a little bit country p. I

[This is the first part of something I wrote when I vacationed with Annie and her granddaughters in the northwest of France last month, in a village called Crecy-sous-Ponthieu near the Baie de Somme. I never finished it, but I figure posting the first part will encourage/remind me to write the second...]

Funny how in some ways, everything is, more or less, the same wherever you go. Here I was in la France profond, Deep France, as Annie put it, as if one were talking about the South—eating eggs from chickens next door, heating our water on the stove, the surrounding fields green and expansive and dotted with horses, a rustic église around every corner—and somehow I still managed to find myself in an aisle of the local Shopi™, deciding if I wanted Mentos in fruit or classic. C’est comme ça.

That said, escaping to the French countryside for a week has been cathartic, in ways expected and not so expected. In sum, though, I can say it’s been like someone stuck a cotton swab inside me and cleaned out all the smog, cheap wine, 6a.m. metros, cigarette smoke, canned food [What would you rather have? Fabulous heels or fancy quiche, hm?] and other such less-romantic Parisian residue accumulating inside me for the past couple of months. It’s true—my perpetual and somewhat inexplicable cough and sore throat, never quite a cold, were gone after my first full day of fresh country air. Just what the doctor ordered.


But what’s to replace all that muck some Big Hand came and mopped out of me? Annie’s French home cooking, of course. The dregs of my semi-hedonistic lifestyle [or so I’d like to romanticize…I really hope you know me better than to pass my time in this city boozing and looking fashionable] have been replaced by fresh-caught sole fried in butter and garlic, zucchini and risotto with thick, sweet coquilles St. Jaques, bloody steak with fingerling potatoes fried with carrots and rosemary from the garden, thick slices of pillowy, crusty country loaves with hard, tangy mimolette or creamy, buttery chaussée aux moines. And all of this with butter, butter and more butter. Oh my god. Bread, with butter, then cheese over it. I bet your arteries just narrowed reading that. I don’t even know if I’ve ever spread butter on anything before. Maybe margarine. Maybe. But between my father’s endless, self-depricating neurotic banter at the dinner table at having eaten so much as a sliver of chicken skin, and, well, the fact that I try to eat healthily, butter has been a pariah in my diet. So given all of that, I’m grateful for my when-in-RomeFrance excuse. Because if not now, when?



I’m not kidding when I say this food is fresh. And I don’t mean fresh like you bought this from your yuppie Sunday farmer’s market, and oh-my-god-you-are-so-microbiotic-and-local, because, if you’re from a city like me, I’m sure that whatever you bought spent at least few hours in a truck to get to you. When we bought our seafood at the St. Valery marché, in front of me was the pecheur slicing the coquilles St. Jacques from their moving shells, and behind me was the sea in which they, along with two other kinds of fish we bought, had been minding their own business just a few hours ago. You want fresh and local? We bought our carrots, still covered in dirt, from a farmer with good prices but not many teeth. Hm. Maybe too fresh.

To be continued...