set your­self a chal­lenge, why don’t you

Well. Remem­ber how I was going on and on about how good my French was? How proud I was to be able to get along with­out any­one try­ing to speak Eng­lish to me, how cool it was to get new shoes for Avery entire­ly in French? Even proud­er was I to wan­der into a French cook­book store, the Librairie Gour­mande and express my desire for a cook­book that was a sort of mem­oire, a cook­ery writer’s rem­i­nis­cences, a sort of per­son­al his­to­ry of food. Just like, in fact, the sort of cook­book I am cur­rent­ly try­ing to write. As much per­son­al mem­o­ries as recipes. You know the kind of thing. Oh boy did I ever pat myself on the back when the nice pro­pri­etress put her head on one side like a lit­tle French spar­row, lead me to a shelf, and hand­ed me exact­ly, pre­cise­ment what I was look­ing for. “A la table d’un ecrivain: petit traite romanesque de cui­sine,” by Marie Rouanet. Trans­lat­ed: “From the table of a writer: a lit­tle romanesque trea­tise on cui­sine.” Isn’t that exact­ly what I was look­ing for?

It’s much too hard.

I haven’t worked this hard since 1992. I have enlevee my mas­sive Cas­sel­l’s French Dic­tio­nary from a high, high shelf and I am mad­ly sift­ing through try­ing to make head or tail of what this nice lady is say­ing to me. It is absolute­ly won­der­ful, though, when I man­age to fig­ure out a para­graph. Eng­lish is so lit­er­al! At least the Eng­lish I read, and speak, and write. I don’t have a poet­ic bone in my body. But I had for­got­ten that French is almost entire­ly (when spo­ken by French peo­ple) metaphor­i­cal, and absolute­ly must mean sev­er­al things, pos­si­bly con­tra­dic­to­ry, at once. Take even the word cui­sine itself. To start with, it is both a noun and a con­ju­gat­ed verb, and even more than one of each! A cui­sine is lit­er­al­ly a kitchen, the room in your house, but it’s also a cer­tain type of cook­ing, as in “French cui­sine.” And the verb is much more expres­sive than just “to cook.” The bor­ing verb for that is “cuire,” which is sort of like “to make cooked,” like a bald instruc­tion to “make not raw any­more.” Cuisin­er is poet­ry, it is to cre­ate, to trans­form, to ren­der some­thing not just “not raw,” but lov­ing­ly lift­ed up and served. It’s just a won­der­ful word.

“That cui­sine might be love itself and only inter­est­ing when it is refined love, that notion of ‘tell me how you eat, how you cook, and I will tell you how you love,’ seems to me to be sim­ple evi­dence; I read the proof of it in the pages of my cook­books, those great books with their pages gnawed, dog-eared, stained with fat or sug­ar, at times torn out but minute­ly saved, com­pan­ions of the art of cook­ing. In them one finds every­thing. They are swollen over the course of the years with recipes clipped from mag­a­zines, or copied out by hand, or not­ed down as dic­tat­ed by a friend… And the vocab­u­lary in these books is stun­ning­ly lover-like. There is no ques­tion but to sim­mer, to flame, to truss, to serve, to sing, to pare, to let rest, to burst, to stuff, to dress, to blanche, to lay out, to knead, to seize, to pluck, to mix. These are the words of pas­sion, right up to that muslin bag for the bou­quet gar­ni, light as a mar­riage veil, fra­grant and lined with white cotton.”

Well, that’s just love­ly! But it took me near­ly half an hour to fig­ure out what the hell she was say­ing. I won­der if there would be an Eng­lish or Amer­i­can mar­ket for Rouanet’s books, and if so, if I could get the job of trans­lat­ing them? Who am I kid­ding, I’d be on my death bed before I got to Chap­ter Four. Ah, well, I can dream. But tru­ly, every­thing she says rings true to me. I do think of every­thing I cook being a sort of offer­ing. I know that sounds ridicu­lous, but it makes the annoy­ing bits worth­while; if as you scrub out the skil­let from your toma­to sauce you can imag­ine the moment when your beloved fam­i­ly will tuck into their lasagne, com­ing home to din­ner after storm and per­il in the busi­ness world and the rid­ing sta­ble, it makes those dish­pan hands just a lit­tle more accept­able. I felt so good when the home­made chick­en soup I made for my friend Jill was deemed to be “so ter­ri­bly ter­ri­bly wel­come, and so good.” It’s enor­mous­ly impor­tant, I think, to run the risk of being thought awful­ly pre­sump­tu­ous, to turn up with a con­tain­er of unasked-for food, feel­ing slight­ly shy and sil­ly, in order to have it com­fort a new moth­er in between feed­ings, in the mid­dle of night when she’s all by her­self and feel­ing pos­si­bly slight­ly pan­icked and neglected.

So I’m going to try to wade through these two books I bought, dic­tio­nary at the ready, and if I come upon any more gems, I’ll pass them along. In the mean­time, I’ll con­tin­ue to taste-test among the seem­ing­ly end­less vari­eties of tiny toma­toes at Marks and Spencer, and force my child to eat “just one more bite” of pear to see if she prefers Com­merce to Red William, and con­vince our­selves that guinea fowl tastes any dif­fer­ent from your run-of-the-mill chick­en. And there’s always a skil­let wait­ing to be scrubbed.