I used to like to cook only in the way that kids like to cook—in a tactile, visual, experimental, intensely craft-like way. As kids, that was one of our favorite games. “Let’s play cookhouse!” In Virginia in the mid-eighties, we grew up in a lovely, charming subdivision in Portsmouth, at 4304 Faigle Road. The next door neighbor’s girls came over, my little brother would join us, and we’d pretend to set up a cookhouse in the wilds (the wilds were the outdoors, near the neighborhood pond, which boasted graceful swans and mandarin ducks, sweeping willow trees, and brown fish and tadpoles). Being the oldest and bossiest, I directed my team of cooks to make plates of lunches, dinners, and snacks, which flowed out of our cookhouse and into the grateful mouths of whole legions of friends–our size, our age, but invisible. Some of the delicacies on our menu were:
small cakes made of deep chocolate mud, dotted with scarlet holly berries
leaf-tacos filled with white flowers and sprinkled with pine cone shakings
hollow acorns, stuffed with dandelion fluff
The caps (from the hollow acorns) floating in water scooped up with magnolia petal bowls (the finest china)
We had escargot too, but being too squeamish, we didn’t remove them from their shells but left them au natural. Our snails dishes were largely mobile and did not stay plated.
Once, we found the dried, blanched bones of a small bird, a few rusty tail feathers still attached, which was an excellent centerpiece, wreathed round with yellow dandelions, tiny buds of wild strawberries, and a toxic fricassee of puffballs and mushrooms. Cooking then was intensely satisfying, even though we made invisible fires of sourceless heat by rubbing sticks together as we’d seen stranded people do in the movies.
In high school, my junior year, I was among a group of two students from my French class to go live with a family in the small town of St.Brieuc in Bretagne for 7 weeks as part of the University of Indiana’s French language program for high schoolers. I stayed with a French version of the Brady Bunch (more on that in a future entry) in their drafty house on the Vielle Cote de Gouet, converted from an old stone farmhouse with a grassy courtyard. Unlike the traditional French maman that had been featured and fabled in our preparatory course materials for living in France, my host mother was a working mom who specialized in t.v. dinners and microwaveable products. She didn’t insist on making me lunch or breakfast, which I was grateful for. One of the best parts of staying in that old farmhouse-turned-busy-waystation-for-six-children-of-a-cobbled-together-family was my solo morning ritual. I got up before it was light, went down into the dark kitchen, turned on the light over the sink and the cupboards. I got out a white café bowl and poured in milk and measured spoonfuls of cocoa powder. While that heated in the microwave, I cut two slices of French bread. After they came out of the toaster oven, I spread butter and strawberry jam on them. I scooped plain yogurt into a cup and mixed brown sugar or jam into that. I sat down at the wooden trestle table to eat my breakfast in the sliding of darkest dawn into the pale morning. I loved the crunch of the sweet toast softening just slightly in the warm cocoa, and the sandy crystals of the brown sugar swathed in the tart and silky yogurt. Something about this ritual, beyond the physical warmth of the food itself, kept me warm on my half-mile walk in the half-light to the middle of town, where we spent our mornings in ecole learning French.
On one outing to the beach off of La Manche (English Channel), my host family sister Marie told me and her younger sister Josette to follow her down to the water and around some rough rocks. “Nous avon faire la cuisine,” she directed, and we followed her lead, clambering over colonies of sharp barnacles and stranded creatures in tidepools, plucking small, jet-black limpets off the rocks. Once we’d each gotten full wet handfuls of limpets, the three of us crouched around in a circle on a flat rock. Marie flipped one of the limpets over, its gray-green flesh flinching slightly, and she took a sharp pebble and scooped the flesh out and popped it into her mouth. Josette and I followed her example. The limpets were crisp, briny, and cold. They tasted like something between an abalone and a clam.
“Tu aime?” Marie asked, sucking on her pebble between limpets like a girl sucking on a thumbstick for eating out of ice cream cups.
“C’est delicieuse?” I said, not knowing whether the noun for limpets was feminine or masculine.
That summer day in St. Brieuc was brisk, gray, and salty. When we finished our limpets, we lined the conical shells up on the rock, as if they were pairs of tiny shoes for exploring the beach. Marie told us that her boyfriend Pierre (who happened also to be her step-brother) was an excellent cook. (I only saw Pierre once during my stay with this family—he came to visit on rare time off from his work. He had dark hair, sullen good looks, and a reserved way about him. He was training as part of the kitchen at a restaurant down in Marseille.) At which point, she wanted nothing more to do with us and wrapped her arms around her knees and stared out at the ocean, missing him. Marie’s meal was one of the best culinary experiences that I ever had.
