Secrets Of A Lazy French Cook

By Marie-Morgane Le Moel

I ordered a kir. I had promised myself not to drink anything that night, in order to keep my mind clear and be able to sound intelligent in proper English, but my resolution had failed immediately. He was obviously as irritating as he had seemed the first time we had met. It was, as I would realise afterwards, irritation at first ... Tiens! When Marie, an adventurous French journalist, decides to try life as a foreign correspondent in Australia, it's a steep learning curve. How to get invited to the best election events, how to get a word in edgewise at press conferences when pushy Australian writers keep interrupting, and how to make new friends - especially when Immigration has firmly suggested your French-Canadian fiancé must go home. Luckily having a suitcase full of Maman's recipes helps when homesickness hits, and it turns out the pushy Australian writer loves her galette des rois ... But will Marie ever feel that she belongs in her adopted country You can take the girl out of France, but can you ever take France out of the girl
I ordered a kir. I had promised myself not to drink anything that night, in order to keep my mind clear and be able to sound intelligent in proper English, but my resolution had failed immediately. He was obviously as irritating as he had seemed the first time we had met. It was, as I would realise afterwards, irritation at first ... tiens! When Marie, an adventurous French journalist, decides to try life as a foreign correspondent in Australia, it's a steep learning curve. How to get invited to the best election events, how to get a word in edgewise at press conferences when pushy Australian writers keep interrupting, and how to make new friends - especially when Immigration has firmly suggested your French-Canadian fiance must go home. Luckily having a suitcase full of Maman's recipes helps when homesickness hits, and it turns out the pushy Australian writer loves her galette des rois ... But will Marie ever feel that she belongs in her adopted country? You can take the girl out of France, but can you ever take France out of the girl?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780730497936

Marie-Morgane Le Moel

Marie-Morgane Le Moël is the Australian correspondent for Le Monde, France’s leading newspaper, responsible for covering economic, political, social and environmental issues in Australia. She is also a contributor to Le Devoir, one of the principal French-speaking newspapers in Canada, and a correspondent for Radio France, the French national radio station; and RFI, France’s international radio station. Marie lives in Sydney with her Australian husband.

Book preview

CHAPITRE 1

Rabbit stories Roger’s way

Once again Benoît had lined the kids up against the wall; once again we were going to experience his peculiar idea of entertainment. My uncle, a thirty-year-old sociologist sporting a beard only a Frenchman can pull off without looking like a pervert, knew how to deal with other people’s kids. And as usual on Sundays at my grandparents’, we must have shown that we needed to be dealt with.

‘Lie down, all of you, without making a noise,’ my well-mannered uncle ordered us — me, my twin brother and our cousin. (Anne, our elder sister, knowing the trick, had already disappeared.)

We obeyed, always eager to please an uncle who was so keen to explain what he would do to us if, by bad luck, we were his kids. That is, tie us down and leave us in the cellar until the next weekend.

‘This is the Dead Indians game,’ Benoît explained.

We grumbled. Playing the Dead Indians game was fun — for the first minute and a half.

‘I’m the white cowboy and you’re the dead Indians. The first one who moves loses and takes my place as the cowboy,’ Benoît said.

We lay down, waiting for the game to begin.

‘Now it’s starting. Any of you Navajo kids move and you become the white murderer cowboy.’

Of course, being the cowboy was far less interesting than being a dead Indian. Not that playing a dead Indian was that much fun either, but at least we could think of something else while waiting it out.

We lay there for a few minutes. Soon enough, Pierre, my twin, sneezed.

‘Pierre, you’re the cowboy,’ Benoît said.

‘Pierre, you did it on purpose!’ I shouted.

‘Pierre, you oways loss,’ my cousin, then too small to know how to speak properly, chimed in.

‘Shush. Pierre is in charge, guys. Don’t move, don’t talk. As for me, I’m now very officially going to leave you to have an apéritif.’ And off Benoît went, smiling at his old trick which always seemed to work.

There I was on the floor, wondering how long we would have to wait until my cowboy twin decided it was time to go and eat. Pierre was very persistent at this game and loved being a cowboy. I guess it must have compensated for the fact that we were deprived of toy guns at home, and it also gave him a sense of what it would have been like to live in a family where war games were allowed.

In the living room, I could hear the laughter of my mother and her sisters. In the kitchen, Roger, my grandfather, was bickering with his wife, Claire. We knew all too well that Sunday lunch was a bad time to talk to Roger, especially today, because Roger was in the middle of making a rabbit dish. Mustard rabbit, one of his favourites. It was a time for focus in the kitchen and kids weren’t welcome.

Roger loved food. He was a baker. Or rather, Roger had trained to become a baker before World War II. He would have become one if a certain man with a narrow moustache, somewhere in Bavaria, hadn’t decided it was time for his country to rule the world. So at twenty-two, instead of joining a bakery in a village in the Lorraine region which had been won back from the Germans only twenty years before — Roger had to join the army. He left behind his dreams, a warm tarte aux pommes and a piping hot weeping fiancée.

The fight didn’t last long — the troops were quickly defeated — but Roger was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. When he came back six years later his fiancée was still waiting for him. But the bakery had closed, so Roger decided to get married, begin a family as soon as possible and forget about his baker’s dream, instead working in the local factory.

Fortunately for the family, Roger still had a taste for cooking, which he employed for delicious Sunday lunches. Thirty-five years later, however, he still had an apprehension of Germans.

‘But Papa, things have changed. Of course the kids are going to learn German at school,’ my mother Madeleine would say.

‘Madeleine, don’t talk about the Boche to me,’ Roger would reply. Les Boches would always be the way Roger talked about the Germans. They were these strange neighbours we had, blond with dangerous looks, 150 kilometres away. It hadn’t changed and never would. Fortunately, Roger didn’t know that one of his granddaughters had an invisible friend called Franz.

Franz had been born a bit earlier, when I was watching an old movie, Sissi — The Young Empress, starring the beautiful Romy Schneider. On the screen, Romy was as splendid as ever, but it was the Emperor, her companion, who left the stronger impression on me. Franz Joseph knew how to ride a horse, which was enough to seduce me as a five year old given that I wasn’t that picky yet. Soon an image of him took shape in my mind and he became Franz, my invisible friend.

Now, with a twin brother, one might think that I didn’t need an invisible friend. There is a tendency to believe that only lonely kids invent imaginary companions. This is because you don’t know what it means to live with a twin brother (since birth, which is often the case). Not only can one feel loneliness, but also intense competition from an early age. It begins on day one, when one has to shout louder than the other twin to get the milk bottle first. It continues at seven months, when one has to very quickly stand up and try to walk, in order to get the applause of one’s mother first. And still at twelve months, when you’re already reciting the alphabet in case your brother tries to impress your parents before you. By age three, one knows how to distinguish a Romanesque cathedral from a Baroque one, and so on. Thus by the time we had reached the age of five, Pierre and I had already had thousands of rivalry battles that nobody but twins would be aware of. When Franz finally arrived in my life, he was a breath of much needed fresh air.

Franz had plenty of things Pierre didn’t have. Firstly, he was 1.8 metres tall, when Pierre was hardly a metre. Secondly, he was blond, while Pierre had a brown bob typical of the early 1980s fashion for hippy kids. Franz knew how to ride horses — always white and galloping — while Pierre was running behind me in his slippers. In addition, Franz was sweet and tender, while Pierre and I would spend our days trying to bite each other. Franz was my best friend ever and even if he was vaguely German, I wasn’t going to let him go so easily. My first year at school I would spend breaks walking in the courtyard, talking to him, while my mother worried she might have given birth to an antisocial kid. Meanwhile, Pierre would be playing with the other kids, winning all the marbles.

So here we were, lying on the floor on a Sunday, waiting for the cowboy to get bored.

‘Are you all right, my sweetheart?’ Franz asked.

‘Yes Franz, I’m fine. Only it’s a little bit boring, the Dead Indians game. Maybe we could go somewhere together?’

‘Just wait my little flower. I’m asking the guards to bring us a horse.’

‘Oh, can we take the beautiful Rosa, the horse we rode the last time?’

‘Whatever you like, my life. Let’s take Rosa and we’ll ask her to carry us to my castle in the Black Forest.’

‘The one with the chandeliers and the marble fountains full of Coca-Cola, and the hundred servants who cook only chocolate cakes for dinner?’

‘Yes, my little —’

‘Mariiiiiiiiieeee, you’ve just moved! You’re finished. You’re the cowboy! I win!’ Pierre roared suddenly. My dream was shattered. Franz was gone in a second, replaced by the grimacing face of my twin. I had to become the cowboy now.

Fortunately, I could hear my mother calling for us: ‘A table, les enfants.’ I had been saved for this time. But, as it turned out, it was like falling from the clutches of Charybdis to those of Scylla.

We took our places around the large table. Roger was sitting next to Claire. Then there was Odile, Benoît’s wife. My other aunt, Françoise, always happy to lighten up the atmosphere with a joke. Her husband, smoking a pipe seriously. Gérard, my father, smoking his pipe similarly seriously. Madeleine. My cousin. Pierre et Anne.

The starter, typical of the Lorraine region, was a pâté en croûte (pâté baked in a crust): crispy on the outside, melting on the inside. As they ate, the adults kept exchanging their views about the first years in power of our president, François Mitterrand. They all had drunk numerous bottles of champagne two years earlier, in 1981, when the socialist candidate had been elected. Now they still thought Mitterrand was the best option, but couldn’t agree on some of his legislation.

In the middle of this topic, the main course arrived, carried with great pride by Roger. The steaming dish was exhaling delicious vapours, and we instinctively picked up our forks and knives. That is, until Roger turned towards us kids with a facetious smile.

‘Hey kids, you know how I did this?’

‘In the oven?’ Pierre tried.

‘Yes, but before, you know what I did?’

Around us, our parents started to shift on their seats, clearly not at ease with the turn of the discussion.

‘It was a rabbit,’ Roger prompted.

‘Ah …’ Until then, we hadn’t really thought about the rabbit aspect of it.

‘You remember the rabbit I bought at the market the other day? I told you on the phone …’

‘No, grand-père, not this rabbit,’ Anne said.

‘Yes, it had a fluffy white coat and big teeth.’

‘You said you called it Lucien and would keep it.’

‘Yes, well, kids, I kept it until now …’

‘What happened?’ my sister gasped, already aware of the dire truth looming.

‘Yesterday morning, I went to the garden, took Lucien the rabbit by its long ears —’

‘Grand-père, you didn’t do that!’ Anne cried.

‘— and I cut its throat very quickly. It didn’t suffer at all.’

‘Papa, why are you saying that to the kids? They’ll never eat it now!’ Madeleine interfered.

‘Because they need to know the harsh realities of life, Madeleine. Otherwise they don’t even know what they’re eating, so how could they appreciate it?’

We looked down at Lucien the rabbit on the dish. We couldn’t see its ears any more, nor any trace of its fur. We hadn’t even been formally introduced, but it was suddenly as if we had known Lucien for years. We thought about what would have happened if only we had realised. Instead of playing Dead Indians, we might have been able to save its life. We could have sneaked it into our car and kept it safely at home, where none of my parents had a long cutting knife. But instead, while we were enjoying the innocence of childhood, Lucien was dying under Roger’s steel will.

Claire began serving the plates. My little cousin was crying, while our parents were clearly upset. On my plate lay a piece of Lucien covered in a mustard-coloured sauce. Anne jumped up from her seat and went outside, where she’d stay until the end of the afternoon. Roger plunged his fork into his plate, oblivious to the silence around him.

‘Les enfants, just have the vegetables if you want,’ Madeleine suggested, for once forgetting her rule of kids eating everything on their plate.

Painfully I ate my vegetables, aware they were immersed in Lucien’s remnants. It wasn’t until the dessert arrived, thirty minutes later, that we began to feel better.

Nothing, not even Lucien’s memory, could deter us from our grand-père’s tarte tatin.

TARTE TATIN

(Upside-down apple pie)

Ah, the Tatin sisters. If they hadn’t made a mistake, nobody would remember them. According to the legend, in the nineteenth century the Tatin sisters, Stéphanie and Caroline, had a restaurant in the village of Lamotte-Beuvron, in the Sologne region, that was very popular with the locals. The story goes that one Sunday as she was preparing an apple tart, Caroline had forgotten it in the oven and let it burn. Instead of throwing it away, she kept the caramelised apples, covered them with pastry, and put the tart back in the oven. In another version, Caroline had forgotten to put the pastry in and had to add it at the end. Whatever the reason behind the recipe, the idea was successful: the locals loved the new tart, and it became the famous tarte tatin. The sisters retired at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their former hotel-restaurant then became the ‘Hotel Tatin’.

WHAT YOU NEED (serves 6)

8 apples

150 g butter

150 g sugar

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

250 g shortcrust pastry (If you’re too lazy to make the pastry yourself, buy it in the frozen section of the supermarket. Read the pack if you don’t know what ‘shortcrust’ is. But beware: you’ll still need to roll out the pastry, with a little bit of flour on a flat surface, so that it takes the right shape)

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR HANDS

Preheat the oven to 180°C. (But first remove anything left in the oven the night before that might smell; for example, fat from chops, or old fries.)

Peel the apples and cut them into quarters (remove their cores, of course). This operation takes some patience, but one soon gets used to cutting apples. Put the peeled apple quarters on a plate.

Put a saucepan on the flame and add the butter and sugar. You are now making ‘caramel’. Don’t stir. When the mixture starts getting brownish, take it off the heat and pour into the tart pan. Do it quickly, as once off the flame the caramel will harden and become impossible to pour.

Next, arrange the apple quarters on top of the caramel, very close together in a rosette pattern. Don’t worry if your pattern’s not perfect! Sprinkle the cinnamon and vanilla sugar on top.

Then comes the pastry! Cover the apples with it, pressing on the edges. Trim the edges.

Bake in the oven for 35–40 minutes.

Do whatever you wish while waiting — a crossword? read a magazine? — but don’t forget to have a look in the oven from time to time. When the pastry has turned golden and crusty, it is ready. Remove the tart from the oven.

Here comes the fun part: turn the tart upside down onto a plate. (Don’t forget to use gloves to protect your hands before this perilous operation, as the tart pan is still very hot.) Congratulations! It is done. The Tatin sisters have worked their magic once again.

MADELEINE’S TIPS

You can also make the caramel by mixing the butter and sugar in the tart pan and placing it in the oven until it gets brownish. Whichever way you do it, don’t let the caramel burn (get too dark!). Golden Delicious or Royal Gala apples, among other types, will do. Serve with vanilla ice cream or just cream.

WHAT TO DRINK: Cider or just water.

CHAPITRE 2

Biscuits sablés in times

of harshness

Having a twin wasn’t always that difficult. When Pierre wasn’t playing the cowboy, trying to monitor my every move, he was a good companion. Especially as he had no sense of wickedness, and was impermeable to envy and brutality. I wasn’t. In the gene lottery, I had received an ability to test my family’s patience and a voice which could reach such high decibels that my parents often had to reassure the neighbours that they weren’t murdering their daughter. This ability of mine was quite convenient and would be of much use, as will be seen later in this chapter.

But for my parents, Gérard and Madeleine, dealing with me was a difficult thing, a bit like choosing to become a priest would be for a womaniser, or becoming a nun for an exotic dancer. Fortunately, Pierre was gentle and mild, which made us the perfect match: we complemented each other. We didn’t have a choice; we had to share everything: our dolls; our Playmobil; our Lego. And one elder sister who was clearly unimpressed by her parents’ surprise kids.

In those magic times of childhood, Pierre would do everything I said, or almost. If I had known it wouldn’t last forever, I would probably have tried harder to convince him to take the first train to Germany or Belgium — or even worse, cold England — while I was enjoying my parents’ full attention.

Early on a Sunday morning, while everybody else was asleep, we would spend our time looking through the bathroom cupboard, which was then forbidden. This cupboard was a source of constant delight, full of unknown medicine. In my pyjamas, I lay in bed like a queen, asking Pierre to assist me: ‘Pierre, can you get up and find something fun to do?’

‘Okay, Marie, I’m going now,’ my brother said, still half asleep.

Five minutes later, the little boy came back, a bottle of coughing syrup in his hand.

‘What about this?’ he asked, his eyes hopeful.

‘Well, I’m sure it’s delicious. Exquisite. Exquisitely delicious. It must make you grow up faster, and I’m sure it tastes like chocolate. Taste it first, though.’

Pierre took a small gulp and grimaced. ‘I hate it.’ He looked at his feet. ‘And I’m still the same height!’ he complained.

‘Then keep it for yourself, you dwarf. Can you go back and find something more interesting please, I’m getting bored now.’ Life was definitely good then.

Another five minutes later, Pierre came back with bandages of all colours. ‘What about this?’

‘Yes, that’s better. I’ll put them on you, you’ll look like a mummy. You’ll look like Toutankhamon.’

Pierre’s face covered with sterile strips, I still felt a bit bored. ‘Pierre, can you go back? Mummies aren’t that exciting when there’s no pyramid.’

Yet another five minutes later, my twin returned. ‘I just found these.’ He produced some little blue plastic objects with curved tips. Razors. Now things were getting interesting indeed.

‘Okay, so we’ll pretend you’re shaving your legs because you’re a cyclist, and you need to be shaven to pedal faster and win the Tour de France. Just like Laurent Fignon,’ I encouraged my brother. In 1984, the Tour de France had been won for the second year in a row by Fignon, a man we thus held as a hero.

‘But I don’t want to shave my legs! I’m Toutankhamon, not a cyclist. Egyptian mummies don’t have bikes anyway,’ he protested. ‘They have camels.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know. And Egyptians have hair. I’m Toutankhamon. Do it on your leg. You’re the cyclist.’

‘Okay, we’ll both do it,’ I proposed, my confidence a bit shaken.

He agreed. Slowly we took the plastic razors and began to stroke our legs with them lightly.

‘It’s not working,’ Pierre said.

I could see it: no hair was going away. ‘Okay, then let’s push harder.’ And I pressed the razor into my skin.

Soon my leg began to bleed. So did Pierre’s.

‘What did you do? We’re going to die now!’ I screamed at my brother, and ran to my parents’ bedroom to stretch my bleeding leg under my mother’s nose.

‘Maman! Pierre has been playing with papa’s razors, we’re going to go to hell,’ I cried.

Pierre arrived right behind me, crying as well, his bandages coming off a bit, one of them dangling over his left eye. ‘It’s not true, Maman. She said we would win the Tour de France.’

‘Mon dieu, les enfants, how can you be so silly? I’ve always told you never to go to the bathroom cupboard,’ Madeleine protested.

‘Maman, I can’t sleep because of these idiots!’ Anne had arrived. ‘Why did you have them? We could have had a beautiful dog instead!’

Gérard, slowly waking up, opened his eyes and saw before him two bleeding kids and one exhausted girl. ‘Les enfants, it’s Sunday morning; can’t you just lie down and give me a rest until 7 am?’

After Madeleine took care of our scratches, we were grounded for the rest of the morning in our room. Pierre looked at me, eager to bury the war axe. ‘You’d be a great cyclist,’ he said.

‘Thanks. You’d be a great mummy. Next time we’ll put more bandages on you,’ I answered.

The peace treaty was signed, celebrated with a small gulp of the coughing syrup hidden under Pierre’s bed.

Through endless discoveries, Pierre and I were always together — until we were eight. At home or at school.

In France, kids go to the maternelle, kindergarden school, at age three. There they are taught to sing, play and, occasionally, be sadistic towards smaller kids, while preparing for the challenges of the big school awaiting them at the age of six. Most of us would learn how to count and write down our first name.

The first year was remarkably uneventful. Our teacher, Mme Flammarion, was a marvellous woman, clearly happy to teach two well-adjusted twins (we kept our worst behaviour for home, as we had been instructed by Madeleine). The second year was similarly unremarkable, except that we both tasted live ants in the courtyard. Mme Marchet, another pleasant, middle-aged woman with spectacles and infinite patience, was keen to see us hanging on her every word.

The third year, though, we discovered that life wasn’t a bed of roses, and that the world was tougher than we would ever have expected. That year we had the terrible Mme Poussin. This Mme Poussin had a reputation: she was known to be a dragon with an acid tongue that spat fire at the kids. And her reputation was transmitted from generation to generation of shaking children. Anne had survived her, but could we?

‘If you’re not nice with her, she’ll put you in her closet and leave you there until you starve,’ my elder sister advised us.

‘If you don’t do exactly what she says, she’ll whip you with her nailed whip,’ her friend Anne-Marie added.

We were terrified. On the first school day, we stood, Pierre against me, trying to comfort each other until Mme Poussin arrived. There she was. A thin, nervous woman with brown short hair, a sharp voice and quick eyes which kept moving from one child to another as if looking for her next victim.

‘Bonjour les enfants. I’m Mme Poussin, and you have to call me Madame. I hope you’ll have a great year with me, and I’m sure you will. As long as you do what I say, you and I will be good friends,’ she explained, with a smile we interpreted as sardonic. It was going to be a long year.

But as we sat down in the classroom, I noticed him. A blond boy with beautiful blue eyes, just like those of Franz. I kept gazing as my heart

Reviews for Secrets Of A Lazy French Cook

[bakenquilt · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I really wanted to like this book, but I completely lost interest about halfway through. The recipes and the stories just didn't deliver for me.