Blue Plate Special (23 page)

Shortly afterward, school let out at La Mhotte and the della Negras went off to the south for their summer
vacances
. My job was over, but my plane reservation back to the States wasn’t until the very end of August, so I stayed on at La Mhotte and worked with a group of European Waldorf alumni to organize that year’s annual international Waldorf students’ conference, which was taking place at La Mhotte. I acted as a French-English translator whenever they needed one, and the rest of the time I cooked for the organizers in the now-empty (the
seminairists
were gone, and Jeff, the cook, had taken his family to the States to visit his parents) château kitchen.

Since we had a superabundance of vegetables from the kitchen garden and biodynamic farm along with plenty of grains, like brown rice and bulgur, and a general shortage of meat and fish, I made soups primarily, which I served with bread and cheese. My success with soup varied: once in a while, I lucked out and accidentally made a good one, but generally, since I hadn’t yet mastered the fundamentals of making soup from scratch, with a base of well-sautéed aromatics and stock enriched with herbs and tomato paste and wine, they were watery and bland, like prison or boarding school soup. Consequently, I got my fair share of complaints, which I accepted cheerfully: I wasn’t being paid, I was volunteering out of the goodness of my heart and because I had absolutely nowhere else
to go right now, so they could either teach me to make better soup or shut up.

For breakfast, there was always Bircher muesli; every night before bed, I cut up all the ripest plums, peaches, and apricots in the larder and soaked it all in milk overnight with a heap of steel-cut oats. The next morning, the vat held a slightly fermented, sticky, thick mass that smelled like library paste on a rotting orchard floor. The German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Swiss kids couldn’t get enough of it. Along with all the French and Italian kids, I ate a piece of toast with butter and apricot jam. I dipped it in my bowl of sweet, milky coffee.

When the conference began and hundreds more kids poured into La Mhotte with backpacks, tents, and musical instruments, I continued to cook, but now I was joined by a whole staff who had actual experience in cooking for a big crowd; the pressure was off, and I could just do prep work—gather and chop vegetables—and then, my duties finished, go off and have fun. With a group of other kids, I drank a lot of wine by campfires at night, went swimming in a nearby lake, visited the nearby Bourbon-l’Archambault, the castle built by Louis Bourbon in 1300, and joined the work crews who were clearing the forest and hauling wood. When I was asked to be the singer for the band that played at the big party halfway through the conference, I memorized Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” from the sheet music, having never heard it before. On the night of the party, I sang into a mike turned so loud, the entire countryside heard me for miles around. There were some grumbles later about the decibel level, but most people were remarkably tolerant.

Toward the end of the conference, I fell abruptly in love with a darkly handsome French boy named François who kept pursuing me. He was a cellist who had just graduated from the Paris Waldorf School and was planning to study philosophy at
the Sorbonne. We spent a couple of nights together in my tent; I was still a virgin and determined to stay that way, at least for now, but that didn’t dampen our lust, at least not mine. When the conference ended, we took the train up to Paris and stayed in the empty apartment in Versailles where he lived with his mother, who was away on vacation. I had three days before my flight back to the States; they were the most preposterously, ludicrously romantic days I’d ever had in my life. It was like some cinematic vision of young love in Paris. We swooned around together, kissing madly in the Métro, going to see
The Marriage of Figaro
and watching the entire thing with our heads together, our arms around each other; we both loved Mozart. We strolled through the palace and gardens of Versailles, walked along the Seine, went to the Louvre. We lay around on the Victorian couches in François’s high-ceilinged, airy, French-windowed, nineteenth-century apartment, listening to classical records and talking for hours. He serenaded me with his cello first thing in the morning. We had big bowls of coffee for breakfast and then nothing much else till late at night when we realized we were starving and fell like hyenas on our stores of bread and several kinds of cheese and huge, ripe tomatoes. Even then, we could hardly stop kissing and talking to eat.

On my last night in France, we didn’t go to sleep at all. François played a new recording of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
on the record player over and over while he baked me a caramelized peach tart with a
pate sucrée
. We lay on big pillows on the rug in his bedroom with a bottle of wine. François fed me pieces of warm tart and we drank wine while we listened to
Rite of Spring
until the sun rose.

François took me on the Métro to the Gare du Nord, where we said good-bye. I boarded a train to Brussels, the same station where I’d met Omar, exactly a year earlier. That afternoon, I flew across the Atlantic, toward home.

LAPIN A LÀ COCOTTE

Chop a rabbit into pieces. Fry 3 or 4 cut-up slices of very thick, fatty bacon in a skillet until they’re crisp and all the fat has rendered. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and watch Vivian munch on it as you make the rest of the stew. In the bacon fat, sauté a large chopped onion and 2 cloves of garlic. Add the rabbit pieces and sauté till they begin to turn brown-gold. Sprinkle them with 3 tablespoons of flour and sauté them for about 5 more minutes, turning. Add a cup of beef broth, ½ cup of wine, minced parsley, dried thyme, salt and pepper, and a bay leaf. Simmer, covered, for an hour, adding more broth as necessary. Serve over buttered noodles with a crisp green salad alongside.

FLAGEOLETS EN PISSENLITS

I love the French word for dandelion greens
, pissenlits,
which means bed wetters, probably because of their diuretic properties. Monica’s and my Provençal hosts made this beans-and-greens stew to serve with a rare, tender, garlic-studded roast leg of lamb
.

Soak a pound of dried flageolets or navy beans in water overnight and then drain them. In a Dutch oven, heat a tablespoon of vegetable oil or bacon fat (I might throw a handful of lardons in, too, if I had some on hand) and sauté a mirepoix (minced onion, carrot, and celery) with 2 crushed garlic cloves and thyme. Add the beans with enough water or stock to cover by 1 inch, plus a bay leaf. Cover and bring just to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 2 hours, adding additional liquid if necessary to keep the beans covered. When the beans are soft, add 2 cups of chopped
pissenlits
or other bitter greens and continue to cook for another half hour, until the beans
are creamy. Stir in 2 tablespoons of butter and season with salt and pepper to taste. Eat immediately.

YORKSHIRE PUDDING

Vivian taught me to make this perfect, quintessentially British accompaniment to roast beef. Made correctly, it emerges from the oven looking like a big popover, brown and puffy around the edges, golden and firm in the middle
.

Half an hour before the roast is done, take a large bowl and in it, combine 1 cup all-purpose flour, ½ teaspoon salt, 1 cup milk, and 2 beaten eggs. Mix until smooth. Remove the roast from the oven and spoon ½ cup of drippings into a 9-by-9-inch pan. Increase oven temperature to 425 degrees. Return the roast to the oven. Pour the pudding batter into the drippings and bake for 10 minutes. Take the roast out of the oven; continue baking the pudding for another 25 to 30 minutes. When it’s cool enough, cut it into squares and serve it with the best, most perfectly rare and tender rib roast ever made in Christendom and Jewry.

I arrived back in the States to find my mother in a very bad way professionally, financially, and emotionally. She was deeply lonely, even more so than she’d been in Jerome. Her job at the health clinic was stressful and hard; the hours were long, the pay was bad. She had left the brick house in Harlemville and was renting half of a divided white frame house over in Spencertown, on the main road through town. The other half of the house was empty. Behind her lived a burly bearded tattooed guy, above a garage. He tinkered with his motorcycle and pickup truck engines constantly and never smiled or said hello.