The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,56
the mornings they woke to songbirds and church bells, then walked across the crunch of small white rocks in the courtyard of their bed and breakfast to one of the round green metal tables set under a linden tree. They poured thick black coffee from one silver pot and foaming hot milk from another into wide white cups that warmed their hands as they drank. They ate croissants that melted in their fingertips, scattering crumbs that disappeared among the rocks, only to be found by the song-birds after they had left.
They rented a small car and spent days exploring roads that wound like grapevines up through towns set on the tops of hills, their limestone houses drenched in wisteria, their shutters pale blues or violet or faded sage green, the smells of lunch and dinner slipping out of the windows like children, playing in narrow streets that curved and meandered and made no sense, if only you cared about where you were going, which they didn’t.
In tiny restaurants tucked into the corners of ancient, white towns, Helen and Carl made a pact, pulling out their dictionary, Carl vowing to try any dish they couldn’t find a translation for. To match his bravery, Helen shopped in the mornings at the tiny stores in their town and made fledging conversations with the fruit man until one day she triumphantly brought home a perfectly ripe melon, which they fed each other for lunch, its flesh warm and thick as the air.
It was hot in the afternoons, a heat that slammed through their open car windows and made them pant, pushed down on their shoulders and heads until finally they retreated to the shuttered cool of their room, to the delight of pounding water in their white-tiled shower, and finally to bed, where they stayed like teenagers until dinner. Only to do it the next day, and the next.
“This is why the Mediterraneans are so healthy,” Carl had remarked one night, as he stretched his long arms luxuriantly above his head.
“Oui,” she said, and smiled at him over a dish they had thought would be a warm casserole but was, in fact, a cool assemblage of pink and white meats. (Should they buy a larger dictionary? they pondered. No, in fact, they would not.)
And that night she dreamed in French.
THE CLASS STOOD around the large prep table, two cheerful red pots perched on stands at each end, heated by small flickering silver cans underneath. The smell of warming cheese and wine, mellowed with the heat, rose languorously toward their faces, and they all found themselves leaning forward, hypnotized by the smell and the soft bubbling below them. Lillian took a long, two-pronged fork and skewered a piece of baguette from the bowl nearby, dipping it in the simmering fondue and pulling it away, trailing a bridal veil of cheese, which she deftly wrapped around her fork in a swirling motion.
She chewed her prize thoughtfully and took a sip of white wine. “Perfect,” she declared.
Helen prepared a bite and placed the fork inside her mouth, the sharpness of the Gruyère and Emmenthaler mingling with the slight bite of the dry white wine and melting together into something softer, gentler, meeting up with the steady hand of bread supporting the whole confection. Hiding, almost hidden, so she had to take a second bite to be sure, was the playful kiss of cherry kirsch and a whisper of nutmeg.
“When you live with your senses, your gestures don’t need to be extravagant to be romantic. I had a student once who courted a woman with fondue made over a can of Sterno in the middle of a park,” Lillian noted.
“How did that go?” asked Ian, curious.
“Rather well,” Lillian noted casually, “he got the girl.”
The class clustered companionably around the two red pots; they fed themselves, they fed one another, stabbing their forks into the squares of bread and then submerging them in the fondue, laughing when the bread threatened to break free and their efforts at containment were not as graceful as Lillian’s.
“Sacrebleu!” Carl exclaimed. “It is escaping!”
“Let me help you, good man,” declared Isabelle, who only managed to push the bread from Carl’s fork down into the molten depths.
“Aren’t we supposed to kiss everyone when someone drops a bite?” Claire inquired.
“With food like this, who needs an excuse?” Carl responded, and took his wife in his arms to the admiring whistles of the rest of the class.
THEY WASHED their palates with white wine and sparkling water, and