On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town

The story of our adventure, our move to rue Tatin, began some thirteen years earlier, when I first went to live in Paris. Of course, back then I had no idea that I would fall hopelessly in love with Michael Loomis, then with France. Nor did I ever imagine longing so heartily for the French countryside, the French language, the thousands of things that make French life what it is, from dozens of varieties of bottled water to the sweet creamy butter. There wasn’t any way to know then how deeply and irreversibly seduced I would be by the markets, the restaurants, the French lifestyle that takes its cue from the meal and the table.

It was 1980. The suitcase was big, and it was heavy. It had everything I thought I would need for a year in Paris, including a little wire contraption that worked on a 220 current and would boil water instantly, my favourite earthenware Melitta coffee-maker and a Petit Robert French dictionary, the best I could find.

After months of planning, applying for and getting a student loan, packing and moving, I had finally arrived in Paris for a year’s experience as a stagiaire, or apprentice, at a cooking school for English-speaking students. It sounded like a dream – working all day at the school, taking cooking classes at night with French chefs, and living in Paris on top of it. I was beside myself with excitement. And fear. I didn’t know a soul. I had only been to Paris once before, for a short week when I was barely twenty. I had studied French for years in school but had never really spoken it.

Already concerned about just how I was going to make the $2500 loan I’d gotten stretch for a year, I decided on arrival to take the Métro rather than a cab from the airport to the city. That meant heaving the suitcase up and down stairs, through arcane turnstiles (all of which have been modernized since to accommodate luggage), in and out of Métro cars. It was several very rough hours before I arrived at the apartment where I was to stay with a young woman who had just started working at the cooking school and had offered me her spare bedroom. The apartment was in the ninth arrondissement, not far from Montmartre. I would stay there just long enough to find something of my own.

No one was at the apartment and I was in a hurry. I dropped my bags, shook myself out and immediately ran back out the door to re-negotiate the Métro and report for work.

The apprenticeship was set out in six-week stages, the first of which was that of school receptionist, which meant sitting behind a desk, answering the phone, greeting visitors and dealing with mounds of paperwork. My ideas of a romantic, food-filled year hadn’t included such stultifying work – the only thing that kept me going was peeking at the cooking classes going on in the adjacent room, and knowing that two nights a week I would join the other stagiaires for lessons.

I could hardly wait for the first class. When my work day was finished and the door to the street locked, I followed the other stagiaires to the kitchen. They explained the system to me, which sounded too good to be true. There was a list of perhaps a hundred required recipes to work through during the year, calculated to teach the basics of classic French cuisine, and to prepare us for the year-end exam. All we had to do before each class was to choose the recipes we wanted to work on, in a certain order which went from simple to complex. All of the ingredients would be ordered so that on the night of the class we had simply to run downstairs to the cave, or cellar, where they were kept, and bring them upstairs. We paired up to work, and kept the same partners throughout the year, in as much as everyone’s staggered schedule would allow.

Once I had traded my phone and typewriter for a chef’s knife and covered my street clothes with a long white apron, I was in heaven. Hours to cook, good company to cook with, fabulous ingredients. Never had I imagined produce so gorgeous, so intense in both appearance and flavour. Though my culinary education was relatively broad, from living in England and Germany while growing up, and from having a mother who was endlessly creative in the kitchen and rarely made the same dish twice, it was innate rather than sophisticated. My personal interest in cooking had come rather late in life – it wasn’t until I was in my last year of high school when both of my sisters, who seemed to spend hours in the kitchen baking cookies, were out of the house that I realized I had a passion for cooking. That year and all through college I cooked whenever I had free time. When I wasn’t cooking I was reading about it, planning my next meal, designing my next dinner party. After earning a degree in communications and working on newspapers and in public relations, it dawned on me that I could incorporate food into my professional life, which is what had led me to La Varenne. I wanted to be a food writer, but first I had to learn how to cook.