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The Kitchen and the Cooking School

Before Michael started on the kitchen he added a long, narrow room at the back of the house and just off the now-finished dining room. Our friends though he was crazy: he had all this other work to do on the house and now he was adding more? But he knew it made sense, and so did I, for it was a very clever way to get privacy. We weren’t allowed, under the terms of our mortgage, to build any kind of wall between ourselves and the parish house next door, but we were allowed to put an addition onto the house. The addition, then, became our wall.

I should explain that our property abuts that of the parish meeting hall, an active spot where parishioners came for catechism, communion classes and evening prayer vigils. All too often we found people peering in through our small-paned windows at what we assumed they thought was an abandoned house. We didn’t understand how they could have thought that, since all the windows were clean, the garden was landscaped and the chimney in active use, but it had been empty for a long time, and presumably they just couldn’t resist being nosy. Their surprise when we caught them at it was amusing – they would stare and ogle, not realizing that we were in there, since it was usually early evening when they were there awaiting their classes or vigils, and the light was quite dim. When their eyes adjusted and they realized they were looking right at us, horror and embarrassment would flit across their faces as they abruptly pulled back, and hastily walked away. We would giggle slyly, knowing that they now felt more uncomfortable than we did. Still, it wasn’t the most pleasant of situations – what if we’d been walking around naked? Or eating off the floor? Or …?

The long room, which Michael put up quickly, consisted of an outer timbered wall, a glass ceiling and a floor of bricks laid in sand rather than on a foundation, a long window at one end and a door at the other. It would ultimately be turned into a passageway to the courtyard and I, dreaming of our own little orangerie, wanted to plant lemon trees along the warmest wall, with the glass ceiling acting as solar heating.

Home grown citrus fruit would not materialize until years in the future, however. For the duration, this unheated room with its unheated floor would be my temporary kitchen, while Michael socked his way through the building of the permanent kitchen which, we now knew, would be the heart of our cooking school.

Michael installed a large, shallow ceramic sink around the corner and at one end of the room, lined the walls with shelving, and once my two small gas stoves, the refrigerator and all my kitchen equipment were installed it was cosy and efficient, like a kitchen on a boat. Everything was out where I could see it and within easy reach, the way I like it, and the blue and ochre timbered walls, the old brick floor and my copper pots hanging above the stove gave it a certain style.

The day Michael began work on the kitchen was one of those red-letter moments. I know he dreaded the job because it was massive and would require not only superhuman strength, but super-human patience as he turned a series of sixteenth-century rooms into one, cohesive kitchen. He carefully sealed off the space with plastic, tape and curtains and proceeded to go at it with satisfying hammer-blows as he bashed down walls and the old, crumbling fireplace, pulled up tiles and generally turned the space into a shambles. A wall with two beautiful long windows that had divided the former kitchen from Michael’s workshop disappeared, as did an angled wall at the back and another one to the side. The result was one huge space that stretched from the street to the back courtyard. Destruction, the easy part, took weeks. Once everything was a mound of rubble the real work began as Michael hauled it out, tons of it, dustbin by huge dustbin. He found someone who needed landfill, which helped enormously, as the city dump allows just one visit per person per day.

It took months of backbreaking labour to get it all cleaned out. Then Michael ran pipes and wiring through the floor before he poured a concrete pad at the end of the room: this would remain his workshop. With nothing in the space but Michael’s tools it looked large, airy, wonderful. Joe was soon in there on his roller blades, swirling around the obstacles of Michael’s paraphernalia.

Michael had completed kitchen plans before he began demolition, and he pored over them at night after working in the space all day, tweaking them as it opened up. The planning stage had been a torturous process for me: I don’t have the gift of being able to visualize space. When I look at plans on paper I see flat drawings on paper. When I look at an empty space I see just that – an empty space. But I do know what I need in a kitchen to work well and efficiently: a big centre island with a butcher block and a sink; my knives handy without being in the way or accessible to small fingers; pots and pans and certain utensils hung where I can reach them; lots of full-extension drawers; enough room to accommodate a crowd.

I have ideas about the way I want a kitchen to look, ideas which have to do with colour and warmth and being able to display some of my favourite things like the gorgeous wedding cookies tied with pale blue ribbon that were a gift when I was in Sardinia, the jar of jewel-like candied fruit from Apt, photographs of the children at work in the kitchen, strands of garlic and Espelette peppers, a frothy bunch of pink peppercorns, bay leaves, shallots. I communicated all of this to Michael, who knew it all already, and beyond that I was pretty hopeless. Oh, I read kitchen design books but found most spaces in them cold and impersonal. Flipping through French magazines I found some design elements I loved, and these went into a file for Michael, along with my ideas and observations. He referred to them all when he drew up the plan, going so far as to making a paper ‘maquette’, or model, so that I could see, in three dimensions, what he was talking about.

A year of demolition and cleaning up, of concrete-pad pouring and figuring had passed before Michael began the construction phase of the kitchen. He worked on it slowly and steadily, his brow knitted most of the time as he puzzled out the intricate details. It was very slow going, but fortunately one of Michael’s many gifts is persistence. He worked and worked for months, grumbling and cursing, hammering and sawing, measuring and figuring. There was a point where I could see it was getting the better of him and, one night, after Joe was in bed, I suggested we rethink the plans. I’d had my doubts about a bank of cabinets he’d drawn in on each side of the stove in a ziggurat pattern. He was trying to give me maximum storage and light at the same time, but each time I looked at them on paper they seemed top-heavy and complicated.

I suggested, gently, that I didn’t need the cabinets, knowing that Michael had spent a lot of time figuring, measuring and planning to fit them in. Surprisingly, he agreed easily, and with a swipe of his eraser the cabinets were gone and the kitchen lightened up. It is very hard to work on a project such as the one we had naively embarked upon – and to live in it as well; to have the husband be the contractor and the crew while the wife is the dreamer and the breadwinner. Anyone who has been through a similar situation will sympathize – it is one of the ultimate tests of marriage. Throw in a foreign country, metric measurements, a toddler and my frequent absences for work, and the situation becomes even more like dry tinder.

Michael and I were managing, but it required extreme delicacy on my side and extreme organization on his. He is a master at keeping construction messes separate from our living area through his system of plastic, tape and curtains, so that as little dust and noise as possible escape into our lives. I have always appreciated this about him. I am very good at keeping out of his way, both when he is designing and when he works, something he appreciates about me. Still, there were times when I wanted to scream at the noise and puffs of dust that inevitably escaped, and there were times when he wanted to, I am certain, walk out and close the door behind him. But each time we lost patience we stepped back, took a deep breath and really looked at what was happening. Progress was being made, spaces were changing, the bones of the kitchen were in place and it was all taking shape. Observation like this gave each of us renewed energy.

One of the most exciting things about the project was a back porch that Michael had incorporated into the kitchen. To do this, he’d pushed out the back wall and put in glass doors, and pushed up the ceiling then roofed it with glass, which pulled light into the whole room. He’d removed a battered old small-paned metal window that I loved, and painstakingly built two replicas using wood and wavy, antique glass. Michael’s brother David, a frequent visitor, helped finish them, and when they were installed they looked as though they had always been there.

Michael rebuilt the fireplace into a cooking fireplace, with a shelf in front wide enough to hold a dinner plate, and a beautifully graceful mantel and chimney. It was a tense job because, even though he’d already remodelled a fireplace that worked, he was building this one from scratch and he didn’t know how to guarantee it would draw. We asked friends who’d had fireplaces installed, and all their suggestions pointed in one direction – make the fireplace itself deep enough to build a fire towards the back so the smoke has nowhere to go but up. A book about chimney-building confirmed this and, using calculations he found there as his compass, Michael constructed an entirely smokeless fireplace.

Michael was about to do a final plastering on the fireplace when a friend called to ask if he wanted an old coal stove. Michael went to take a look, only to discover that what he was being offered wasn’t any old stove, it was a vintage Aga cooker in mint condition. Our friend just wanted to get rid of it, and said if Michael would take it off his hands, he could have it. Michael jumped at it.

I was in the United States on a book-tour at the time, and when I called that day and Michael told me what he’d just been given I was so excited I could hardly stand it. Both Michael and I had spent significant years of our childhoods in England, where each of us had eaten oatmeal, soups, stews and breads cooked in the oven of an Aga, and heard our mothers extol the virtues of this heavy, cast-iron stove. We’d both wanted one for years.

Our friend needed the Aga out of the apartment building and Michael called three friends to help him move it. They took a sturdy dolly that Michael had built, hoisted the heavy stove up on it and pushed it uphill from our friend’s building to the house, a journey of about five blocks. One of them played traffic policeman as they huffed and puffed and somehow shimmied and wrestled it into our courtyard, then into the house. I took a photo of them from my office window as they pushed and guided this ungainly stove up the middle of the street – they were working hard and laughing at the same time, knowing they were a spectacle, and I just hoped they wouldn’t laugh so hard that they would let go of it and send it rolling back down the street.

Michael couldn’t install the Aga before he made room for it, which meant that he had to deal with our immensely tall and spindly chimney, which looked as if a strong puff of wind would topple it. Michael had checked it when we moved in and determined it was secure, and the last thing he wanted was to take the time and resources to rebuild it. The addition of the Aga meant he couldn’t avoid it; the oven needed a separate flue.

He gritted his teeth, bought the materials and enlisted the help of a Sicilian friend who is a mason. Together, they managed to build an even taller chimney with two flues, one for the Aga and one for the fireplace. This proved providential when an epic windstorm blew through Normandy just months later: the new chimney withstood the storm, whereas the old one wouldn’t have; it would almost certainly have crashed right into the kitchen below it, destroying months of work.

The kitchen was about half-built when I was contacted by a restaurant chain with whom I’d done some promotion, who asked if I would design a five-day programme for fourteen of their managers that would include hands-on cooking classes. ‘Of course,’ I said. We’d been serving lunches to paying guests from a temporary kitchen in an unfinished dining room, why shouldn’t we go ahead and let fourteen cooking students come too?

Michael and I studied our options, trying to figure out how to make this a reality. We resorted, once again, to theatre. We would transform the now-finished dining room, next to the temporary kitchen, into a ‘laboratory’, where all of the mise-en-place, or recipe preparation, would be carried out. We wouldn’t have water, but the sink wasn’t far. Then, all the cooking would be done in the long, narrow kitchen, which was basically arranged for one person, so I would need to organize the menus carefully to make it work efficiently. We would set up the dining table in our hallway, which is just large enough to hold a long table and has the house’s best view of the church’s main façade.

Meanwhile, I became pregnant with Fiona. When I’d agreed to do the class I hadn’t expected this. She was due in February and the class had been scheduled for April. That gave me two good months to recover, which I figured would be plenty.

The closer the date for the class got, the more nervous I became. I had organized the week as best I could before Fiona was born so that my mind was at ease, but I still needed to work out the menus and figure out where and how to procure ingredients. I would buy everything I could from local farmers, and rely on Chez Clet, the épicerie – grocery – next door, for the rest.

I have taught many, many cooking classes, but never in my home, never with a two-month old baby, and never a hands-on class for fourteen people with little or no cooking experience. I knew I’d need some help and I turned to Bruno Atmani, a friend and professionally trained chef. He had recently returned to France from Sweden where he’d worked in restaurants for ten years. His English, which he’d perfected by watching English-language movies, was fluent and his humour of such quality that it is hard to look at him without giggling. I’d never worked with him, but I knew he’d be perfect for the job.

I also enlisted a young American woman, Allison, who had worked for me previously, to help organize things, take some of the trips with us, and generally keep things in order. With Michael, we formed the heart of the ‘cooking school’!

The day before the group arrived Michael and Bruno set up work-stations in the dining room. One of the stations was the butcher’s work-bench we intended to move into the kitchen when it was finished, a beautiful piece of furniture we’d picked up at a brocante for next to nothing. The others were sturdy tables that Michael had quickly built. I set out cutting boards, tea towels and knives, bouquets of herbs and salt and pepper. I lined several dustbins with plastic bags, and set large bowls of water in strategic positions, for rinsing knives and hands. When we were finished we stood back: with the church looming through the windows in the background, it looked incredibly romantic!

The group arrived, starstruck with being in France and with coming to our house. The group leaders had prepared them well: each manager had a beautiful little book that described their tour, and included a biography of me. They’d all read my French Farmhouse Cookbook, so they had a sense of the food they would be asked to prepare.

I gave them each a long white apron, a toque, or chef’s hat, and a book of the recipes we were going to prepare. They went to settle into their hotel while Bruno, Allison and I set out ingredients and prepared for them to return.

I’d planned a simple menu for the first meal, which included tapenade as an appetizer, asparagus with a fresh goat’s cheese and herb sauce, chicken with cream and sorrel sauce, salad and cheese, and lemon cake with fresh strawberries and cream.

My first step was to take them through all of the ingredients, to explain what they were and where they had come from. When I got to the chicken there were a few shrieks, for its head was still attached, and one of the students almost fainted. I had been warned that these people weren’t cooks. Despite working for a restaurant chain, they were people-managers and number-crunchers, and it turned out that most of them had almost no hands-on experience with food at all. Their ‘restaurants’ were really bakeries that served food, and they all knew a lot about how to sell breads and cakes, tarts and cookies, how much wood to order for the wood-burning ovens and how to manage the people who actually did the cooking. But they couldn’t navigate their way through a recipe. This made my job that much more interesting and important, and more fun, because I had them captive for a week and could imprint upon them my own standards of quality and freshness!

What this group didn’t know about cooking they made up for in willingness to learn and to work, and the experience was more fun than I could have imagined. I was organized down to the last clove of garlic, but considering the variables – not the least among them the fact that I was nursing an infant Fiona – the results of the first session were near miraculous. The temporary kitchen, intended for one cook, at one point had seven people in it laughing, sautéeing, tasting as they went. There was just one French person with the group, a chef employed at the company’s central kitchen, and he had decided that he would go off on his own. He’d run out to the butcher while I was giving my talk about ingredients – being French, he didn’t need to hear it – and bought some lamb brains. As everyone worked and jostled in the kitchen, he’d carved out a little space to prepare the brains, which, I was certain, he would eat all by himself. I could have strangled him, but I held back. In any case, everything went so smoothly that we were all ready to sit down and begin our inaugural meal at 8 p.m., as I’d planned.

We had a terrific week going to markets and visiting artisan food producers, farmers, and pottery makers. We even visited an ancient wood-fired bread oven and everyone had a chance to wear the baker’s traditional Norman wooden clogs with their turned-up toes, slide loaves around in the oven, then see them emerge from the oven’s heat, their crusts popping and crackling. The baker opened jars of homemade jam and bottles of cider, and we had an unexpected feast in the small, timbered building. As we left, the baker gave a warm loaf to each person and we rode the bus back to Louviers in a haze of toasty aroma.

Our week culminated in a meal that Bruno and I prepared for the group, who had gone on a day-trip to the D-Day landing beaches. They returned just as we were putting the finishing touches to the seafood stew we’d prepared, but before we sat down Michael had some entertainment planned. He called everyone into the kitchen, opened champagne and poured glasses. He was preparing to install the centre island in the kitchen, and that afternoon had poured the small concrete pad where it would sit, which was still soft enough to take an imprint. After a toast to the group and the week, he asked each person to autograph the concrete. ‘You will be immortalized at On Rue Tatin,’ he said, and everyone cheered, then dropped to their knees and covered the concrete with their fanciful signatures. One day, should our house be excavated, the archaeologist will surely scratch her head over the signatures in the concrete pad!

The dinner table was set. On it were bottles of Côtes de Blaye and big baskets of Michael’s freshly made bread. Because this group was service-oriented, they jumped right into helping out, insisting that Bruno, Michael, Allison and I be waited on. It was a fitting end to an unbelievably warm, enjoyable week, and it heralded a happy future for a cooking school at On Rue Tatin.

After the group had gone, Michael returned to working on the kitchen, and I to writing and recipe testing. Michael installed the butcher’s work-bench, then proceeded to expand on it for the centre island. The butcher block top, which was about five feet long, had fissures in it the size of the Grand Canyon. We had bathed it with water for months, hoping the wood would expand, but the spaces remained. Michael cut the block into three pieces, which he trimmed and evened off, then stuck back together to make a shorter, smoother cutting surface. It still had small cracks in it, which Michael filled with beeswax, a food-friendly, aesthetically pleasing solution. We wanted the front of this graceful piece of furniture, with its two deep, curved drawers, to be what people saw when they entered the kitchen, so Michael put them facing forward. He built a frame that widened the piece and set the butcher block atop it at the back, on the stove side.

We hadn’t determined what our counter-tops would be. We’d tried poured concrete for the surfaces in the temporary kitchen, but it hadn’t held up as well as we’d hoped, and we’d also tried tile, which I found an unfriendly work surface, and hard to clean. We were considering all kinds of things when Michael came home from a materials buying trip one afternoon, excited about some end-lots of marble he’d seen. We went to take a look.

Here again, a limited budget worked in our favour. We wouldn’t have tried so many surfaces, nor looked so hard if we could have just gone out and purchased what we wanted. Thanks to Michael always looking for ways to make the budget stretch, here was a beautiful solution in the form of huge, polished squares of a marble that was luminous with ochre, dark pink, grey and a tinge of bluish green.

With the marble chosen, Michael could continue with the centre island. He first rounded the edges of the squares, then installed them opposite the butcher block. He incorporated a small sink to the right of the butcher block for washing vegetables, and underneath it he built two drawers, one for rubbish and the other for compost. He incorporated other drawers into the island, too, to accommodate all the paraphernalia of a family kitchen, from first-aid kit to napkins and bibs. In the centre of the island, between the wood and the marble, Michael inserted a wooden knife-holder that was flush with the surface. My knives fitted down into it, their blades separated by adjustable wooden pegs. Over the island he installed a beautiful, art deco chandelier we’d purchased several years before, which was, we discovered when we got it home, signed by the Frères Mueller from Lunéville, in Alsace.

We wanted to tile the entire twelve-foot-long back wall of the kitchen, as a backdrop for the gas stove. I wanted to use handmade tiles we’d seen in the Marais area of Paris, which came in a beautiful blanc cassé, soft white. We brought two of them home and set them on the counter, more as a tease than anything else, for their price would eat up the whole of the rest of our kitchen budget. Michael came home with many other tile samples, but none of them looked good next to those from the Marais. One day, though, he found some industrially made tiles he liked, and I went with him to take a look. They were nice and irregular, with a good shine and rich colour. We decided to use them, and Michael made the wall look as good as it would have with the tiles from the Marais, by mixing white and off-white to give the wall depth and subtle texture.

I wanted my copper pots to hang somewhere in the kitchen, both for the warmth their colour would add and for practicality, but we couldn’t figure out where to put them. I didn’t want them over the butcher block because they would block the view of the stove and the mantel, and our chandelier looked so graceful there. I couldn’t hang them against the tile wall because the counter top was too deep for them to be within easy reach.

I stood at the stove and reached up, as though reaching for a pot. I realized that if they hung inside the hood Michael had built, along the sides, they would not only look beautiful but would also be accessible to me yet out of the way. This is where they hang today, a perfect solution.

Michael built all the cabinets in the kitchen, which include twenty-two long drawers, each of which slides out to its full length. One of my favourite and most useful drawers is the tall, narrow one that sits next to the stove and is used to store baking sheets and odd-shaped baking pans. In this kitchen I would have the luxury of space and storage that I could only have imagined in kitchens of yore.

Michael laid a beautiful floor in half the kitchen that consisted of the ancient tiles he’d pulled up from the original kitchen floor, some old six-sided terracotta tiles called tommettes that had come from the hallway behind the kitchen, and small squares he cut from the marble that covered the counter-tops. The area where I would spend most of my time, between the stove and butcher block, the refrigerator and the sink, was floored with buttery old pine planks he’d lifted from the house’s original sitting room. They would be much kinder than tile or stone to my legs and back.

I’d wanted stone sinks like those in old farms and chateaux, but we didn’t find one easily and I wasn’t so devoted to the idea that I would go to any lengths to have one. I’ve always liked stainless steel, so Michael went about looking for a stainless steel sink that fitted the dimensions we wanted, long and wide enough to hold the removable pan under the stove burners, and shallow enough for ease and comfort. Needless to say, such a sink was nowhere to be found or ordered.

This was a puzzler. I didn’t want to compromise on the shape of the sink – it had to be practical and easy to use. I didn’t want porcelain because it is fussy to maintain. Michael heard about a place where he could get any size stainless steel sink, and a friend of ours said that he could intervene and get it wholesale. Michael handed in the sink’s dimensions and got a call back the following week with an estimate that sent him through the roof. ‘Five thousand dollars for a stainless steel sink?’ he said, shaking his head. Apparently, the sink would have to be custom-made, which is what made it so costly. Like the handmade tiles, the handmade stainless steel sink would have to go.

How would we get around this one? Michael had lined a wall in our downstairs bathroom with zinc, just for fun, and he’d loved working with it. One night I heard him soldering in his workshop and I looked in to see him fashioning a zinc box. ‘It’s a sink,’ he said shortly. The next day he brought it to show me. ‘If this thing holds water, this is what our sinks will look like,’ he said. ‘It should work – zinc lasts forever. Just look at all the zinc bars in French cafes.’ He filled it with water and it was watertight. Our sink problem was solved, sort of. He had to figure out how to put in a plug and how to support it, which he did, and the upshot is that we have three custom-made zinc sinks in our kitchen, which are burnished and lovely, and easy to maintain.

With the sinks in place, the drawers all built, the floors laid, Michael could install the yards of marble. He studied all the squares to choose those with the most ochre in them, and the most harmonious patterns. He tried them out on the counters to see how the light fell on them, then carefully rounded their edges before setting them in place. He had fashioned a narrow ledge at the back of the counter-tops on either side of the stove for condiments, timers, knick-knacks, all the little things that clutter a work surface, and he cut small pieces of marble to fit that. When all was installed he had to figure out how to polish and treat it so it would hold up to kitchen use.

We both got on the phone to do some research. Mine led me to an Italian family of masons in Paris; they were very generous with information and offered to have Michael come in so they could give him a marble-treating demonstration. Michael’s research led him to the headstone makers in Louviers. Between these sources, he got the information he needed. The results turned the marble smooth and luscious, and made the colours, which are warm and complementary to food, flowers and people, emerge. A visitor, looking at the marble, said, ‘Do you realize people go to school just to learn how to cut and polish marble and he just did it?’

I had heard that marble was hard to maintain and very delicate, and I wondered how it would hold up to the kind of use I would give it. I needn’t have worried, as it has proved to be low maintenance and very forgiving. Even acid, which eats away at its surface leaving a rough white spot, isn’t as much of a problem as I feared, for those rough spots go away with regular wiping.

The stoves were installed, the counter-tops finished, the drawers ready to fill. I wanted to move in, or at least to decorate. One night, while Michael was at his weekly sculpture class, I opened up some kitchen boxes, trying to figure out what I could put on the mantel that would surprise him the next day. I stumbled onto teapots and soup terrines; it turned out that over the years I’d amassed a small collection in varied bright colours. These I set on the mantelpiece and said nothing. I knew they would get covered with dust as Michael continued to work, but I wanted to see how they would look and I mostly wanted him to see that I was paying attention. He loved seeing them there the next day, giving truth to the adage that it is the little things that make a difference.