Читать книгу Tarte Tatin: More of La Belle Vie on Rue Tatin - Susan Loomis - Страница 6

Before Michael started on the kitchen he added a long, narrow room at the back of the house and just off the now-finished dining room. Our friends though he was crazy: he had all this other work to do on the house and now he was adding more? But he knew it made sense, and so did I, for it was a very clever way to get privacy. We weren’t allowed, under the terms of our mortgage, to build any kind of wall between ourselves and the parish house next door, but we were allowed to put an addition onto the house. The addition, then, became our wall.

I should explain that our property abuts that of the parish meeting hall, an active spot where parishioners came for catechism, communion classes and evening prayer vigils. All too often we found people peering in through our small-paned windows at what we assumed they thought was an abandoned house. We didn’t understand how they could have thought that, since all the windows were clean, the garden was landscaped and the chimney in active use, but it had been empty for a long time, and presumably they just couldn’t resist being nosy. Their surprise when we caught them at it was amusing – they would stare and ogle, not realizing that we were in there, since it was usually early evening when they were there awaiting their classes or vigils, and the light was quite dim. When their eyes adjusted and they realized they were looking right at us, horror and embarrassment would flit across their faces as they abruptly pulled back, and hastily walked away. We would giggle slyly, knowing that they now felt more uncomfortable than we did. Still, it wasn’t the most pleasant of situations – what if we’d been walking around naked? Or eating off the floor? Or …?

The long room, which Michael put up quickly, consisted of an outer timbered wall, a glass ceiling and a floor of bricks laid in sand rather than on a foundation, a long window at one end and a door at the other. It would ultimately be turned into a passageway to the courtyard and I, dreaming of our own little orangerie, wanted to plant lemon trees along the warmest wall, with the glass ceiling acting as solar heating.

Home grown citrus fruit would not materialize until years in the future, however. For the duration, this unheated room with its unheated floor would be my temporary kitchen, while Michael socked his way through the building of the permanent kitchen which, we now knew, would be the heart of our cooking school.

Michael installed a large, shallow ceramic sink around the corner and at one end of the room, lined the walls with shelving, and once my two small gas stoves, the refrigerator and all my kitchen equipment were installed it was cosy and efficient, like a kitchen on a boat. Everything was out where I could see it and within easy reach, the way I like it, and the blue and ochre timbered walls, the old brick floor and my copper pots hanging above the stove gave it a certain style.

The day Michael began work on the kitchen was one of those red-letter moments. I know he dreaded the job because it was massive and would require not only superhuman strength, but super-human patience as he turned a series of sixteenth-century rooms into one, cohesive kitchen. He carefully sealed off the space with plastic, tape and curtains and proceeded to go at it with satisfying hammer-blows as he bashed down walls and the old, crumbling fireplace, pulled up tiles and generally turned the space into a shambles. A wall with two beautiful long windows that had divided the former kitchen from Michael’s workshop disappeared, as did an angled wall at the back and another one to the side. The result was one huge space that stretched from the street to the back courtyard. Destruction, the easy part, took weeks. Once everything was a mound of rubble the real work began as Michael hauled it out, tons of it, dustbin by huge dustbin. He found someone who needed landfill, which helped enormously, as the city dump allows just one visit per person per day.

It took months of backbreaking labour to get it all cleaned out. Then Michael ran pipes and wiring through the floor before he poured a concrete pad at the end of the room: this would remain his workshop. With nothing in the space but Michael’s tools it looked large, airy, wonderful. Joe was soon in there on his roller blades, swirling around the obstacles of Michael’s paraphernalia.

Michael had completed kitchen plans before he began demolition, and he pored over them at night after working in the space all day, tweaking them as it opened up. The planning stage had been a torturous process for me: I don’t have the gift of being able to visualize space. When I look at plans on paper I see flat drawings on paper. When I look at an empty space I see just that – an empty space. But I do know what I need in a kitchen to work well and efficiently: a big centre island with a butcher block and a sink; my knives handy without being in the way or accessible to small fingers; pots and pans and certain utensils hung where I can reach them; lots of full-extension drawers; enough room to accommodate a crowd.

I have ideas about the way I want a kitchen to look, ideas which have to do with colour and warmth and being able to display some of my favourite things like the gorgeous wedding cookies tied with pale blue ribbon that were a gift when I was in Sardinia, the jar of jewel-like candied fruit from Apt, photographs of the children at work in the kitchen, strands of garlic and Espelette peppers, a frothy bunch of pink peppercorns, bay leaves, shallots. I communicated all of this to Michael, who knew it all already, and beyond that I was pretty hopeless. Oh, I read kitchen design books but found most spaces in them cold and impersonal. Flipping through French magazines I found some design elements I loved, and these went into a file for Michael, along with my ideas and observations. He referred to them all when he drew up the plan, going so far as to making a paper ‘maquette’, or model, so that I could see, in three dimensions, what he was talking about.

A year of demolition and cleaning up, of concrete-pad pouring and figuring had passed before Michael began the construction phase of the kitchen. He worked on it slowly and steadily, his brow knitted most of the time as he puzzled out the intricate details. It was very slow going, but fortunately one of Michael’s many gifts is persistence. He worked and worked for months, grumbling and cursing, hammering and sawing, measuring and figuring. There was a point where I could see it was getting the better of him and, one night, after Joe was in bed, I suggested we rethink the plans. I’d had my doubts about a bank of cabinets he’d drawn in on each side of the stove in a ziggurat pattern. He was trying to give me maximum storage and light at the same time, but each time I looked at them on paper they seemed top-heavy and complicated.

I suggested, gently, that I didn’t need the cabinets, knowing that Michael had spent a lot of time figuring, measuring and planning to fit them in. Surprisingly, he agreed easily, and with a swipe of his eraser the cabinets were gone and the kitchen lightened up. It is very hard to work on a project such as the one we had naively embarked upon – and to live in it as well; to have the husband be the contractor and the crew while the wife is the dreamer and the breadwinner. Anyone who has been through a similar situation will sympathize – it is one of the ultimate tests of marriage. Throw in a foreign country, metric measurements, a toddler and my frequent absences for work, and the situation becomes even more like dry tinder.

Michael and I were managing, but it required extreme delicacy on my side and extreme organization on his. He is a master at keeping construction messes separate from our living area through his system of plastic, tape and curtains, so that as little dust and noise as possible escape into our lives. I have always appreciated this about him. I am very good at keeping out of his way, both when he is designing and when he works, something he appreciates about me. Still, there were times when I wanted to scream at the noise and puffs of dust that inevitably escaped, and there were times when he wanted to, I am certain, walk out and close the door behind him. But each time we lost patience we stepped back, took a deep breath and really looked at what was happening. Progress was being made, spaces were changing, the bones of the kitchen were in place and it was all taking shape. Observation like this gave each of us renewed energy.

One of the most exciting things about the project was a back porch that Michael had incorporated into the kitchen. To do this, he’d pushed out the back wall and put in glass doors, and pushed up the ceiling then roofed it with glass, which pulled light into the whole room. He’d removed a battered old small-paned metal window that I loved, and painstakingly built two replicas using wood and wavy, antique glass. Michael’s brother David, a frequent visitor, helped finish them, and when they were installed they looked as though they had always been there.

Michael rebuilt the fireplace into a cooking fireplace, with a shelf in front wide enough to hold a dinner plate, and a beautifully graceful mantel and chimney. It was a tense job because, even though he’d already remodelled a fireplace that worked, he was building this one from scratch and he didn’t know how to guarantee it would draw. We asked friends who’d had fireplaces installed, and all their suggestions pointed in one direction – make the fireplace itself deep enough to build a fire towards the back so the smoke has nowhere to go but up. A book about chimney-building confirmed this and, using calculations he found there as his compass, Michael constructed an entirely smokeless fireplace.

Michael was about to do a final plastering on the fireplace when a friend called to ask if he wanted an old coal stove. Michael went to take a look, only to discover that what he was being offered wasn’t any old stove, it was a vintage Aga cooker in mint condition. Our friend just wanted to get rid of it, and said if Michael would take it off his hands, he could have it. Michael jumped at it.

I was in the United States on a book-tour at the time, and when I called that day and Michael told me what he’d just been given I was so excited I could hardly stand it. Both Michael and I had spent significant years of our childhoods in England, where each of us had eaten oatmeal, soups, stews and breads cooked in the oven of an Aga, and heard our mothers extol the virtues of this heavy, cast-iron stove. We’d both wanted one for years.

Our friend needed the Aga out of the apartment building and Michael called three friends to help him move it. They took a sturdy dolly that Michael had built, hoisted the heavy stove up on it and pushed it uphill from our friend’s building to the house, a journey of about five blocks. One of them played traffic policeman as they huffed and puffed and somehow shimmied and wrestled it into our courtyard, then into the house. I took a photo of them from my office window as they pushed and guided this ungainly stove up the middle of the street – they were working hard and laughing at the same time, knowing they were a spectacle, and I just hoped they wouldn’t laugh so hard that they would let go of it and send it rolling back down the street.

Michael couldn’t install the Aga before he made room for it, which meant that he had to deal with our immensely tall and spindly chimney, which looked as if a strong puff of wind would topple it. Michael had checked it when we moved in and determined it was secure, and the last thing he wanted was to take the time and resources to rebuild it. The addition of the Aga meant he couldn’t avoid it; the oven needed a separate flue.

He gritted his teeth, bought the materials and enlisted the help of a Sicilian friend who is a mason. Together, they managed to build an even taller chimney with two flues, one for the Aga and one for the fireplace. This proved providential when an epic windstorm blew through Normandy just months later: the new chimney withstood the storm, whereas the old one wouldn’t have; it would almost certainly have crashed right into the kitchen below it, destroying months of work.

The kitchen was about half-built when I was contacted by a restaurant chain with whom I’d done some promotion, who asked if I would design a five-day programme for fourteen of their managers that would include hands-on cooking classes. ‘Of course,’ I said. We’d been serving lunches to paying guests from a temporary kitchen in an unfinished dining room, why shouldn’t we go ahead and let fourteen cooking students come too?

Michael and I studied our options, trying to figure out how to make this a reality. We resorted, once again, to theatre. We would transform the now-finished dining room, next to the temporary kitchen, into a ‘laboratory’, where all of the mise-en-place, or recipe preparation, would be carried out. We wouldn’t have water, but the sink wasn’t far. Then, all the cooking would be done in the long, narrow kitchen, which was basically arranged for one person, so I would need to organize the menus carefully to make it work efficiently. We would set up the dining table in our hallway, which is just large enough to hold a long table and has the house’s best view of the church’s main façade.

Meanwhile, I became pregnant with Fiona. When I’d agreed to do the class I hadn’t expected this. She was due in February and the class had been scheduled for April. That gave me two good months to recover, which I figured would be plenty.

The closer the date for the class got, the more nervous I became. I had organized the week as best I could before Fiona was born so that my mind was at ease, but I still needed to work out the menus and figure out where and how to procure ingredients. I would buy everything I could from local farmers, and rely on Chez Clet, the épicerie – grocery – next door, for the rest.

I have taught many, many cooking classes, but never in my home, never with a two-month old baby, and never a hands-on class for fourteen people with little or no cooking experience. I knew I’d need some help and I turned to Bruno Atmani, a friend and professionally trained chef. He had recently returned to France from Sweden where he’d worked in restaurants for ten years. His English, which he’d perfected by watching English-language movies, was fluent and his humour of such quality that it is hard to look at him without giggling. I’d never worked with him, but I knew he’d be perfect for the job.

I also enlisted a young American woman, Allison, who had worked for me previously, to help organize things, take some of the trips with us, and generally keep things in order. With Michael, we formed the heart of the ‘cooking school’!

The day before the group arrived Michael and Bruno set up work-stations in the dining room. One of the stations was the butcher’s work-bench we intended to move into the kitchen when it was finished, a beautiful piece of furniture we’d picked up at a brocante for next to nothing. The others were sturdy tables that Michael had quickly built. I set out cutting boards, tea towels and knives, bouquets of herbs and salt and pepper. I lined several dustbins with plastic bags, and set large bowls of water in strategic positions, for rinsing knives and hands. When we were finished we stood back: with the church looming through the windows in the background, it looked incredibly romantic!

The group arrived, starstruck with being in France and with coming to our house. The group leaders had prepared them well: each manager had a beautiful little book that described their tour, and included a biography of me. They’d all read my French Farmhouse Cookbook, so they had a sense of the food they would be asked to prepare.

I gave them each a long white apron, a toque, or chef’s hat, and a book of the recipes we were going to prepare. They went to settle into their hotel while Bruno, Allison and I set out ingredients and prepared for them to return.

I’d planned a simple menu for the first meal, which included tapenade as an appetizer, asparagus with a fresh goat’s cheese and herb sauce, chicken with cream and sorrel sauce, salad and cheese, and lemon cake with fresh strawberries and cream.

My first step was to take them through all of the ingredients, to explain what they were and where they had come from. When I got to the chicken there were a few shrieks, for its head was still attached, and one of the students almost fainted. I had been warned that these people weren’t cooks. Despite working for a restaurant chain, they were people-managers and number-crunchers, and it turned out that most of them had almost no hands-on experience with food at all. Their ‘restaurants’ were really bakeries that served food, and they all knew a lot about how to sell breads and cakes, tarts and cookies, how much wood to order for the wood-burning ovens and how to manage the people who actually did the cooking. But they couldn’t navigate their way through a recipe. This made my job that much more interesting and important, and more fun, because I had them captive for a week and could imprint upon them my own standards of quality and freshness!

What this group didn’t know about cooking they made up for in willingness to learn and to work, and the experience was more fun than I could have imagined. I was organized down to the last clove of garlic, but considering the variables – not the least among them the fact that I was nursing an infant Fiona – the results of the first session were near miraculous. The temporary kitchen, intended for one cook, at one point had seven people in it laughing, sautéeing, tasting as they went. There was just one French person with the group, a chef employed at the company’s central kitchen, and he had decided that he would go off on his own. He’d run out to the butcher while I was giving my talk about ingredients – being French, he didn’t need to hear it – and bought some lamb brains. As everyone worked and jostled in the kitchen, he’d carved out a little space to prepare the brains, which, I was certain, he would eat all by himself. I could have strangled him, but I held back. In any case, everything went so smoothly that we were all ready to sit down and begin our inaugural meal at 8 p.m., as I’d planned.

We had a terrific week going to markets and visiting artisan food producers, farmers, and pottery makers. We even visited an ancient wood-fired bread oven and everyone had a chance to wear the baker’s traditional Norman wooden clogs with their turned-up toes, slide loaves around in the oven, then see them emerge from the oven’s heat, their crusts popping and crackling. The baker opened jars of homemade jam and bottles of cider, and we had an unexpected feast in the small, timbered building. As we left, the baker gave a warm loaf to each person and we rode the bus back to Louviers in a haze of toasty aroma.

Our week culminated in a meal that Bruno and I prepared for the group, who had gone on a day-trip to the D-Day landing beaches. They returned just as we were putting the finishing touches to the seafood stew we’d prepared, but before we sat down Michael had some entertainment planned. He called everyone into the kitchen, opened champagne and poured glasses. He was preparing to install the centre island in the kitchen, and that afternoon had poured the small concrete pad where it would sit, which was still soft enough to take an imprint. After a toast to the group and the week, he asked each person to autograph the concrete. ‘You will be immortalized at On Rue Tatin,’ he said, and everyone cheered, then dropped to their knees and covered the concrete with their fanciful signatures. One day, should our house be excavated, the archaeologist will surely scratch her head over the signatures in the concrete pad!

The dinner table was set. On it were bottles of Côtes de Blaye and big baskets of Michael’s freshly made bread. Because this group was service-oriented, they jumped right into helping out, insisting that Bruno, Michael, Allison and I be waited on. It was a fitting end to an unbelievably warm, enjoyable week, and it heralded a happy future for a cooking school at On Rue Tatin.

After the group had gone, Michael returned to working on the kitchen, and I to writing and recipe testing. Michael installed the butcher’s work-bench, then proceeded to expand on it for the centre island. The butcher block top, which was about five feet long, had fissures in it the size of the Grand Canyon. We had bathed it with water for months, hoping the wood would expand, but the spaces remained. Michael cut the block into three pieces, which he trimmed and evened off, then stuck back together to make a shorter, smoother cutting surface. It still had small cracks in it, which Michael filled with beeswax, a food-friendly, aesthetically pleasing solution. We wanted the front of this graceful piece of furniture, with its two deep, curved drawers, to be what people saw when they entered the kitchen, so Michael put them facing forward. He built a frame that widened the piece and set the butcher block atop it at the back, on the stove side.

We hadn’t determined what our counter-tops would be. We’d tried poured concrete for the surfaces in the temporary kitchen, but it hadn’t held up as well as we’d hoped, and we’d also tried tile, which I found an unfriendly work surface, and hard to clean. We were considering all kinds of things when Michael came home from a materials buying trip one afternoon, excited about some end-lots of marble he’d seen. We went to take a look.

Here again, a limited budget worked in our favour. We wouldn’t have tried so many surfaces, nor looked so hard if we could have just gone out and purchased what we wanted. Thanks to Michael always looking for ways to make the budget stretch, here was a beautiful solution in the form of huge, polished squares of a marble that was luminous with ochre, dark pink, grey and a tinge of bluish green.

With the marble chosen, Michael could continue with the centre island. He first rounded the edges of the squares, then installed them opposite the butcher block. He incorporated a small sink to the right of the butcher block for washing vegetables, and underneath it he built two drawers, one for rubbish and the other for compost. He incorporated other drawers into the island, too, to accommodate all the paraphernalia of a family kitchen, from first-aid kit to napkins and bibs. In the centre of the island, between the wood and the marble, Michael inserted a wooden knife-holder that was flush with the surface. My knives fitted down into it, their blades separated by adjustable wooden pegs. Over the island he installed a beautiful, art deco chandelier we’d purchased several years before, which was, we discovered when we got it home, signed by the Frères Mueller from Lunéville, in Alsace.

We wanted to tile the entire twelve-foot-long back wall of the kitchen, as a backdrop for the gas stove. I wanted to use handmade tiles we’d seen in the Marais area of Paris, which came in a beautiful blanc cassé, soft white. We brought two of them home and set them on the counter, more as a tease than anything else, for their price would eat up the whole of the rest of our kitchen budget. Michael came home with many other tile samples, but none of them looked good next to those from the Marais. One day, though, he found some industrially made tiles he liked, and I went with him to take a look. They were nice and irregular, with a good shine and rich colour. We decided to use them, and Michael made the wall look as good as it would have with the tiles from the Marais, by mixing white and off-white to give the wall depth and subtle texture.

I wanted my copper pots to hang somewhere in the kitchen, both for the warmth their colour would add and for practicality, but we couldn’t figure out where to put them. I didn’t want them over the butcher block because they would block the view of the stove and the mantel, and our chandelier looked so graceful there. I couldn’t hang them against the tile wall because the counter top was too deep for them to be within easy reach.

I stood at the stove and reached up, as though reaching for a pot. I realized that if they hung inside the hood Michael had built, along the sides, they would not only look beautiful but would also be accessible to me yet out of the way. This is where they hang today, a perfect solution.

Michael built all the cabinets in the kitchen, which include twenty-two long drawers, each of which slides out to its full length. One of my favourite and most useful drawers is the tall, narrow one that sits next to the stove and is used to store baking sheets and odd-shaped baking pans. In this kitchen I would have the luxury of space and storage that I could only have imagined in kitchens of yore.

Michael laid a beautiful floor in half the kitchen that consisted of the ancient tiles he’d pulled up from the original kitchen floor, some old six-sided terracotta tiles called tommettes that had come from the hallway behind the kitchen, and small squares he cut from the marble that covered the counter-tops. The area where I would spend most of my time, between the stove and butcher block, the refrigerator and the sink, was floored with buttery old pine planks he’d lifted from the house’s original sitting room. They would be much kinder than tile or stone to my legs and back.

I’d wanted stone sinks like those in old farms and chateaux, but we didn’t find one easily and I wasn’t so devoted to the idea that I would go to any lengths to have one. I’ve always liked stainless steel, so Michael went about looking for a stainless steel sink that fitted the dimensions we wanted, long and wide enough to hold the removable pan under the stove burners, and shallow enough for ease and comfort. Needless to say, such a sink was nowhere to be found or ordered.

This was a puzzler. I didn’t want to compromise on the shape of the sink – it had to be practical and easy to use. I didn’t want porcelain because it is fussy to maintain. Michael heard about a place where he could get any size stainless steel sink, and a friend of ours said that he could intervene and get it wholesale. Michael handed in the sink’s dimensions and got a call back the following week with an estimate that sent him through the roof. ‘Five thousand dollars for a stainless steel sink?’ he said, shaking his head. Apparently, the sink would have to be custom-made, which is what made it so costly. Like the handmade tiles, the handmade stainless steel sink would have to go.

How would we get around this one? Michael had lined a wall in our downstairs bathroom with zinc, just for fun, and he’d loved working with it. One night I heard him soldering in his workshop and I looked in to see him fashioning a zinc box. ‘It’s a sink,’ he said shortly. The next day he brought it to show me. ‘If this thing holds water, this is what our sinks will look like,’ he said. ‘It should work – zinc lasts forever. Just look at all the zinc bars in French cafes.’ He filled it with water and it was watertight. Our sink problem was solved, sort of. He had to figure out how to put in a plug and how to support it, which he did, and the upshot is that we have three custom-made zinc sinks in our kitchen, which are burnished and lovely, and easy to maintain.

With the sinks in place, the drawers all built, the floors laid, Michael could install the yards of marble. He studied all the squares to choose those with the most ochre in them, and the most harmonious patterns. He tried them out on the counters to see how the light fell on them, then carefully rounded their edges before setting them in place. He had fashioned a narrow ledge at the back of the counter-tops on either side of the stove for condiments, timers, knick-knacks, all the little things that clutter a work surface, and he cut small pieces of marble to fit that. When all was installed he had to figure out how to polish and treat it so it would hold up to kitchen use.

We both got on the phone to do some research. Mine led me to an Italian family of masons in Paris; they were very generous with information and offered to have Michael come in so they could give him a marble-treating demonstration. Michael’s research led him to the headstone makers in Louviers. Between these sources, he got the information he needed. The results turned the marble smooth and luscious, and made the colours, which are warm and complementary to food, flowers and people, emerge. A visitor, looking at the marble, said, ‘Do you realize people go to school just to learn how to cut and polish marble and he just did it?’

I had heard that marble was hard to maintain and very delicate, and I wondered how it would hold up to the kind of use I would give it. I needn’t have worried, as it has proved to be low maintenance and very forgiving. Even acid, which eats away at its surface leaving a rough white spot, isn’t as much of a problem as I feared, for those rough spots go away with regular wiping.

The stoves were installed, the counter-tops finished, the drawers ready to fill. I wanted to move in, or at least to decorate. One night, while Michael was at his weekly sculpture class, I opened up some kitchen boxes, trying to figure out what I could put on the mantel that would surprise him the next day. I stumbled onto teapots and soup terrines; it turned out that over the years I’d amassed a small collection in varied bright colours. These I set on the mantelpiece and said nothing. I knew they would get covered with dust as Michael continued to work, but I wanted to see how they would look and I mostly wanted him to see that I was paying attention. He loved seeing them there the next day, giving truth to the adage that it is the little things that make a difference.

I was concerned about hiding in drawers all the many little tools I use a hundred times a day, from measuring spoons to whisks, mixer attachments to fish-bone pullers, because I could see myself getting very frustrated with the time lost opening them, closing them, keeping them orderly. As I stood in the kitchen trying to figure out how I would solve this, my eye hit upon an unmatched pair of brass shelf-supports sitting in the corner, beautiful pieces that Michael had found at our friend Magaly’s second-hand shop. I picked up one and set it on end on the raised shelf at the back of the counter-top, right near the stove. Then I hung measuring spoons, whisks, skewers and tongs on its various levels. I set the other one up on the other side of the stove and did the same. They looked gorgeous without being cluttered. When Michael came in and saw them he said, ‘They’re perfect.’

I’d come up with a schedule for cooking classes, thinking it would be good to hold the first one in June, the beginning of summer when produce is at its most gorgeous, gardens are fresh and growing, markets are taking on their festive summer air. In order to publicize the classes, I did a mailing to all of our lunch guests, to editors I’d worked with over the years, and to various other friends, colleagues and acquaintances who constituted my nascent mailing list. This must have been in February, and I figured that by June I would be well settled in the kitchen, accustomed to where everything was, ready to teach and share. I asked a young American woman who had worked with me before if she would come again for two months to help me settle into the kitchen and do the class. I planned out the schedules.

With the weeks planned and the possibility of people actually coming to take classes, I assessed my cooking equipment. I have a great deal of utensils, but I reckoned I would need more knives and more things like vegetable peelers and melon-ball makers, stiff plastic scrapers and wooden spoons, measuring cups and spoons. I would also need more cooking pans and baking sheets and more wine glasses, and I would need to find beautiful aprons and a multitude of tea towels to match.

I investigated all of the hotels and a bed and breakfast in the area to determine which were best for my ‘guests’. I settled on four places. My favourite hotel is a rambling place in the country, with charming bedrooms and a lush garden just outside the limits of Louviers, in a village called Le Haye le Comte. The most convenient, however, is a hotel in the town, five minutes on foot from our house. It is very comfortable, and it is where most people choose to stay.

I have had to work with the people at this hotel, whose attitude reflects that of shopkeepers I used to meet when I first moved to Paris twenty years ago. Those were the days when you walked into a shop and were greeted with hostility, as though your very presence was an insult, an affront. The people who run the hotel were the same. Though they agreed on a special price for anyone who reserved through me, every additional request – whether it was a reservation for two double rooms, a faxed reservation confirmation, an unlocked front door on Sunday afternoon so guests could get into the hotel, or whatever – was met with almost laughable rudeness and hostility. I suggested to the owner that we meet, thinking that if there was personal contact it would melt the ice, but she brushed me off, telling me that her assistant took care of everything. One would have thought she was the manager of Le Bristol in Paris the way she acted, though I’ve had better luck there. I spoke with the assistant who wasn’t much better. I couldn’t work it out. I sent more than thirty people to them in the first year, all of whom stayed for five days at a time. I knew they were very busy with business groups, but I also knew that they liked having the business I sent their way. I asked a well-placed friend if he knew them, and if he could help me out. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said, ‘but I’m not sure if I can help. He – the owner – is all right, but his wife, who takes care of the hotel, is awful, just awful.’ When I heard that, I figured there was little hope.

I haven’t pursued it any further because there has been a perceptible thaw which, in this case, amounts to enormous progress. I still haven’t had a formal meeting with the owners, but I don’t care if I do. What I care about is that everyone who stays there has a good experience and thankfully, thus far, that has been the case.

Sometimes guests choose to stay in a charming bed and breakfast in the village of Heudreville, a ten-minute trip by car. Run by a friendly and energetic woman who takes great pride in fine linens and homemade jams for breakfast, it is a little spot of country finery in the midst of a charming village.

Michael and I had discussed the dates of the first classes, thinking it was possible. But May came and he was still working in the kitchen. It looked nearly finished to me, but he said there was a long list of things to finish. By mid-May I knew that it was unrealistic to hold a class, yet I had a small group signed up. What should I do? I tossed and turned over it, then one morning when I opened up my emails I found a message from Marion, who now handled the organization of the school as well as the lunches. ‘They can’t come,’ she wrote. ‘One of them is ill so none of them are coming.’ I was relieved to hear it wasn’t a life-threatening illness, but at any other time this would have been disastrous. In the circumstances, though, and as sorry as I was that they were kept from coming, I heaved a sigh of relief. Someone was watching over me.

By this point I was getting impatient to move into the kitchen. My appetite was whetted for more space, functionality, ease. I needed to increase my productivity, too, as I had deadlines looming. How could I speed the process along?

I offered to help, suggested we hire someone to help, said I didn’t mind if all the details weren’t finished. Michael resisted and calmly went about his work. One day I walked into the kitchen to find him on his knees, calmly, carefully polishing the twenty-two brass drawer-handles we’d gone to great lengths to order. I stood there watching, realizing this was, in part, keeping me from moving into the kitchen. I asked him why he was polishing them. ‘Because they’re too shiny, they’ll look too new and the rest of the kitchen is burnished and comfortable looking,’ he said.

I left him to his polishing, and went and cried. I was convinced, then, that I would never move into the kitchen; the cooking school would never happen; Michael would always have one more detail to attend to, calmly, as if nothing but time stretched out before him.

Michael finished the series of drawer-handles, and we never said another word about them until many years later, when we could laugh about it. I had learnt, through the process of creating the kitchen, that Michael becomes so intensely involved in projects that he forgets real life is going on around him. I had seen his sense of aesthetics and perfection dictate that all drawer-handles be burnished in exactly the same way. He is right about them in one way – it’s a tiny detail that makes a difference. But the alternative would have been all right, too. After all, life is a series of compromises, isn’t it?

Michael finally pronounced the kitchen ready. I was so excited, and so nervous too. Michael had given two years of his life to creating this beautiful kitchen; we’d made many compromises, we’d argued about it, we’d changed it many times on its way to completion. When it was finished it had to work, and I had to love it. The pressure was enormous. It’s interesting how one’s basic self is challenged by something so insignificant as a kitchen remodel. I feared having to change my cooking habits, having to put things in drawers instead of on shelves or on the walls, yet I had agreed upon a ‘tidier’, more elegant kitchen. The idea of change made me very anxious, as I’ve based a lifetime of cooking and a career on my swift, sure movements in kitchens where everything is out and accessible. Then I stopped myself. I vowed to loosen up.

I put off the actual move until the American woman I’d hired joined us. She was going to be helping me test recipes and I wanted her to know from the start where everything was stored.

After she’d settled in we got to work hauling boxes and filling drawers and shelves, in a process that took two days. Unbelievably, there wasn’t enough storage for every single thing, and it was then I realized how much kitchen equipment I had. If this kitchen couldn’t accommodate it all, no kitchen ever would. It was a good excuse to weed out things I didn’t use.

With most things in place, I prepared to cook our first meal in the kitchen, which we would all eat at the central island. It was exciting, wonderful, completely disconcerting. I grated raw beets and tossed them with a vinaigrette, then made a simple, herb-rich potage with leeks, carrots and potatoes, garnished with minced parsley and garlic from the garden. It took me twice as long as usual because I couldn’t put my hands on anything quickly, but how luxurious it felt to work in a place where I could stretch out my arms and not touch the wall, where the sink was handy and there was ample counter space, where the wood floor was easy on my legs and back, and where I didn’t have to use any of the economy of motion I’d mastered in my other kitchen. Here, everyone in the neighbourhood could come and cook and we’d all have our own spot.

I served the salad on my side of the island as Michael, Joe, Fiona and Paige, the American woman, sat and watched from the other side. It was wonderful to be so easily together in such a huge space with a gorgeous stove to cook on. Michael and I looked at each other. It had been a long and difficult process for both of us to get to this point. We’d left our country with, on my part, a dream to live in France and raise our children, write books, even open up a cooking school, and on Michael’s part a willingness to put his career aside for the time it took to make it happen.

We’d had several kitchens in our life together, most of them either designed and built by Michael or remodelled by him, but this was our first that was intended for teaching, and included every detail that we could possibly have thought of to make that efficient, comfortable, pleasant. The struggle to get this kitchen built was still fresh in our minds, but we both knew that it would fade and that we were in for some wonderful times and delicious meals. I, who love the kitchen more than any spot on earth, knew I was in for some exhilarating moments, which, I hoped, I would be able to share not just with my family and friends, but with people eager to learn the secrets of French cooking. Here we were, unbelievably, all of us together, in the heart of our beautiful new kitchen.

I had decided to give myself about six months in the new kitchen before teaching any classes, because I figured it would take me that long to become accustomed to working in it. I couldn’t risk any fumbles for the classes – I had to be smooth, at ease and professional. So I established the dates for two classes the following spring, and I sent out another mailing to publicize them. I also investigated getting a website, but I found the venture beyond my budget. Besides, I was sceptical about websites. Internet access in France was problematic, and every single thing took so much time that I didn’t have the patience for it: sitting and staring into a screen has never been my forté. I supposed that most people were like me, and that websites were a ‘must have’ because of their novelty, not their real usefulness.

My ideas were changed by two wonderful lunch guests who came, ate, and fell in love – with the house, with the food, with what we were trying to do, and with baby Fiona. Both high-level professionals, they were alight with ideas on how to market the school, and both were adamant that it, and I, needed a website. I told them my opinions. They disagreed, vehemently.

Glo, one of the women, fixed me with a gaze as stern as that of an owl and said, ‘Susan, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t have “.com” after your name in the States you are nothing.’ I flinched, told her thank you, and said I still didn’t think I needed a website.

She badgered me about it for a while, then let the subject drop for the remainder of our lunch together. On her return to the United States she started sending me emails. ‘Susan, you need a website, you’ve got to have one, you are no one without one,’ she would write, along with her cheery messages filled with news and jokes. She was a great person and I appreciated her enthusiasm and concern, but I couldn’t have cared less. I didn’t have the wherewithal to develop a website, and I didn’t think I needed one. If that made me a nobody, so be it. Then one day I opened my email messages to find the following from Glo. ‘Susan, since you are so stubborn, I’m doing a website for you. My friend Geoff will design the site. He charges $4000 and he says he’ll trade you for cooking classes. I will too. We don’t care if you don’t want it, we’re doin’ it.’

I was flabbergasted. I read on. She explained how it would go, how she would help design it and write the copy. She would pass everything to me for approval before it went ‘live’. Glo had pinned me to the floor. I capitulated, succumbing to the force of her energy.

I ended up spending a month working on the website with Glo and Geoff, answering a million questions, writing and rewriting, choosing photographs and graphic styles. It was exciting, like writing and publishing a book, with all the attendant satisfaction and anticipation. By the end of the process the three of us were fast friends, and I had a gorgeous, user-friendly website. I couldn’t imagine who would go there, but now at least I could put a ‘.com’ after my name. I was somebody!

I now had a key marketing tool in place to test with the restaurant group, who had asked if I would host more of their managers. Naturally I agreed, and when they came back to me with questions about myself, my work, the school, where they could stay (I had posted photographs and information about my chosen four places on the site), I sent them to susanloomis.com. The response was miraculous; I didn’t have to spend any more time answering questions, and when they arrived they were fully informed about my work, the cooking school and me.

I felt extremely fortunate to be trying out the new kitchen on these restaurant managers who would, I was sure, be as open and easy-going as the first group had been. That group had loved working in the makeshift kitchen; this group would have all the advantage of working in the finished kitchen. If there were a few stumbles or some head-scratching about where to find this or that, it wouldn’t matter.

By the time they arrived I’d augmented my equipment. A friend of mine, Barbara Tropp, a wonderful Chinese cook who lived in San Francisco, sent me a dozen great, lightweight chef’s knives. I found some very good quality copper pans at a shop near Louviers for ridiculously low prices, and purchased multiples of the most useful sizes. I’d augmented my utensils and cutting boards, and I’d found beautiful long white aprons as well. I was all ready to go.

There were sixteen managers and I paired them up to cook. I couldn’t believe how well we all fitted in the kitchen: there was room to work, room for me to circulate among the couples and guide them, room to arrange the cheese tray off in a corner, to roll out pastry, to open wine. Not only was there room, but the lighting Michael had installed could be modulated to fit the occasion. We went from laboratory bright while preparing the meal to cosy intimate while we stood around the tidied-up island with our aperitifs, a fire roaring in the background.

From cooking in the new kitchen to eating in the dining room, everything worked so well, so smoothly and so effortlessly. No one could possibly know all the planning, dreaming, and plain hard work that had gone into the smooth flow of food from kitchen to table. I was so proud of Michael, and I knew that our cooking school was going to be a well-organized and luxuriously comfortable success, thanks to the setting he had provided.

Filled with confidence, I scheduled a class for the following spring, and hoped it would fill. I knew I had to do some marketing, so I had a brochure printed up that explained the school, and sent it out to friends, colleagues and the editors I’d worked for over the years, hoping they would all get behind the project and spread the word. I announced the opening of the school on the website, then I crossed my fingers. Meanwhile, we had to celebrate the kitchen and ‘pendre la crèmaillère’, or ‘hang the soup pot’, the French expression for a house-warming. Everyone we knew had become intimately acquainted with this massive project, and they all wanted to experience the results. I invited our friends, our neighbours, Fiona’s various babysitters, Joe’s friends and their parents, who had kept an eye on progress while they dropped off or picked up their children, until we had at least fifty people on the guest list. The party was to be casual, and I wanted it to be a surprise for Michael. I made lots of appetizers, among them a favourite of Michael’s: wild boar rillettes. My vegetarian friend Babette had offered to come cook with me, and when Michael saw her in the kitchen helping me with the rillettes he began to suspect that something was afoot, but he said nothing.

Babette and I also made tapenade, anchovy toasts and strips of air-cured ham wrapped around chunks of feta and fresh sage. Because this wasn’t a sit-down affair, I decided I would make thin crusted pizza with many different toppings, from olive oil, sea salt, rosemary and garlic, to Sicilian tomato sauce with capers, and onions with bacon and cream. For dessert I slathered dough with crème fraîche and sprinkled it generously with brown sugar and cinnamon. Our neighbour, Patrick Merlin, diverted Michael with an invitation for a drink at his house.

Joe was in charge of lighting the hundred candles out front in the courtyard, and as our friends arrived I set them to other tasks – making sure the music was organized, arranging platters, putting away coats. Some washed dishes and put things away.

I’d asked everyone to bring something sparkling, without being specific. Had this been the States, I suspect that offerings would have ranged from boxes of glitter to sparkling items of clothing, but here in France it meant one thing and one thing only: champagne. I assigned five men to open bottles, and instructed them that the minute Michael and Patrick came in the front gate they were to pop the corks.

I’d told Patrick to bring Michael at 8.30 p.m., and by then all our friends were assembled and everything was ready, but there was no Michael nor Patrick. I called Patrick. He’d forgotten about the party because he and Michael were having such a good time drinking whiskey, listening to music, talking. Fortunately he lived three minutes away and, much chagrined, said they would leave immediately. I alerted everyone and it went just as planned: the minute Michael walked in the door, corks popped and flew, and he was as surprised as if someone had put ice cubes down his shirt. It was a terrific party, one of our best.

I had a group signed up for a class in May 2001, and it would be my first, official class. By this time I had a terrific assistant, Kerrie Luzum, who has degrees in cooking and nutrition, as well as years of restaurant experience. She lives in Paris and comes out two days a week to help in the office and the kitchen.

I planned that first week over and over and over, with Kerrie making phone calls to set up farm visits and wine tastings, restaurant meals and visits to artisans. Establishing the mix of recipes that we would all make during the six hands-on classes was the most difficult part of planning, and the most important. I take my role as cooking teacher very seriously, and I want people to leave my classes not only with a reinvigorated passion for cooking and a sheaf of recipes they can’t wait to make at home, but with confidence in their technique and a keen understanding of how to balance flavours. To that end I was up at all hours tweaking the menus, changing recipes, testing details until I came up with a perfect mix which incorporated the right blend of techniques, methods and ingredients. When the recipes were finally printed and bound, I realized why it had felt like so much work – I’d produced a small book.

I look forward to the classes as a whole, but the Sunday evening when guests tap gently on the old, wavy glass of the front door for the first time is almost the best part, for it is like a reunion. We’ve never met anyone before they arrive, but the communication and arrangements that have gone into making this moment a reality mean that we are, on some level, already acquainted.

I’ve thought, planned, and cooked my way to this first meal with each guest in mind, sparing no detail so it will be perfect. Like all the recipes and meals that we encounter during our time together, this first is based on what is best and freshest at the market. It’s a fête, too, because Michael and I – and the others who help out at On Rue Tatin – are just as excited as anyone that our five days together are beginning.

We greet each other, we share the meal I’ve prepared, we linger over dessert, then the participants leave with their recipes in hand. They return to our home the next morning, put on their monogrammed On Rue Tatin aprons, and cook their way up to lunch.

After the first evening, the weeks speed by in a blur of cooking classes and meals at home, visits to artisans and restaurants, wine tastings, cheese tastings and drinks outside in our courtyard, in the shadow of Nôtre Dame in Louviers. I can never believe, when the last meal rolls around, that another week is ended: it always goes by so quickly. Yet it has been long enough to bond with great people, to get involved; not only to instruct but to learn and share.

I imagined many things when we decided to go ahead with lunches, then with a cooking school, but what I didn’t anticipate was the friends we would make. We’ve had the most special people cross our threshold, from the wonderful New Yorker who presented me with an apron her grandmother had embroidered with the name On Rue Tatin, and which I treasure (she also sent us her special Christmas cookies after the week she spent with us), to the duo of dentists who kept us laughing from Sunday night through to Friday noon, then gave both kids a quick dental examination and advice, followed up by packages of fluoride in the mail; from the school librarian who made a list of ‘must read’ books for Joe, to the retired university professor who keeps me up to date with all manner of interesting food items. Nor will I ever forget our first Australian guest, who kept saying, as she fastened her apron and picked up her knife, ‘I didn’t know we were going to cook!’

All of this, and we’ve only just begun!

My goal with this cooking school is simple, aside from providing an income for us all. I want everyone who comes to On Rue Tatin not only to gain a practical knowledge of French culinary techniques but also to get a real, authentic flavour of France, to experience the rare relationship people here have with food producers and artisans, and to taste the difference in food that is grown locally with care, and eaten within just a few miles of where it was grown. I want them to leave On Rue Tatin with a sense that they ‘know’ France through all of us, and I want them to go home and share what they have learned.

CORN LOAF

Pain de Maïs

This rustic bread is a delight with any meal, though I particularly like it with roast pork. Make sure you keep some for breakfast, to toast, for it is sublime with a touch of salted butter and a drizzle of honey!

3 cups (750ml) lukewarm milk

2 tsp active dry yeast

1 ¹/₂ tsp sugar

4 cups (535g) fine cornmeal (or semolina), preferably yellow

1 tbs sea salt

5 to 6 cups (705g) unbleached, all-purpose flour

1. Place the warm milk in a large bowl or the bowl of an electric mixer. Stir in the yeast and sugar, then the cornmeal (or semolina), 1 cup at a time. Stir in the salt, then add the flour, 1 cup at a time, until you have a soft dough. Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and knead it several times, adding a bit of additional flour if necessary so it doesn’t stick to your fingers.

2. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes on the work surface, then knead it until it is smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes, adding more flour if necessary to keep it from sticking to your hands. Don’t use more than 6 cups of flour – the dough should be soft and slightly wet, not firm.

3. Place the dough in a bowl, cover with a damp towel and let it rise in a warm spot until it has doubled in bulk, about 1–¹/₂ hours. Punch it down, and divide it in half.

4. Sprinkle two 9¹/₂-inch (23.5cm) pie plates with cornmeal (or semolina). Shape each half of the dough into a round and place them, seam-side down, in the prepared pie plates. Press down on the rounds so they fill the pie plates, cover loosely with a towel and let them rise in a warm spot until they are nearly doubled in bulk, about 30 minutes.

5. Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C).

6. Using a very sharp knife, cut a large spiral in the top of each loaf, then bake in the centre of the oven until the loaves are golden and sound hollow when tapped, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn out of the pie plates and let cool to room temperature on wire racks.

Two large loaves

RAW BEET SALAD

Salade de Betteraves Crues

I love beets any way I can get them, though this salad is a favourite. I make it often at home, and serve it as a little extra during cooking school weeks, so that everyone has a chance to sample beets at their crunchy finest!

I serve very small portions of this, as its flavour is intense. It looks beautiful in the centre of a small plate garnished with a sprig of green!

1 tsp sherry vinegar

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tbs extra-virgin olive oil

¹/₄ tsp cumin seeds

1 shallot, peeled and cut into paper-thin slices

4 medium beets, trimmed, peeled, and finely grated

Small bunch of chervil, flat-leaf parsley, or arugula

1. Whisk the vinegar with salt and pepper to taste in a large bowl. Add the olive oil in a thin stream, whisking constantly. Taste for seasoning; then stir in the cumin seeds and the shallot. Add the beets and toss so they are thoroughly coated with the dressing. Let the beets rest for at least 15 minutes before serving. Just before serving, mound the beets in the centre of 6 small plates, and garnish them with the parsley or the arugula leaves. Serve immediately

6 servings