Cordon Bleu

Forty-five years of patience and hard-work but here I am: I've been admitted into our family's culinary hall of fame.

This is a tiny but exclusive matrilineal society which includes my great grandmother Marguerite, my grandmother Marguerite, my mom Monique Marguerite and now me (just guess what my middle name is?)

Admission into the society is both arduous and elusive. Our women are possessive about their kitchens, secretive with their recipes and notoriously closed to advice.  The cook is in charge, you don't mess with the cook.  You might dice a carrot according to instructions, but you may neither taste her sauces nor comment on her seasoning.

But mom (who was in charge) agreed to my assistance this Christmas eve.  The guests were about to arrive and the bechamel sauce was refusing to thicken. 

"It's that American butter," said my mom.  "And that flour!  You just look at it and it clumps!"

Dad who suggested I be brought in as a semi-foreign consultant.  "Let Marie help you," he said.  "She's been here a long time, she might know what to do."  I did.  I started the bechamel using the old jar method that my friend Deborah had shown me long ago: put one tablespoon of flour in a jar with water, shake well and use as a fool-proof starter for sauces and gravy.  Works every time for godawful American gravy, should be o.k. for French sauces right? 

Once the bechamel took, mom and I worked on the seasoning together.  I grounded the pepper, she added the splash of calvados.  She tasted.  I stired.  She tasted dome more.  I stirred more.  We debated the timing of roasting apples for the chestnut-filled turkey.  I demonstrated the use of my cool American broiler to "au-gratin" the ramequins of Coquilles St. Jacques.   She lavished more calvados on the roasted apples.

We toasted with champagne.

Dad took a pic for posterity.

Faux-foodie

Central Market has identified me as a "foodie" and graced me with a membership card. It must have been the six dollars I paid for a half-pound of imported Charentes butter (SIX dollars!).

The butter was extravagant and delightful but it wasn't a foodie fad.  Nostalgia is what I suffer from.  I made crab-stuffed tomatoes for our Sunday lunch today, hoping to replicate one of my grandmother's staples.  My swetheart was happy.  Only I knew  that the stuffed tomatoes were a far cry from their original northern French version.  For starters, the "fresh" crab didn't taste near as subtle as the one that can be found at the Dunkirk fish market.  The mayonnaise was canned instead of homemade.  And the tomatoes had traveled from Mexico in refrigerated trucks instead of being picked from the vines growing along the white-washed wall.

The wine (Chilean) helped.

I am left yearning for a slice of "fraisier": a thick layer of fresh strawberries encased in butter cream, sandwiched between two slices of Genoise cake and topped with a thin almond-paste frosting.  It would take me a couple of days to bake such a marvel.  Perhaps the Lebanese baker near the River Oaks theatre will have some. It might be worth and afternoon trip...

I am learning to find adequate substitutes for my culinary yearnings.  My grandmother has been dead for over two years, her house sold, her pots and pans dispersed, her tomato plants left to seed.  I will never taste her homemade mayonnaise again unless I learn to make it myself.  Perhaps I should.  On the upper shelf of my kitchen closet is the mayonnaise-maker she purchased at the 1936 world fair.  She shipped it to me after her vision failed and she had to stop cooking.

I have never used the mayonnaise maker.  Perhaps I will drive to Central Market, purchase a liter of oil and some organic eggs, see if I can remember her instructions.  I might pick up a fresh baguette and browse the cheese section for an acceptable camembert.   Collect foodie points.

Harvest

I pulled into the driveway this morning and collected two tomatoes from the tomato plants I planted in the Spring.  Due to the lack of rain and my less-than-stellar gardening skills, the total yield has been a whopping seven tomatoes this summer.  Those last two were small and I had to discard half of one because it was affected by some kind of mysterious tomato ailment.  Still, I cooked the tomatoes my scrambled eggs and declared them delicious and well-worth the long wait and scarcity.

Twenty-seven years ago, I walked in on my great-grandmother slicing tiny green apples into a rickety aluminum pan.  I was on a break from my job as a camp counselor and had traveled by bus to the other end of town to visit with her. I had been surprised to see her standing up.   She was in her early eighties then.  Crooked from rhumatoid artritis,she hardly left her armchair by the window.  But on that day, she had  managed to trek to the garden to pick apples from the trees that grew along the wall.

Those trees hadn't been pruned since her brother had died some twenty years earlier.  Their fruit were stunted.   But my greatgrandmother had followed their growth since late Spring.  When the time had come she'd made the journey and brought back all that she could carry.  It must have been a huge effort to make it back up the kitchen stairs with a pan full of apple but she'd made it and there she was, standing at the dining table, making applesauce.   Her fingers could hardly hold the tiny peeling knife and she stopped often.  She was patient and determined.  She'd been waiting a long time for that applesauce.

For years I've wondered what had prompted her to make the journey.  Was it truly the lure of applesauce?  Was it something deeper, making that last journey down to the apple trees without help, just to prove to herself that she still could?  Or was it the survivor in her, the one who had gone through two wars and many losses who would let no fruit go to waste?

Either way, the sight of her stirring those apples with a half cup of sugar is etched in my memory and now I know and I am sure of it: no matter how sour or stunted, the fruit from our garden is always worth harvesting.