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Cooking
jyl_gw

Our Christmas in Carpentras

John Liu
7 years ago
last modified: 7 years ago

We are in France for Christmas, seeing daughter-san and enjoying the hospitality of our friend who lives in Marseille.

Our connection with Martine started about 15 years ago when her 13-year old daughter Alice took a a three week USA trip with her French lycée class. The kids were bunked with different host families, and Alice happened to land with us. The next summer, at 14 years old, she came back for two months, traveling on her own this time. We took her on our family trips to the Pacific Northwest and around California, and then I took her to New York on my business trip, we spent a couple days exploring New York and I put her on her plane to Paris.

As she grew up, Alice kept returning to stay with us for a month or two at a time, even after we moved to Portland. We also stayed with Alice's family in Marseille, when her mother Martine got to met her daughter's "American family" for the first time. A couple years later, Martine's family and ours took a vacation together in Italy. Meanwhile, Alice finished high school, went to university, then studied at an ecole de commerce (business school) in France, between more stays with her American family.

A few years ago, she emailed me for help writing a CV in English. We researched the companies she would be applying to, and wrote a CV in nearly-but-not -too-perfect English. She got the first job she applied for, which was in New York City. So Alice started working in America, as well as getting a graduate degree from a US university.

(Warning: rant about the US immigration system. It drives me crazy that a young French woman, fluent in English, highly educated, already employed in the US, no hint of security issues, struggles to piece together a string of temporary visas just to stay in the US. We are a nation of immigrants, and we won't stay the dynamic, inventive, adaptable, wealthy country that we are without the best young talent that the world has to offer, those brave and ambitious enough to choose challenge over familiarity.)

Anyway, back to food. We arrived in Marseilles and had barely unpacked before we were bundled into Martine's car and headed to Carpentras, which is a small town near Avignon, the former seat of the Catholic Papacy in Southern France. We all stayed with our hosts Alain and Dominique, two big dogs, a farm cat, and a rotating coterie of friends in their big stone farmhouse at the corner of what used to be a large strawberry farm.

The house was fascinating. Initially built around 1854, it was a classic farmhouse from this region. The cold north wind, or mistral, dominates the local architecture. Houses were built long and narrow, with the ends pointed east and west, the living areas and large windows on the south side, and enclosed, windowless areas for storage of vegetables, wine, and animals along the north side. Living areas were only about 15 feet deep, that being as far as sunlight will reach through a window. Walls of cypress were planted close the the north side as windbreaks, deciduous trees were planted outside the main southern windows as shade for the summer. As the family grew with each generation, storage areas were converted to living space and eventually new sections added. One son became a local priest so a neighboring house was built with a prominent statue of the Virgin. Eventually the family did less farming.

The last farmer in the Nicolet family died in the 1960s. His papers and office were left exactly as he last touched them, and the family began selling the farm, parcel by parcel. His widow passed away in the early 1980s. Her daughter, then completing her degree in architecture, used the family farmhouse as one of the subjects in her graduate thesis, so when our new friends bought the house around 2000, they received not just all the tools, plows, baskets, and records of a long-shuttered strawberry, farm, a house full of old furniture, and a renter in the east wing, but also a detailed history of the house, its changes over the past 150 years, and the rural architecture of the region, which have been very useful as they convert the old farmhouse to a large and comfortable villa.

Even financially well-off French people haven't adopted the huge quasi-commercial kitchens of high-end American houses. For two days, around 16 people, plus or minus, were fed a more or less continuous flow of courses from a kitchen of about 100 square feet, including counters, one sink, a hard-working dishwasher, and a 30" range with four glass burners.

This French family didn't aspire to Iron Chef displays of technique. Very fine ingredients were cooked very simply, or not cooked at all, and plated in the most basic arrangements. They laughed at how I cut and folded the platter of smoked salmon, and no-one took pictures of the food - but me.

I lost track of what we ate, but it was something like this, and not exactly in this order:


smoked salmon, salmon eggs, bread

pate

slices of truffle with salt and olive oil

filet mignon, stuffed with truffles, wrapped with ham

seared foie gras, I had thirds because there was too much for everyone to finish

scallops in a saffron cream sauce

three scotches, as part of an attempt to work from lightest to darkest in my host's collection, but I gave it up early

mushroom soup

turkey slow cooked in champagne, in a dough-sealed cocotte

mushrooms in mushroom gravy

a Chateau Margaux 1999, which was told was this chateau's second wine

about 12 kinds of cheese

the best Buche de Noel (Yule Log) I have ever had, with a layer of puffed rice adding lightness and crisp

more pate

three or four dessert wines

rillettes, which is a sort of fatty, salty, mix of slow cooked pork fragments, mostly from the pig's face I think

grapes and curly crusty bread things

more smoked salmon, and some kind of white salty spread made from fish eggs

truffle potato chips

a couple more red wines

some sausages, that my son said were the best sausages he'd ever tasted

local walnuts

another buche de noel

a weird green dessert liqueur

a couple different kinds of bread, one homemade, one apparently rather fancy (but I've forgotten the name)

cream of vegetable soup

12 more kinds of cheese

more smoked salmon, rilettes and salmon eggs

soft cooked eggs with lots of truffles, served in the eggshell

more mushrooms in sauce

various white wines, for breakfast

also about 30 little cups of espresso


The is the region for truffles, hence there were a lot of truffleized foods. The soups were made with an interesting machine called a Thermomix which appears to be a programmable combination of cooker and Vitamix. For the searing, we used an electric pan. The Chateau Marguax was gravely introduced and carefully decanted but then we simply drank it, no declaimations or pontifications. The cat ate from the its food bowl on the counter as we cooked, and the dogs were constantly underfoot.

Eating all of this took pretty much every waking moment of two days and nights. Courses were usually at least half an hour apart. Breakfast was served around 10 am, lunch started around 4 pm, and dinner typically at 9 pm.

Featured Answer
  • Islay Corbel
    7 years ago

    Just noticed that it was one of those local 5 legged turkeys LOL

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