My Life in France

My sievelike mind didn’t want to lock away dates and details; it wanted to float and meander. If I mixed all those facts and theses up with a little gelatine and egg white, I wondered, would they stick together better?

The first course was tomates farcies à la pistouille: tomatoes stuffed with chopped eggplant, fresh tomato pulp, basil, and garlic. A poached egg sat on top, like a queen on her throne

He was a sometime insomniac, and I was known to snore. We decided it was best to spend the nights apart, but we’d put a double bed in Paul’s room so that we could cuddle in the mornings

emember, ‘No one’s more important than people’!” In other words, friendship is the most important thing—not career or housework, or one’s fatigue—and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went. And thank heaven we did!

Good French food cannot be produced by a zombie cook,” I wrote him. To get the proper results, one had to be willing to sweat over it;

To me, the telling flavor of bouillabaisse comes from two things: the Provençal soup base—garlic, onions, tomatoes, olive oil, fennel, saffron, thyme, bay, and usually a bit of dried orange peel—and, of course, the fish—lean (non-oily), firm-fleshed, soft-fleshed, gelatinous, and shellfish

Ah me! The meal was just as sublime the second time around, only now I could identify the smells in the air quicker than Paul, order my own food without help, and truly appreciate the artistry of the kitchen. La Couronne was the same, but I had become a different person

but none of it seemed foreign enough to me. It was all so pleasantly bland that it felt as if I were back on the SS America. I don’t like it when everyone speaks perfect English; I’d much rather struggle with my phrase book

first this broke my heart, but then I came to understand that learning how to fix one’s mistakes, or live with them, was an important part of becoming a cook.

And if the food is truly vile, as my ersatz eggs Florentine surely were, then the cook must simply grit her teeth and bear it with a smile—and learn from her mistakes.