On Rue Tatin (12 page)

Annie Grodent, a small blonde fireball of energy, and Joe’s very first teacher at the
maternelle,
flies in once in a while for a quick visit, and Soeur Françoise, the keeper of the keys of the church who lives in the convent down the street from us, always greets us through the fence and our rosemary hedge. It took her years to accept an invitation to come into the courtyard, but we finally got her there, and once she even came for Joseph’s birthday.

Joseph-Claude Miquel, whose family was one of the wealthiest in Louviers before World War II and the city’s textile industry crash, divides his time between painting and giving tours of the church and the town, wearing a deep blue cape and hat in winter, and a cream-colored silk suit in summer. He makes a very distinguished figure as he walks through town, stopping to greet absolutely everyone with a joke or a racy comment, and he invariably opens the door to our courtyard and leans in to wish us well. Old Monsieur Bruhot, who lives in the house adjacent to ours, was born on rue Tatin in 1913, and his bright blue eyes dance when he talks about Louviers and its past, or the five years he spent in a Russian prisoner of war camp during the war (which was a painful experience for him, rife with bravery and bad food, and one he loves to talk about). The food in the camp turned him off onions permanently—amongst other things—and whenever I cook them he lets me know later how much he hates their aroma.

Our cast of characters also includes Lena, a friend from Sweden who has very American—and familiar—attitudes about raising children, and her husband, Bruno, a professional chef; Martine, her brother Jean-Pierre, and her husband, Patrick, who own a farm and just three years ago turned one of its outbuildings into an instantly successful restaurant serving delicious food. Edith’s father, Michel, or her Aunt Miche stop by occasionally to check on things as well.

Usually we see these people individually, when they stop by or come for dinner, or when we are invited to their homes. But once or twice a year we assemble everyone for a fête.

The first fête we had included Bernard—who has always been involved in local politics and was the senator from our district for many years—and Edith, Christian and Nadine, a handful of teachers (who seem to come in twos since they meet and marry while still in teacher’s school), and a prison guard and his lovely, fun wife. We had a great time, all of us, and Edith called me the following day to thank me.

“You know, normally you would never invite a politician and schoolteachers to the same dinner,” she said. I was dumbfounded.

“Why not?” I asked. She explained that politicians, particularly centrists like Bernard, and schoolteachers, who are generally left of the left, don’t usually mix.

“But you don’t have to worry,” she said. “Bernard had a great time and was surprised at how much he liked everyone.”

When I spoke with one of the teacher friends later he admitted that he’d been uncomfortable at first—not so much just to be with Bernard, but to be with people whom he considered bourgeois—but that he’d also been pleasantly surprised. I was shocked, but now that we’ve lived here for so long and I understand politics a bit better, I wouldn’t think of repeating the experience!

We also see a lot of people we know while we work in the garden on Saturday afternoons and Sundays or early summer evenings. We’re usually all out there, with Joe jumping on the wooden bridge Michael built him, which has as much play in it as a trampoline, climbing the small apple tree, bouncing his basketball on the postage stamp–size brick entryway. When we first moved in people often stopped to comment on the garden, the flower boxes, the minor changes in the exterior of the house. It was particularly the older generation who noticed, and they would thank us for undertaking the improvements.

As soon as the weather is fine we eat all of our meals out front, and as people walk by and spy us through the fence and the hedge they invariably wave and say
“Bon appétit!”
whether or not we know them. Juliano, our Italian hairdresser from down the street, booms out a
“Ciao!”
as he walks by. Line, who with her husband, Gilles, owns the real estate agency across the street, waves a cheerful hello and often stops in to talk. We see pharmacists, schoolteachers, the mayor, and city council members as they walk by on their way to this meeting or that, or to and from the
épicerie
or bakery. We love the rhythms of the city, the calm of Mondays when shops are mostly closed, the activity of Sunday morning when the bells ring for 11
A
.
M
. mass and people stream in and out of the church, the bustle of the rest of the week as people do their shopping and run their errands.

In many ways Louviers is a dream town for me. Its vibrant streets are lined with clothing boutiques, hardware stores, food shops, pet stores, jewelry shops, florists, a perfume boutique, a handful of makeup/day spa shops, and more coiffeurs than I’ve ever seen in one place. As a neighbor—whose husband is a coiffeur—told me, the ideal number of coiffeurs is one per thousand inhabitants. Louviers excels with at least twenty-five coiffeurs, and they all seem busy all the time.

Everything I need is within walking or bicycling distance, from the freshest of produce, cheeses, and wines at the
épicerie
next door, to freshly roasted coffee, to dozens of varieties of crisp-crusted, chewy loaves of bread, flaky, buttery pastries, and luscious fruit tarts. An old-fashioned toy store run by a dynamic mother-son team, who seem as enthralled with what they sell as are their customers, has aisles so tiny two people can’t pass in them. It satisfies Joe’s needs, which are those of most eight-to-ten-year-old boys. He loves
châteaux
and knights and theatrical battles with
épées
, or swords, trading marbles, and a game called
jojos
based on the ancient game of
osselets
, or knucklebones, and all the accoutrements can be had at the toy store, and lots of dreams besides. The town boasts a few stores whose windows look as though they haven’t changed since the twenties. Inside one of them I find treasures like old-fashioned cheesecloth, which is so pretty I want to hang it at the window, bolts of ticking once used for pillows but which would make ideal slipcovers (if I only had the time to sew!), old-fashioned, flint-driven stove lighters that I swear by. The owners are a very discreet couple who greet customers at the door and follow them until they’ve made their choice, acting miffed if no choice is made.

I love the
merceries
, or button and yarn stores, in Louviers, where flat wooden drawers hold treasure troves of embroidery thread in vivid colors, buttons of every shape and size, spools of silken thread, bolts of ribbon, ancient embroidery patterns. The particular store I’m thinking of also carries designer handbags for women and girls, scarves, and an echo of the accessories worn by the well-dressed owner who sits behind a wooden counter, her tan skin glowing, a portable telephone often clamped to her ear as she converses with her husband, gives orders to her children, answers questions from a distant customer.

I also particularly enjoy going into one of the several lingerie shops in Louviers, where the owner, a slender, attractive woman, is always doing five things at once, from helping a customer try on her wares to helping another find what she wants, to advising a man on what to buy for his wife—whom she knows—to hailing a friend walking outside. The lingerie is lovely, the show entertaining!

It takes me five minutes to walk from our house to the butcher, where I get the most flavorful tender lamb and dozens of different cuts of pork, full-flavored chickens, beef, ducks, and guinea fowl, all with incomparable flavor and texture. I’ve never seen raw meat look as appetizing as it does in this shop. The butcher is usually good for a cooking or butchering lesson, which I get while I’m waiting in line, craning my neck to look past the
pâtés
, the head cheese, and the lasagna that his wife makes.

From watching the tidy, dapper Monsieur Richard, who always wears a carefully knotted tie under his impeccable white apron, I have learned how to trim the fat on a lamb chop so it rests in an attractive curl once cooked. I now know how to tie a loin of pork so it not only holds abundant stuffing but looks graceful on a platter. Through his influence I have come to accept turkey as something more than a bird that is stuffed and roasted; its tender, tasty meat can be braised, stewed with herbs and vegetables, breaded and sautéed. He has taught me to cook young shoulder of lamb longer than a mature shoulder so it is perfectly tender, and whenever I wonder what cut of meat is best he is there to supply the answer and the goods.

One day I was in his shop musing over what to buy for lunch. I often choose his skinny, herb-flecked pork sausages, but that day I wanted something different. He suggested
tripes à la mode de Caen
(tripe cooked in apple cider) and I wrinkled my nose. At his perplexed look I explained that I’ve never been able to get over the aroma of tripe. He cut a thick slab which he wrapped and gave to me, throwing down a gauntlet. “If you don’t like MY
tripes à la mode de Caen
, I’m no butcher,” he said, then instructed me on just how to heat and serve it. I accepted the challenge, followed his directions, and both Michael and I, to our immense surprise, were converted.

My latest epiphany at Monsieur Richard’s involves chicken. He sells only farm-raised poultry, and when I asked him for one he chose a particularly plump specimen for me, with its head and feet intact. While it is common for the head to be left on, I was surprised to see the feet. “It’s true, most people don’t eat them anymore, but I refuse to cut them off,” he said. “They’re delicious. My brothers and sisters and I fought over them when we were kids.”

I expected him to simply weigh and wrap up the bird and hand it to me with the bill, but no. First he had some work to do. He carefully burned away the invisible (to me) pinfeathers and proceeded to sear the feet with a tiny propane flame. “Makes them more tender,” he explained as he scraped and trimmed them. He turned the bird this way and that, inspecting it minutely, trimming it, patting it, arranging it so that, once trussed, it would make a compact oval. When he was finished with the bird it looked as though it had spent two hours at a spa. I was entranced. Monsieur Richard carefully wrapped it in his signature red and white waxed paper and handed it to me so I could tuck it in my basket. I went home to roast it and it not only looked gorgeous but was exceptionally flavorful and delicious.

Across from the butcher is the
poissonerie
, a chilly, blue-tiled, mirrored-ceilinged shrine to the sea. Depending on the season there are sweet triangular skate wings with their slimy spotted skin; pearly white fillets of cod;
julienne
, a cod-like fish; regal, nutty-flavored little sea bass with their deep blue side stripe; and always a fillet or pile of salmon steaks, usually from the fjords of Norway and generally bland as water. More exciting are the tiny little squid or the miniature monkfish tails. When I spy these I get them, for they are too rare to pass up. At least to an American. Baby monkfish tails are limited to a very short season and their meat is so tender yet firm, so white, and so lightly sweet that I can never resist them. I love them prepared as simply as possible, usually rolled in flour and sautéed in butter. The tiny squid I either sauté or deep-fry in olive oil and serve with a piquant vinaigrette. What delicacies! There is always a table out front of the
poissonerie
with rustic baskets filled with at least three different sizes of oysters, two different varieties of blue-black mussels, and tiny, plump, wavy-shelled clams. Shellfish is my
péché mignon
, or downfall, and I often succumb to a couple dozen oysters or a liter or two of clams and mussels.

The
poissonier
’s wife makes a handful of dishes that sit proudly on the sidelines inside the shop, near the live lobster tank. They change every day, depending on what is fresh or what needs to be cooked. In the winter there is always a scallop dish, usually drowned in cream and garnished with golden bread crumbs. There is almost always a seafood
quiche
, often a marinated shellfish salad, and sometimes little puff pastry
bouchées
or cups filled with either white fish or crabmeat or chunks of lobster. Each dish is available by the serving and they all look delicious. I’m sure they are since by late afternoon not a spoonful of any of them is left.

There are
charcuteries
—the French version of a take-out, which specialize in pork creations, from
pâtés
and sausages to stuffed roast pork—about every hundred yards it seems. It may be that they hold a constant competition for the most appetizing window display for they seem to outdo each other. There are the cone-shaped, bread crumb–dusted
jambonneau
, a braised pork hock that has been rolled in bread crumbs and is intended to be eaten cold and thinly sliced. There is head cheese enclosed in gelatin,
pâtés
with strips of bacon and bay leaves on top, tripe stewed with carrots and herbs, near-black coils of blood sausage, fat white sausages flecked with wild mushrooms or truffles, and air-dried
saucissons
,
quiches
, or tiny little tomato pizzas with puff pastry crust. Then there are all the other tempting dishes like seafood terrines and freshly made salads . . . the offerings go on and on. On days when I’m not in the mood for cooking I go to one or the other of the
charcuteries
and buy a pizza, a slab of
coulibiac
(salmon in a crust), some
boudin blanc
sausage, or a huge square of
gratin de pomme de terre
so rich with cream that a little goes a long way. We could eat from the
charcuteries
every day for months and never try the same thing, for the dishes change with the seasons.

At one of the
charcuteries
on the way to school, individual pizzas baked with an egg right in the center look tempting in the morning, as do the
crêpes
filled with creamed spinach, and the little puff pastry
chaussons
that bulge with aromatic sausage meat. And this particular
charcutier
must have a love affair with gelatin for he makes dozens of fanciful creations where gelatin is a main ingredient. Joe and I often stop to look at them, marveling at the tall, skinny cones with green peas floating in slightly golden gelatin above a bed of rich pink salmon and under half a hard-cooked egg. With their mayonnaise decorations, these appetizers look like they are dressed for the prom. There are brick-shaped ones, too, with slices of sausage and swirls of spinach and almost always, it seems, at least part of a hard-cooked egg. They are more amazing than appetizing. When my older brother, Jeff, visited us, he couldn’t get over these fantastic creations with their jewel-like appeal. For his last meal with us I bought four cone-shaped treasures to serve as an appetizer. “Wow,” Jeff said. “This is so French.” It’s true, I thought, where else would anyone take so much time to create something so elaborate as a single appetizer? They weren’t the best things we had ever eaten, but they were dramatic.