Contents Title Page Dedication Acknowledgments 1. The Beginning 2. House Hunting 3. Brushes with the Law 4. The Messy House 5. Transformations 6. Mornings in Louviers 7. Chez Clet 8. A Hair in the Soup 9. The Priest 10. The Rug Salesman 11. The Perfect Stove 12. Notre Dame 13. The Beauty Around Us 14. Paris 15. Early Morning Swim 16. Too Good to Be True Recipe Index About the Author Also by Susan Herrmann Loomis Copyright Page I dedicate this book first and foremost to my partner in life, Michael, and to our two wonderful, humorous, and, above all, adaptable children, Joe and Fiona. I also dedicate this book to Louviers and its inhabitants, for making room for us. Acknowledgments Before I thank anyone I must turn to Edith and Bernard Leroy, friends who are like family, for their part in the adventure we call our life. Thank you to our dear friends Christian and Nadine Devisme, Patrick Merlin, Bernadette Brière, Chantal and Michel Amsalem, Babette and Jean-Lou Dewaele, Marie Odile and Marie Claire Bunel, André Taverne, Brigitte Tois, Dalila and Sala Boufercha, the staff at Chez Clet and La Maison des Simples, Monsieur et Madame Richard, and all the others in Louviers who make it the special place that it is. Thank you, too, to Patricia and Walter Wells and to Martha Rose Shulman for friendship, spice grinders, and more! And thank you to Marion Pruett for her careful testing of the recipes in the U.S., and to Kurt for helping out! I cannot thank Angela Miller, my agent, enough for her support, generosity, and keen sense; my once-upon-a-time editor, Harriet Bell; and my current and very much appreciated editor, Jennifer Josephy, who goes right to the heart of things. Thank you to everyone at Broadway Books, including Anne Resnik, for making the process so pleasant. And finally, thank you to my editor at epicurious.com, Betsy Beckman, for her excellent editing, encouragement, and enlightened nature. ONE The Beginning THE STORY OF OUR ADVENTURE, our move to Rue Tatin, began some thirteen years earlier, when I first went to live in Paris. Of course back then I had no idea that I would fall hopelessly in love with Michael Loomis, and then with France. Nor did I ever imagine longing so heartily for the French countryside, the French language, the thousands of things that make French life what it is, from dozens of varieties of bottled water to the sweet cream butter. There wasn’t any way to know then how deeply and irreversibly seduced I would be by the markets, the restaurants, the French lifestyle that takes its cue from the meal and the table. THE SUITCASE WAS BIG, and it was heavy. It had everything I thought I would need for a year in Paris, including a little wire contraption that worked on 220 current and would boil water instantly, my favorite earthenware Melitta coffee maker, and a Le Petit Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Française French dictionary, the best I could find. After months of planning, applying for and getting a student loan, packing, and moving, I was finally in Paris for a year’s experience as a stagiaire, or apprentice, at a cooking school for English-speaking students. It sounded like a dream—working all day at the school, taking cooking classes at night with French chefs, and living in Paris to boot. I was beside myself with excitement. And fear. I didn’t know a soul. I’d only been to Paris once before, for a short week when I was barely twenty. I’d studied French for years in school but had never really spoken it. Already concerned about just how I was going to make the $2,500 loan I’d gotten stretch for a year, I decided on arrival to take the metro rather than a cab from the airport to the city. That meant heaving the suitcase up and down stairs, through archaic turnstiles (all of which have been modernized since to accommodate luggage), in and out of metro cars. It was several very rough hours before I arrived at the apartment where I was to stay with a young woman who had just started working at the cooking school and had offered me her spare bedroom. The apartment was in the ninth arrondissement, not far from Montmartre. I would stay there just long enough to find a place of my own. No one was at the apartment and I was in a hurry. I dropped my bags, took a deep breath, and immediately ran back out the door to renegotiate the metro and report for work. The apprenticeship was set out in six-week stages, the first being that of school receptionist, which meant sitting behind a desk, answering the phone, greeting visitors, and dealing with mounds of paperwork. My ideas of a romantic, food-filled year hadn’t included such stultifying work; the only thing that kept me going was peeking at the cooking classes going on in the adjacent room and knowing that two nights a week I would join the other stagiaires for cooking classes. I could hardly wait for the first class. When my workday was finished and the door to the street locked, I followed the other stagiaires to the kitchen. They explained the system to me, which sounded too good to be true. There was a list of perhaps a hundred required recipes to work through during the year, calculated to teach the basics of classic French cuisine and to prepare us for the year-end exam. All we had to do before each class was to choose the recipes we wanted to work on, in a certain order that went from simple to complex. All of the ingredients would be ordered so that on the night of the class we simply had to run downstairs to the cave, or cellar, where they were kept, and bring them upstairs. We paired up to work and kept the same partners throughout the year, to the extent everyone’s staggered schedule would allow. Once I had traded my phone and typewriter for a chef’s knife and covered my street clothes with a long white apron, I was in heaven. Hours to cook, good company to cook with, fabulous ingredients. Never had I imagined produce so gorgeous, so intense in both appearance and flavor. Though my culinary education was relatively broad—I lived in England and Germany while growing up and had a mother who was endlessly creative in the kitchen and rarely made the same dish twice—it was not sophisticated. My personal interest in cooking had come rather late in life. It wasn’t until I was in my last year of high school when both of my sisters, who seemed to spend hours in the kitchen baking cookies, were out of the house that I realized I had a passion for cooking. That year and all through college I cooked whenever I had free time. When I wasn’t cooking I was reading about it, planning my next meal, designing my next dinner party. After earning a degree in communications and working at newspapers and in public relations, it dawned on me I could incorporate food into my professional life, which is what had led me to La Varenne. I wanted to be a food writer, but first I had to learn how to cook. So here I was in 1980 in a two-hundred-year-old building in Paris, near the Place des Invalides, basking in the world’s best butter; the fattest, most pungent pink garlic; spinach whose leaves were so firm and meaty they stood up on the table instead of lying flat; brown eggs whose yellow yolks tasted as rich as they looked. I thought I knew good apples, fragrant strawberries, juicy pears. But never had I tasted the likes of the fraises des bois I had on a tart at La Varenne, and the pears I sniffed made me want to fold them into cakes, slather them with chocolate, poach them in fragrant herbs and spices. The food was so whole. Chickens came with head, feet, and pinfeathers, and so did the pigeons and quail; the fish looked at me with big, dreamy eyes as I took them from the cooler; the lettuce still had soil clinging to it. Once my onerous receptionist stint was finished I moved on to washing dishes at cooking demonstrations, a job I much preferred. At least I was in contact with food. I lived in a blessed cloud of ecstasy about the food, the flavors, the techniques I was learning. I jumped at the chance to run errands to the market, the cheese shop, the bakery. When I wasn’t at La Varenne I took jobs cooking for embassy families, catering bar mitzvahs, making canapés for special occasions. Anything to be with food. Whenever I could I went to spend a day at a bakery or pâtisserie, often getting up at 1 A.M. and arriving when the baker did, so I missed nothing and could still get to work on time. The chefs on duty with us for our evening classes—all of them terribly handsome in their crisp whites and with their Gallic attitudes—would yell,