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