Everything Danie did was first-rate, and every dish she made was better than the one before it. Because of this, her enterprise was enormously successful, her table so sought after that she eventually expanded her dining room and turned it into a restaurant, which is still thriving today.
Michael and I loved the ambience that Danie’s business gave to the farm; the flow of appreciative guests from around the world; the sharing of traditions; the way the house and their life encompassed everyone; the seamlessness of it all. I’d always wanted to create that at our own home, and I realized that we had the potential on rue Tatin. We wouldn’t house people – the house isn’t large enough – nor would we grow all our own food. We didn’t need to – local farmers would do that for us.
We had one problem, however, and that was the kitchen. It was far from suitable for a cooking school in its present state. We’d planned to build a new one, but Michael was still embroiled in the dining room. When we sat down to discuss the idea of the cooking school we realized that it would be at least two years before we could consider bringing the idea to fruition. How, we wondered aloud, could we make the house work for us now?
With our friends Pat and Walter Wells, who were over for lunch one day, we came up with the idea of offering lunches to paying guests, tourists who would like a moment of delicious luxury and an opportunity to get a more intimate view of French culture. We all decided, looking around at the dining room and the view out of the window, that it didn’t matter that the house was half finished, or that our ‘forever’ kitchen wasn’t yet built. All I needed for this idea was a kitchen where I could cook fabulous food. ‘This house, this room, this whole place is gorgeous; people will love it as it is,’ Pat said, and Walter concurred.
Once the idea had been articulated, I began to get excited. It could be so perfect. I could easily imagine greeting small groups of friendly Americans with meals made from the best of local and mostly organic ingredients, and delicious wines. I could imagine us discoursing on the local community, agriculture, the state of the European Union, and we could answer their questions about life in France. One of my favourite parts of this plan was that we could justify buying beautiful dishes and glassware (which I love) to make lunches the luxurious experience I imagined.
I was scheduled to go on a book-tour in the United States not long after our lunch with the Wellses. I decided to take a stab at marketing the lunches as I went, and to that end brought it up during every interview. I enlisted a friend in the US, Marion Pruitt, to be the contact person, knowing that she was so organized she wouldn’t let one detail fall through the cracks, and that people who called would love her. She’d been to visit, too, so she could speak knowledgeably about us and about our location. Before I knew it, a group of five women had signed up as paying guests.
When I returned from my book-tour I looked at the house with fresh eyes, and I wondered if I’d been crazy to think we could have strangers here. The setting and the bones of the house were gorgeous, no doubt about it, but would people mind the stacks of crooked old timbers and stones? Would they be as charmed by the unfinished dining room as we were? Would they think the sheet rock wall in the kitchen that Joe used as an easel as cute and practical as we did? ‘We’ll see,’ I thought. Then I began to plan the menu.
The group would come in October, one of my favourite times of year. How to decide what to serve? I put myself in the shoes of the person thinking of Norman cuisine: what would they want to eat? Apples, of course. Duck, for there is nothing like it to whisper ‘Normandy’ on the palate. Shellfish, cream, wonderful cheese.
Whenever people come to eat I want to offer them all the good and wonderful things we have available to us, but of course in one meal I can’t. So I use the aperitif to offer a multitude of small tastes and flavours that will give a hint of the meal to come, and of the wealth the region offers, as well as a sense of what is typical. I decided that, in this instance, oysters from the cold waters of the Normandy coast were a must. I personally love them plain: just well chilled and without sauces or condiments. As a compromise, to cater to tastes that might not be so pure, I would serve lemon wedges and a sauce mignonette alongside.
Anyone who has ever dined in a French home knows how vital pistachio nuts are to the aperitif hour. I have a source for slender, dark pistachios from Turkey, the kind my father used to bring back from there by the laundry bag full when I was a child. I developed a passion for their crisp, rich nuttiness then, and I still love watching others taste them for the first time. Their eyes widen and pretty soon they are back for more, for these pistachios are so much more flavourful than any other. So, duck, oysters, pistachios. The menu needed work.
I make a sweet, salty olive cookie from an old Provençal recipe, and I added that to the aperitif – no one can resist them. Now, I needed a crisp vegetable to round out the selection, and I decided it would be sticks of fresh fennel. It is the only vegetable aside from celery with a natural saltiness, and it is round, fat and crisp in October. I would serve my homemade orange wine, too: its intense, caramel-orange flavour beguiles everyone who tastes it.
I decided on confit tomatoes for the first course, since Normandy tomatoes are rich and sweet in early October. To make these, I cut them in half and bake them long and slowly in olive oil with rosemary, thyme, thinly sliced shallots, whole cloves of garlic and sea salt. When they emerge from the oven they taste and smell like concentrated sun. With the roast duck I would serve autumn turnips glazed with cane sugar. Just thinking about it made me hungry.
Salad would come from the garden – arugula and baby beet greens, sorrel and snipped sage leaves. I settled on a trio of Normandy cheeses – Livarot, Camembert and Neufchâtel. I would carefully caramelize apples for a tarte tatin. After all, we live on rue Tatin – how could I plan a meal without it?
As good fortune would have it, a visit from my parents would coincide with our first lunch. Friendly, warm and well-travelled, they are the perfect lunch companions any time. For our first lunch they would be our trump card, carrying the conversation while Michael and I attended to the details.
This lunch would resemble a theatre performance as we hid the worst of the remodelling messes and created a captivating, luxurious ambience. We began cleaning up the dining room, garden and courtyard three days before our guests were due to arrive. Michael moved and stacked materials; we both worked furiously to get the garden cleaned up. I bought and planted flowers and we trimmed and tidied the window boxes. The exterior had looked pretty good before we started. By the time we were finished it looked magical. As for the interior, we cleaned, polished and dusted, and I put bouquets of flowers everywhere. We didn’t have an official bathroom downstairs, but a toilet hidden behind a wall. I hung a pretty curtain over the door and hoped for the best.
Finally, it was market day before the big lunch. Accompanied by my parents and Joe, I went to buy all the ingredients, loading myself down with the best butter and milk, the finest tomatoes and oysters, gorgeous little turnips and even some late-season raspberries that smelt like heaven. I wasn’t sure where they would fit in, but how could I resist?
I went home and began to prepare the meal, then was up at 6 a.m. the following morning to continue cooking. With my mother’s help I covered the table with an antique monogrammed white linen sheet, then curled a strand of ivy down the centre. Michael almost killed me when he saw the ivy; he had been at great pains to make our one ivy plant climb up a small section of brick wall near the ancient wooden door in our courtyard, and I had just trimmed off the longest pieces. He needn’t have