Sensual Living: Fact or Fiction?

stoned by the lake

At this point in the summer we have so settled into the terroir mentality that we sprinkle lavender over our joints before rolling them. Yesterday we went down to the lake and laid on the tall grasses right onshore and smoked one laced with lavender seeds and watched the clouds surf over a sleek blue sky. When we made it home a few hours later my aunt brought a case of apples out from the garage for me to make a crumble with, and I carefully peeled and seeded each one, smelling them, feeling the fruit’s crystals, its compact juicy foam. I weighed out flour and sugar and butter, equal parts of each, and crumbled it in my hands until it was sandy. And that night when we ate it I noticed for the first time the difference in taste between baking with salted vs. unsalted butter, a small victory for my tongue.

What are we eating? Whole fish, baked, over a ratatouille and jasmine rice. Thin and crunchy green beans with merguez sausages on the grill and potatoes spiked with bay leaves, wrapped in foil and tossed in the fire. Crayfish we’ve snuck down to the lake with flashlights and butterfly nets to stalk, watching them thrust and parry in the pail before boiling them till done. Dried donkey sausage, or saucisson d’âne, which is, I promise, a lot more appetizing than it sounds. Salmon terrines. Cod liver pâté. Duck mousse. Creamed leeks. Cookies poolside, with a pitcher of grenadine. Savoy mountain cheeses that we buy from la barbue, the toothless farmer lady, her back curled more cruelly every year, who cuts them with a rusty knife—la Tomme, le Reblochon, l’Abondance, le Tamié (still made by Benedictine monks, one of whom I saw at the Shopi getting groceries), and my favorite, le Beaufort. (She also sells her own sour cream, yogurt, local eggs, and butter, cutting it from an atlas-sized slab.)

We eat salads with lavender seed, although everyone complains they then taste soapy (I like it). Amélie’s spaghetti carbonara, wet with cream. My peach crumbles and mirabelle tarts and nut cakes. Homemade pizzas. Pears we sun til soft, melons rife with flavor. Tomatoes, feta, chives. Bubbling gratins of cauliflower or potato or zucchini. Leftover egg whites alchemized into chocolate mousse. Fresh cheese that’s little more than whey and water, loosely clumped, best if made that day. Tiny radishes still flecked with earth, drunk with rosé as the sun sets. Chicken tagine, simmered on the stovetop all day long, Marie’s multi-culti pot-au-feu. Ethereal croissants and baguettes the texture of deep-fried cotton. Smoked, dried pork loin.  Lake fish like le féra or, in restaurants, the illustrious omble chevalier.

But wait a second. What am I doing? I hate the whole France nostalgia bit. It irritates me when I see it in cookbooks, certainly in those written by non-French, but it’s almost worse when it’s the French (Madeleine Kamman et al) prostituting their own country. I’m talking specifically about the exploiting of tired old stereotypes about French provincial life (even ones considered “positive”), which collapse, ignore and conflate the subtleties of a country with, yes, a rich past, but also an amply textured present. The fat French gourmand, say, pinky-ringed, ruddy-nosed, critically holding his wineglass to the light. The crotchety old gardener with his beret and rubber boots and suspenders, sniffing at the air to determine if it’s humid enough to plant beets in the chateau’s potager. The gingham-aproned menagère smiling merrily as she tosses more goose scraps into her simmering pot-au-feu.

Here is the France most commonly called up in the minds of those who aren’t French, even when they might know better. Cooking schools like the one I work in exploit images like these (and it works). Come feel the passion, we say. Toss away your cell phone, your diet books, your neuroses, your mother-in-law (As if these only existed in America!) Come live more simply, in the rhythms of nature. Even the air provokes romance!

To this end, we transfer to rustic glass bottles the wine we buy in five-liter plastic gallons. We almost poured purchased tomato sauce into canning jars to make it look as though we’d made it (Sly and Mela later made our own). We hang laundry in front of the neighbors’ door so that students don’t find out—through us, anyway—that not every Italian kitchen looks like ours. These images are how we and many others make our money, and sometimes, they’re a big fucking charade. 

Tradition is lovely and important; it’s certainly worth remembering the past. But the past presented in images like this is unreal, and furthermore, unfair to the present.  Case in point: my aunt buys local alpine butter, creamy and flaxen, while my grandmother picks up low-fat Bridelight at the supermarket. The same aunt plans on making and selling 100 or so artisanal pâtés de foie gras this Christmas; the same grandmother makes radish dip with powdered onion soup, much like the Card Club women in Pennsylvania.  But my aunt uses a food processor (le Magimix!) to make her pie crusts, and my grandmother does not. To me, this mix of givens and inversions is markedly more interesting than if they just embodied their proscribed roles (grandmother: upholds tradition, it will die with her; aunt: career woman, embraces modernity, shuns the long way). Plus, it’s real. More real, I would argue, than the invariably flat stereotypes evoked so often that they’ve carved deep ruts into our minds.

Unfortunately, I rely on this sham all the time, in writing, in speech. And that’s because it has some basis in truth, and it so lends itself to poesy. The bearded old cheese-selling farmer ladies, pinky-ringed bon vivants and curmudgeonly gardeners are still around, if you look hard enough. But it’s sad to ignore modern interpretations of traditional values, roles and behaviors, because besides being relevant, they have a complexity and beauty deservedly of their own.