Strawberry Cream Pie
Appendix A: Planting and Maintenance
Appendix B: Pest and Disease Control
My spring front yard French vegetable garden fascinates and delights visitors. Lavender in bloom and rows of French lettuces fill some of the beds.
the french
vegetable
garden
On my first trip to France twenty-five years ago, my husband and I spent a whole day at Versailles; when we left the grounds in late afternoon, we were famished. In vain we looked for a cafe, and we were finally so desperate that even an ice cream vendor stationed outside a large park looked promising. I hopped out of the car, and when I asked for some ice cream in my high-school French, the vendor replied, "Grand Marnier ou Chartreuse, madame?" I must have looked puzzled, because he then said what sounded like "Esqueemoo pie Grand Marnier ou esqueemoo pie Chartreuse?" Taking a stab in the dark, I held up two fingers and said, "Grand Marnier." He handed me two Eskimo Pies, flavored with Grand Marnier. Only in France! I thought. The bars were out of this world, coated with a wonderful rich chocolate (not chocolate-flavored paraffin), made with buttery-smooth ice cream, and flavored with real Grand Marnier.
That vendor's ice-cream treat became a symbol to me of how much the French care about their food. On that trip, we couldn't eat enough onion soup filled with melted cheese and crispy garlic bread. We woke up to fabulous flaky croissants served with ripe, fragrant melons and wild strawberries. For dinner we savored leek and mussel soup, pheasant with a shallot cream sauce, breast of duck with a garnish of tiny filet beans, and celeriac mousse. Whether we were eating a snack or a full meal, in the city or the country, the food was superb. For a decade I had been cooking from Julia Child's recipes and loved them, but it wasn't until I went to France that I fully realized it was the culture her cookbook reflected, not Julia alone, that made the food so good.
Back in the early 1960s, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck, along with Julia's television program, first interested me in cooking. Were I to start someone cooking today, I would probably point him or her to the same book. What a great introduction to the basics this book is and what wonderful food it presents. When I pick up my dogeared copy, I can still tell which recipes I followed by running my hands over the pages and feeling the tiny splatters and crumbs. As I page through it, I read the penciled-in notes that say, "Fantastic, Robert loved it!" or "Needs more onions." Given our newlyweds' tight budget in those early days, my cooking was light on the meat and heavy on the vegetables, cheese, and eggs. I would make spinach soufflés, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, quiches with leeks or mushrooms, potatoes mashed with garlic, and, for a splurge, the spectacular molded dessert called Charlotte Malakoff, its almond butter cream layered with strawberries and homemade ladyfingers dipped in Grand Marnier.
Having mastered many French cooking techniques, I was on my way to enjoying great French food at home, but it wasn't until I had my own garden that I could duplicate many of the true flavors of France. Baby leeks in an herb vinaigrette, breakfast bowls of Alpine strawberries, round baby carrots in chervil butter, and numerous salads of baby greens—these wonderful treats and many more had all been previously out of reach. In the ensuing years I've grown hundreds of French vegetables and fruits and found that my cooking has gradually changed, with more emphasis on fresh vegetables and less on cream sauces, pastries, and complicated techniques. My garden style has changed as well. When I started vegetable gardening in the 1960s, I confined my garden to the mandatory rows of identical plants in an area relegated to only vegetables. Those who know me realize that early on I became frustrated with this genre and soon began interplanting my vegetables with herbs and flowers in what is called edible landscaping. It was not until I visited France, however, that I started to plant in small blocks with an emphasis on harvesting fresh instead of preserving much of my garden for winter use. Furthermore, after a soul-affirming trip to the definitive French vegetable garden at the Chateau de Villandry, I occasionally plant beds in decorative patterns and line the beds with defining borders of parsley, chamomile, or dwarf basil—all in the French manner.
Château de Villandry in the Loire Valley of France is probably the most beautiful "vegetable" garden in the world. Here chard, ornamental cabbages, and eggplants are the stars.
My research sources for this book were diverse. To reexperience a formal nineteenth-century kitchen garden like those I had seen in France, I visited the E. I. du Pont estate in Maryland. To gather the cooking information, I interviewed countless growers and cooking professionals about their favorite preparations and presentations. Emily Cohen, French-trained sous chef and onetime pastry chef at the San Benito House in Half Moon Bay, California, helped assemble and review cooking information. The late Tom McCombie, chef at Chez T.J.'s, in Mountain View, California, was of special help and contributed a number of recipes. And, of course, I drew on my visits to France and the many unforgettable meals I had there.
The French home garden is alive and well. A garden near St. Emilion displays chard, tomatoes, and cabbages.
Another further north has a classic fall garden of kale, chard, lettuces, leeks, and cabbages. My visit to the E. I.
Du Pont estate in Maryland gave me another opportunity to stroll through a French style parterre vegetable garden.
how to grow a french garden
Most of the vegetables and some of the herbs commonly used in France are popular in many parts of the world; however, there are some edibles I still associate primarily with France: celeriac, sorrel, shallots, haricots verts, and chervil. Further, while the same vegetable may be popular in many countries, French varieties are sometimes unique. For instance, the French are fond of white and purple varieties of asparagus and artichokes, round baby carrots, and waxy finger-ling potatoes. Both the familiar and the more decidedly French vegetables and varieties are covered in the "French Garden Encyclopedia" (page 25).
There are cultural techniques practiced in France that need special mention here as well. One is a somewhat different philosophy of harvesting, the second is the practice of growing baby salad greens
