At Home in France by Ann Barry

And since most bats produce only one baby a year, it’s very important whether that baby survives or not.
    Mon Dieu!
What had we done to the poor
chauves-souris?
I was overcome with remorse, and sent the article to Jean, the home wrecker. (I made no mention of the brothel in my letter.)
    In time, the bats—who had picked up stakes and never returned—were followed by other creatures.

Getting
       Acquainted

4
MARKETING

    C ooking may not be everyone’s ideal way to spend a vacation, but it is mine. A gourmand’s passion originates either from being brought up by a good cook or from deprivation. In my case, it was the latter. Not that my family was poor—far from it. I grew up in an upper-middle-class Midwestern suburb. But my mother had cooked her way through my two older brothers’ lives and, during my childhood, had had to adjust to the restricted diet my father required after a serious heart attack. On holidays—dreaded holidays, in an atmosphere fraught with family friction—she would put on the requisite festive show, but our normal fare was, say, broiled chicken, a Bird’s Eye frozen vegetable, and a salad, often eaten in the stony silence imposed by my father’s mood. Friday-night specials, adhering to the Catholic Church’s strictures, were frozen fish sticks—or a dish I remember with some fondness but would never cook—a casserole ofcanned tuna mixed with cream-of-mushroom soup and topped with crushed cornflakes.
    This was a time when my idea of heaven was what in the Midwest was called a brown cow, a tall glass of foamy root beer with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I had this every night before bed in summertime, sitting at the Formica-top table in the kitchen near the open window to the backyard, slurping to the tune of katydids and hypnotized by the blinking of lightning bugs (whose sticky golden corrugated “lights” Christine and I would amputate and try to wear as rings).
Katydid, katydidn’t
, the insects chanted naughtily. And I would long for my grandmother Kate (my mother’s mother and my only surviving grandparent), who lived in the rambling old house in Jerseyville, Illinois, where my mother was born. She always had a batch of warm cookies waiting for me in the pantry, where I could look out the window onto a vista of endless cornfields. When I visited her, I was content to do nothing but sit in a prickly green upholstered chair in the living room, shaking a glass paperweight to make snow fall on the tiny figures of a bride and groom. It was just us three in that house: my mother, my grandmother, and me, and there I was safe.
    When I moved to New York two years after college, its culinary riches overwhelmed me. I’d never even heard of lox and bagels. My first deli lunch consisted of chopped chicken liver on rye. It looked dry, so I asked the counterman for ketchup. He looked as if I’d broken his heart. Missouri, Mars. On my first blind date—with a preppy Wall Street type—I ordered my first stuffed artichoke at the intimate Upper East Side French restaurant where he’d taken me to dinner. Logic said to eat it leaf by leaf, that is,
entire
leaf by entire leaf. I stopped when one caught in my windpipe. You learn.
    Thereafter, I plunged into my food education unreservedly, even taking cooking courses during vacations: in France (at Le Cordon Bleu, during a two-month leave of absence from my job), Italy, and Mexico.
    Now, with the luxury of a house in France, food has become paramount. No sooner have I finished breakfast than I’m thinking of the possibilities for lunch. Lunch hardly digested, I’m pondering dinner. Breakfast usually consists of toast made from a robust
pain de campagne
, with country butter and the fig or prune jam that is a specialty of the region. And coffee, of course. On some mornings I take a little ten-minute spin by car to the Counoud bakery in Bétaille, a village near Carennac, for one of its meltingly tender
pains aux raisins
, fresh out of the