The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux - Samantha Verant Page 0,35
to her knees and lifted the board, chucking it to the side. “Et voilà,” she said, her breath heavy. “Here are your grandmother’s kitchen notebooks. Her recipe for the daube should be in one of these. I’m just not sure which one.”
After struggling with their weight, Clothilde handed me around twenty dark brown leather-bound notebooks tied with red leather cords. They were beautiful, like pieces of fine art, splattered with water spots and food stains.
“Why do you keep them hidden in the floor?”
“Because of the war—when the Germans occupied northern and western France. Your grand-mère’s family was from Bordeaux, and although she was just a young girl of five years old, she remembers her mother hiding valuables to keep them safe.” Clothilde wrung her hands. “It was a difficult time, one she doesn’t like talking about.”
“She doesn’t like talking about a lot of things,” I said. “Especially my mother.”
“As I said, je m’occupe de mes oignons,” she said, forcing a nervous smile. She patted a notebook. “Alors, your grandmother painstakingly wrote all of her recipes down for well over twenty years. And we don’t want anything to happen to them now, do we?”
“Why are you talking about her as if she’s already gone?” I said, and Clothilde’s face crumpled. My heart dropped into my stomach. I’d made a major faux pas and could only backpedal after being so rude to Clothilde. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”
“I understand. You’re worried about her. I am, too, and I pray every day she’ll pull through. Now that you’re back, you’ve given her something to fight for. More than anything, she wants to spend time with you,” she said, blinking back her tears. “Open the notebooks, ma puce. Like your grandmother said, these notebooks are part of your heritage.”
With shaky hands, I opened up one of the notebooks and thumbed through the creamy pages filled with my grandmother’s beautiful handwriting to find no recipes, but rather names, dates, and what people ate, what they liked and didn’t like. I let out a gasp when I found my name. Pages upon pages were filled with mostly likes and a few dislikes. I hated tête de veau (boiled cow brain), and who wouldn’t, but loved escargots in a creamy garlic, butter, and parsley sauce. The word “cerise” was underlined four times, along with the words “Ma petite-fille Sophie, elle aime n’importe quoi avec les cerises.” Cherries. I still loved them.
My visits to Champvert always coincided with cherry season, and Grand-mère Odette always made sure a bowl of plump black cherries sat in front of me. When I wasn’t tasting one of her wonderful creations, I’d stuff one cherry after another into my eager mouth and spit the pits into a bowl, reveling in the juicy and sweet explosions hitting my tongue. As she whisked the batter for her clafoutis, stating how important it was to keep the pits in the cherries or the dessert would lose its nutty flavor, she’d tell me about some of her other recipes, the ingredients rolling off her tongue like a new exotic language I wanted to learn every word of. Saffron, nutmeg, coriander, paprika, and kumquat—what were these things, I wondered?
As I thumbed through the pages, I realized how dedicated my grandmother was to me and the other people surrounding her. To take the time to gather such information proved it. She wanted to make sure everybody was happy when they were under her roof and, more specifically, at her table. I placed my head in my hands, rubbing my temples. I traced my name with my finger, trying to burn Grand-mère’s loopy scrawl into my memory. Unlike her, my handwriting looked like chicken scratch. One thing we had in common, though, was the love of cooking.
The recipes I’d cooked as a child floated in my brain, like making succulent duck and cooking potatoes in duck fat—a standard in southwestern France. From chicken to sausage, pork loin to lamb, duck fat gave savory ingredients a silky feeling on the tongue. Again, the visions I was having transported me back in time, right to when I first tasted Grand-mère’s special duck-fat-drowned French fries. I’d been a goner ever since. After my palate exploded with joy, Rémi and I had run down to the lake, jumping right in, the cold water burbling over our heads in tiny waves.
“Those were the best French fries ever,” I’d said. “I can’t believe it.”