The Happy Stove

Yes, we will be needing a new roof! We have filed the papers!

Yes sir. We signed on the house in the Alps on Friday morning. The signing was long and protracted, with every detail of everyone's life getting dragged through the proceeding, and our hands ached from initialing about 300 pages of documents. We learned a lot of history, mostly involving the fascinating tapestry of a family in a small Savoyard town, but never the exact date of construction of the house, which is thought to be between 250 and 300 years old. We discovered that there are 3 fruit trees on the property: an apple, a pear, and a cherry tree, in addition to a fig tree, chestnuts, and a plum tree in the open grove next to the house.

The previous owner also told us there were black trumpets, chanterelles, and cepes hidden in the hills nearby, and I rubbed my hands together in anticipation while he also gave Loic all of the documents pertaining to maintenance on the house since they owned it. We were encouraged to go and contact the old lady who was the owner of the property before them and ask for more stories. They told us what they knew, and that was that. Three big clunky sets of keys were placed in my hand and I tucked them into my bag. Loic and I shook hands with everyone, and headed up into the hills.

When we got there, we made our way to the door through nettles and brambles. No chance of vitamin deficiency here with all of the nettles, I thought to myself! All of the delays meant that the house had been closed up for three months. The grass was very tall and everything overgrown. We decided to take a peek in the garden before we went in. I was almost afraid to look but a feeling of joy swept me up when I looked up into the branches at the towering tree next to the house - laden with fruit. We rushed to the tree, each picked one, bit into it, and shared a nice long hug. They are nice tart cooking apples.



My first mission was to get the fire started. I removed the covering that the previous owners had left on the stove. A very rusty stove, but sound. The rust didn't come as a surprise to me, I'd been doing some research about how to restore it. Mother Earth News had a great article that I studied with interest before the date to sign came. We were to do as the chimney sweep had instructed, to light it up, see how things went. This was a bit scary to me, with all of the warnings out there to have your chimney carefully swept before lighting any fire. It didn't take long to figure out which chamber to light the fire in, what the knobs and thingies did. There was a note written on the wall that said we had to fill up the reservoir with water before using the stove, which I am thankful for.

Our first meal

Loic went to get things from the car. I filled the reservoir with a couple of buckets of water and got some wood, kindling, and paper. I remembered the day a baby owl flopped into our neighbors' house when they lit the first fire of the season one day when I was a kid. In Alsace, it looked like the storks made their nests over peoples' chimneys! Although our chimney had a little roof built over it, you might not know it if there was something living in there.

Heating the potatoes for the raclette

It was quite important to me to get the chimney swept, but not so urgent for the chimney sweep. He didn't seem concerned about our chimney exploding or our house burning down whatsoever. He said "light a fire, and see what kind of draw you get". This means what kind of passage of air up into the chimney when the fire is lit. If the house fills with smoke, put it out, and call the chimney sweep. If not, maybe he'll get around to sweeping it in December. I lit a fire with some paper and kindling, and watched as the smoke didn't come up into the house, but was mysteriously drawn in an efficient stream into the center of the stove. I sent Loic out to look. Do we have smoke? Yes, we have smoke! I threw on a log and soon we had a nice fire burning very well. The stove warmed up the room in an instant. I had thought the wok might fit nicely on the hole left when you remove the burner, and I was right. It was the perfect way to cook. There are two temperatures, one for each sized hole, and then a million different possibilities, depending on how you get the fire going.

That's me with the power tool. Mother Earth News gave me courage. I will not be starting a business.

We warmed ourselves with the rusty old stove until Sunday morning. I set up my hammock near the stove Saturday night and listened to her breathe like a sleeping baby. We decided to let the fire die completely once the sun was up and then I put in some elbow grease to get her gleaming and proud again. My love for power tools is something that Loic will never understand, just as I do not understand his aversion to them. We divy the tasks accordingly. I got to have the fun of finding the right brush for the drill beforehand, and all the fun of finding the right stove polish. I don't want to bore you will all the stuff we were doing around the house. But I do want to show you how the stove turned out. That's one happy stove, isn't it? Now in addition to finding a name for the house, we have to find a name for the stove.

Before and after refurbishing the stove myself.

The happy stove.

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow morning we have to be ready just too early to be real. I have been making lists, getting supplies all week, I've been doing these little mental walk-throughs of the things we are going to accomplish, trying to imagine timeframes and such.

Loic doesn't want to load the car before we leave. He wants to get up a 5am and load the car then, because he thinks that thieves will break in and steal our garage sale second hand accumulated country house stuff between the hours of midnight and 7am on a Thursday evening. That's fine with me. Although I would have preferred to load the car tonight. Because we have to leave early, we have to drive an hour and a half.


We have an appointment with the notaire, nice and early. A notaire is a little bit like a lawyer here, but they specialize in real estate and questions of heritage. There are good notaries and bad ones, something we realized when we ran into the one who is handling this transaction. Our last transaction went impeccably smoothly. This one... Let's just say there have been some silly delays, but tomorrow, it's going to happen.

We will sign the papers, and then the country house will finally be ours. We will go to the house, break open the Champagne, and pour it into the glasses we've packed just for the occasion.

This is going to be the place we escape to. You know, one of those places where we can cook an old hen in a pot for three hours on the wood fueled cast iron stove, and do nothing but read, gather wild herbs, or go for a walk while we're waiting for the old hen to cook. It will be the place where our skis will be hanging in the kitchen and we can just put them outside and glide out into the Alpine countryside during the winter. We'll ladle broth from an old hen over hand yanked spuds kept in a bin and pour a nice glass of local wine. Lamplight, candle light, who knows. Maybe we'll be able to concentrate here. This is the kind of place where things will be noted in writing. By hand. Drawings will be made. Paintings. Things will be constructed with wood. This is in stark contrast to our city home.

Tumbling Whole

Reading the headlines: Stocks sink after government bailout... I have been in a thoughtful mood today. Something's happening. Something already happened. I remember feeling something like this, the world shifting.

Looking to the present, I'm so happy that my friends and family are well. We have bacon. We have beans. We have the Art Tatum Village Vanguard recordings to help us along shelling the beans, and Mama's voice soothing me over the line in her instructive way about the cycles of projects and how we must be prepared to embrace new frontiers.

We have autumn winds blowing the hair akimbo with leaves and cool weather prompting the trench coat and a darker shade of lipstick again. We have Lolo immersed in his formulas, the toasty smell of the heat turned on again to come home to, a neighbor knocking at the door asking for an onion. We have visits with Barbara and Stephane's second girl just at the beginning of an expansive bloom into girlhood. Wisdom and innocence at the same time. Far reaches to a precarious sociability followed by her quick grasp for the pacifier she can't let go of quite yet. We have these things to remind us.

We have the good butcher developing a cough, something that reminds me to cook the meat properly. We have various poultry necks at 40 cents a pound with which I made stock on Sunday to pour over the fresh shelled coco beans that we will enjoy tonight. The boys at the Halle on my block waving to me with a twinkle in their eyes well before I've even contemplated what's for sale today. I feel lucky to be a part of this living web.

As each recipe represents a moment, an evening, a season, we can rely on this - the short cycles of our lives - to bring us back to the present. These recipes link us one season after another to life, no matter what today's news brings. It is very important to record these moments while they tumble whole to our senses. I appreciate them, even as I call to mind today's changes. I suppose this means I am growing up.

A Pêche de Vigne and Verbena Cream Tarte

The month of September brings plenty of opportunity for reigning in habits that have gone astray, like making pie all the time. Just kidding. You know, I haven't been making pies because I have been on a diet since April, the revolutionary LA LA LA LA I can't hear you diet. The diet is only temporary, but the other habits like daily exercise, eating lots and lots of simply prepared vegetables, and special treats every once in a while instead of whenever the spirit strikes me are all sustainable ones I am working hard to hold on to.

Before we went visiting and touring in August, I was meeting weekly with my belle sœur (sister-in-law) Anne for lunch. She is a hat designer. We both live in Lyon now, and as time goes by we both realize that it would be a shame not to profit fully from this cross in our paths. She is still relatively itinerant, in her mid 20s. Hopefully we will always live close to one another, but you never know what life can bring. We know this because Aude's trajectory took her to the Auvergne where they have settled down near Seb's mother. Even if Aude and Seb are still within a few hours' drive from us, it takes an effort to meet now. It was very easy when we were all in Lyon, but we really didn't meet enough. Anne and I don't want to regret not having fully enjoyed one another now, so we've made it a point to meet, even just the two of us.

We called and asked Anne and Greg to come for dinner, and we hadn't thought about dessert. Being late Sunday afternoon, swinging by the bakery to choose something just for them was out of the question, so I fell back on the old standby to make a kitchen table tarte with what I had on hand. A fresh bunch of verbena, 2 pêche de vignes that we'd got from a producer in the Coteaux des Lyonnais, and 2 little yellow peaches. This year the fruits are very red!



There is no recipe. You make a pâte brisée. Of course you probably have your favorite pie crust. It doesn't have to be a sweet one. Fresh verbena makes a wonderful syrup, for which I gave you instructions here. A 1/2 cup of this syrup mixed with about 60 grams of farm fresh cream cheese (aka cream cheese) and an egg was all I needed to fill in nicely when we ran out of fruit.

I sprinkled the peaches with sugar and placed the tarte in a nice hot oven until the top was brown. The big challenge is to stay away from it today. I enjoyed a sliver, and they had seconds, and the remaining pie after Loic had his share for breakfast is wrapped in foil on the kitchen table. I am noting the marriage of verbena and peach in my kitchen notebook. It is something I will do again, perhaps next time poaching the peaches in verbena syrup and serving them cold with chantilly.

Home Again, Home Again

Jiggety Jig.

Strasbourg in Particular

It was so satisfying to finally be eating in Strasbourg after having spent a good deal of time there in my mind when I translated the Pudlo guide. (Just to let you know I was paid already for my culinary translation work, and I don't get any kind of commission on the sales of the guide.) I was drooling the whole time, and I spent a whole lot of time researching the local patois - in the food language. I realized that although the ancient local dialects spoken in all of the different regions of France are quickly falling out of use, these tongues remain vibrantly alive in the food. For this reason it is very important to keep local food traditions going, and preserve them. It's more than just what people like to eat, but the whole cultural identity of a region is bound up in its food language. I simply adored looking at Strasbourg with this perspective in mind. My work added depth to my own vision as I made my way about. I was so thankful for having done it. Never stop learning and taking projects because you find them interesting. These are the ones that will serve you the most in the end.

It was difficult to choose from Pudlo's picks in Strasbourg because they all sounded so good, but I was happy with every one I tried. And this is what I want in a guide. When I am traveling, I do not want to have to sift through positive and negative reviews. I want a list of places to go. For lunches, instead of making reservations, I just went to the places I recognized from his picks and was only turned away for lack of seating at one very popular place. What I did was read everything before setting out initially, retaining a kind of sketchy outline in my mind of what to look out for while walking through town. While out walking, I did recognize at least a half dozen places just in the thick of things, and when lunchtime rolled around I had ideas for several places to go.



The famous French dish called bouchées à la reine is common in many restaurants in Strasbourg, since that whole class of pastry that includes the vol-au-vent originates in the region. It was a great place to try the garnished dish in the local style which can be quite beautiful. The shells are for sale in the boulangeries as well, ready to use at home.



Some restaurants make their own mini-pretzels and put them out with the apero, and a lot of bakeries had their house versions.



There is a restaurant in a building that dates back to the 1500s with a carved facade I could have stared at for days and I loved the cathedral. You can see all of these images in larger format by clicking on them.

The Alsace Wine Route

Each bee has its own flower.

Touring along Alsace's wine route was lots of fun. The route was well marked and wound through little picturesque villages with vineyards around every turn, where you could stop, taste, and buy. (they have spittoons for the drivers!) By the time we got home, the car was full of cases of wine, and we now have more Riesling, Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer in the cave than we'll ever be able to drink. I guess we'll have to have a party! The route was well marked, and the little towns, one after the other, were very pretty. Thanks to Pudlo, comfortable affordable inns along the way were easy to locate, and we made special stops for charcuterie, stopped for the famous fresh troute, tarte flambée, matelote, even a carp fish fry. Know that if you ever drive a Renault Clio while touring in France, that the car is designed with the gourmand in mind. The A/C is sent in a circuit around the glove compartment, turning it into a little refrigerator, keeping the meats and cheeses we picked up along the way nice and cool.

Weddings and the Kougelhopf

A most extraordinary radio show was on the air while I nibbled on the kougelhopf in the car on the way home from Alsace. A documentary that has great sound mixing, with samples of sound cuts from all kinds of sources, very evocative and stimulating, full of imagery. This time, they were talking about French weddings.

People from different generations were being interviewed about their weddings. The old people recounted small affairs that had been arranged for such and such reasons, ceremonies conducted in the presence of 4 witnesses and a dinner with immediate family around the table. Then they talked to people who were married in the 60s, still in rather simple ways, small affairs when compared to some of the weddings we see today, but amplified in the number of guests or amount of wine. Then came the coverage of the wedding industry and the pressure that young people have these days to orchestrate these enormous receptions with elaborate meals and fine wines that in the past would never have taken place.

An invited sociologist theorized that today's generation have a distorted concept of what wedding traditions are, because like a telescope, they are looking to the past for stories, of which only the most exceptional were recorded. Much wedding tradition lore is embellished or exaggerated or framed in glowing terms. Even descriptions of humble events turn into family legends, as we all know. In the end they seem more fanciful than they really were. This is retained by today's generation, and the perfect small low stress affairs that were the norm in the past are left behind for large, romantic celebrations that are like enactments of imagined history. Several generations later, the exceptional lore begins to take over as the expected norm. Elaborate receptions, princess gowns, long veils and trains, creative themes, fussy craftwork in the favors, towering pieces montees, flowers costing thousands, etcetera.

A couple of years ago, at a vide grenier, I picked up a kougelhopf mould for a buck. I bought it because of that kougelhopf I had in Paris when I had just begun this blog. I was truly inspired by the experience. I got the mould home and began digging out recipes, and doing research. But every time I picked up the recipe for one, I just could not envision getting the same result. I kept putting it off, and putting it off, searching for the perfect recipe.

Some cousins par alliance from Alsace came to Aude's wedding with some kougelhopfs prepared by some aunt or another that had been sent along in the train. They had spent some time in a suitcase, and shifted from one place to another. Kougelhopf was originally prepared as wedding cake in Alsace. These special cakes were a symbolic home made gift. Everyone oohed and ahhed over these simple humble cakes and they were put out on the bare kitchen table during the family gathering the day after the wedding. I looked forward to tasting it, thinking about my initial experience. I was sorry not to have been able to appreciate it, because I really did want to like it. But it seemed unremarkable and plain to me, after that great Paris kougelhopf. I quietly reflected on this, as well as the recipes I had seen, and tucked it away for another day.

In Alsace, I tasted the kougelhopf fresh from a good bakery. Just to be sure, I also tasted another. And they were falling short of this original idea in my mind based on my first grand experience. They were more along the lines of the Aunt's kougelhopf. Not very sweet, subtle in their crumb, with just a whisper of flavor, you might even say ethereal once you start to understand it, whereas this kougelhopf I had in Paris was rich and dense and buttery above all else, with a strong heady dose of liquor of some kind. It wasn't until I was thinking about weddings that I realized it. My mind had been calibrated by a strange kind of legendary exception and not the rule. And I think, in retrospect, that maybe the Alsacian kougelhopf, with its particular aspect and flavor, may have somehow been telescoped into something completely different by the time it reached Paris. I now have a better appreciation for the one sent along by the Alsacian aunt, and also these days I have a very precious tender memory of that moment I tied the bit of tulle ribbon in my hair in Los Angeles, when we got married secretly, before the vortex of the big fat wedding party 6 months later began to suck me in. I hope one day to try her recipe. Maybe I'll coat it with sugar and butter, Paris style. Then again, maybe I'll just serve it plain.

Cheese Pilgrimage: Munster

The main reason for my detour through the Vosges on the way up to Strasbourg was a pilgrimage to a certain valley there. Munster is to Alsace as St. Marcellin is to the Lyonnais region, ubiquitous. In many restaurants, it is the only cheese served. Munster, when quite ripe, can be the stinkiest cheese in the whole world. If you don't agree with me, you have never confronted a ripe Munster. It outranks Epoisses in the sheer vulgarity of the odors that it can emanate, opening with a strong whiff of ripe pointe shoes, drifting dangerously close to intruding intimate female perfumes, and closing with a refrain of stale Russian cigarettes. The flavor? Perfect, buttery, mild and staid in a simple counterpoint to the volatility of its ether, gorgeous when paired with toasted little cumin seeds, otherwise known as carvi in France. When Loic and I were dating many years ago, he bought a wedge of Munster from a famous fromagerie in Paris and I was so brutalized by the smell that I made him remove it from his home. I look back on those days with a smile. I was a delicate flower, just a cheese virgin.



Today I still harbor a certain affinity to a younger wedge of Munster, and to me, it is perfect when the inner core hasn't melted through, but that's just me. In the end it is a matter of personal choice. Don't let anybody tell you how to like your Munster. There is a great little restaurant in Strasbourg called Au Coin des Pucelles that does a nice plate of Munster in various stages of affinage for someone who might want to taste it in its different forms, as well serving forth a humble but glorious Munster gratin, complete with all of the trappings of a tartiflette, mountain food at its best. Loïc reminisces about hiking through the Vosges and enjoying this dish at the refuges there.