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.