Tomorrow the students come

I wrote this story perhaps fifteen years ago. I was in France awaiting the arrival of new students who came to spend two months studying cooking. Tonight I had dinner alone. The evening was closing on a perfect pale blue sky illuminated with pink clouds. I sat contented, thinking of what tomorrow would bring with new students beginning, other students continuing. I spent the past week, not arranging the farm house in rural France, but the studio in urban Portland. It has a new oven to keep the beautiful, powder blue French stove company. Everything in the kitchen was taken out, wiped clean, and reorganized.

If in the next six weeks you’re inspired to come to the Studio to spend a day and see who we are and what we do, or if you have a week to devote to learning and to focus either on cooking, or on baking, check to see if there is a place for you at the Studio. We are in a flexible mode. We are planning two one week sessions in August, so keep us on your radar, particularly if Oregon, and all it offers in summer, is your destination.

DINNER ALONE

Next week the students come, but this week belongs to me. It is time to settle, to arrange the farmhouse at Ste. Ouenne, and to readapt, to re-familiarize myself with the different world that France is. I ask myself if it is the way the evening light that falls across these gentle valleys, softening all the colors and contours of this landscape that makes me or any of us love a place. Patches of newly turned earth have been planted. The earth is exposed to sun and sky. In the morning mists it appears moist, velvety, chocolate colored. Now at evening, after a full day of warm sun, it is a radiant terra cotta, it has a golden glow.

Is the love of place tied to the reception from friends, from acquaintances, from casual contacts? At the market I find some changes. I ask the young couple selling vegetables where their parents are? They look puzzled and ask “What parents?” “But aren’t you Guy’s son,” I ask, convinced by the resemblance. “No,” the young man answers, “I’ve bought the business from Monsieur. You’re the chef from California though, aren’t you?” This is a place of continuity. My friend agrees that the young man looks just like Guy did when he started selling produce twenty five years ago. The woman who sells fish greets me as though I saw her last week. The butcher and his wife do the same. The couple who sell excellent birds, ducks, foie gras, joke with me about being alone. “When do the students come?” “How are those who were here the last time?”

The woman who sells honey explains to me her work these days. At this time of year, some of her bees take it into their heads to leave the hives and go to establish new ones. This of course would not be a good business practice for her to condone. She says the bees fill their gorges with honey before they leave so they have enough to live on for three or four days until they can re-establish their work habits and build new hives. She tracks them down, following them from flowering plants to their new nests. She finds the queen and transports her back to a hive that she has readied. And the new colony follows the queen faithfully, obediently. She says she can tell by the sound of their humming if the bees are upset and therefore whether she should wear gloves and hat. This conversation with me turns into a performance. She speaks in a voice that becomes more public as more people stop to listen in on our conversation. I take my pot of honey and my soap, wish her well, and I continue on my way. (photo:John Valls)

Tomorrow there will be students who bring so much openness to be compressed into a short period of time. They will want to know many things and there is much we will do. But this week I have the odd experience of buying only for one person. Now I reeducate my palate. I eat simple foods, well prepared. On their own they taste like what they are; they don’t need to be something else. A piece of cod from the fish vendor, cooked in paper with a little local butter is all discovery. The potatoes, new this season, taste all by themselves as though they are already loaded with butter. They need nothing additional in order to be enjoyed.

The ratatouille made from a small dice of onions, sweet peppers, tomatoes, eggplant and zucchini, is cooked with garlic in some olive oil from the mill at Maussane in Provence. The dish gets seasoned only with local salt and fresh ground pepper. I bring a little to friends who think immediately of the Midi and of summer. It is so evocative a taste and provides so clear a memory. Cooking for one person, I buy only a small pot of fromage blanc. To go with it I buy a small pot of local creme fraiche from Echire. These things give my palate an immediate sense of the taste of the season. There are gariguettes, early strawberries, and a small box lasts me through three servings. I find that the fromage blanc, topped with a little creme fraiche, sprinkled with beet sugar and garnished with these perfumed little strawberries makes the best dessert. It is much more satisfying that any ice cream, any where.

The shadows grow longer as the setting sun finds its way further west. From the top of this little hill where I sit, I see the winding roads that separate field and woods. The sound of a tractor returning from the fields percolates to my hill. The beauty of this landscape is the result of industry. It comes from hard work and diligent effort on the part of people who take great pride in making their world look the way it does – cared for, manicured, domesticated, tended. It produces an image of a world that matches their expectation, and mine.

Other articles you might like;

• Things Italian
• Cooks dream
• Simple beauty
• Chef Studio mentorship training
• Understanding Indian cooking – 4 part series

Be Sociable, Share!

•