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
