we stopped to peer again at the organic shop, she told us that we could have a cup of tea or coffee inside—prendre un café, such an inviting phrase. We thanked her and told her we would, but not tonight; we had a few days in Paris, and we would be back.
And we were back, every morning of our stay in Paris, and most afternoons, for our quatre-heure, our late afternoon snack. There was just a narrow little bar to sit at, along the wall in the front of the shop, opposite the pastry cases filled with those pristine, glistening cakes and tarts you will find all over France. At the back of the shop was the bread, and more quotidian pastries like croissants, pain au chocolat, etc. They had a formule for breakfast—coffee, tea or chocolate, fresh orange juice, a tartine beurré (baguette sliced the long way with butter and preserves), and a viennoiserie (one of those croissant or similar), for about five euros. Their baguette was exemplary ( it’s the inspiration for our Latin Quarter baguette), the viennoiseries perfectly buttery, the coffee fresh and strong—not the muddy, acidic swill you get in most hotels. Our friend from the first night was usually there when we went in. For our afternoon snacks we often asked her recommendation (“Qu’est-ce que vous proposez aujourd’hui…?”). One day she pointed out a little layer cake with an improbable number of tiers; it looked kind of mocha flavored. “C’est super-fantastique,” she said. We trusted her and we tried it, and it was.
The day of our departure we went about assembling our picnic for the long plane ride home—paté, dried sausage, cheese, fruit, bread, pastry, a half bottle of wine (okay, two half-bottles). Our last stop was Kayser, where we ordered up way too much bread (so we know how some of you feel…). Our friend was assembling our order, and at the end started filling a bag with little croquantes, I think they were called, tiny choux pastry puffs jeweled with pearl sugar. I started to open my mouth, to say, “Mais madame, nous n’avons pas…”, but before I could speak she gave us a look, a smile, and we just said, “Merci beaucoup, madame. Vous êtes très gentille….”
I will never again say I hate the French, even in jest.