fuoricitta

This is not just about breakfast. These are my options. What are my choices?

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:19:00 +0000

Options and choices play a very big role in all our lives. Perhaps this is more true today, when we have so many options available to us (at the mall or the supermarket, for instance, or on TV). For me the delicate part of the challenge has been to assemble as many good options as possible, and then choose, rather than settling for one good option among many bad or mediocre ones. Or, even worse, settling for the best of only bad options. This issue could easily result in many avenues of investigation, discussion and argument, covering topics ranging from one's career to what we contribute to the waste stream each day. But for this moment, I am going to examine my immediate choices, the ones looking me in the face right now, this morning.

It is my Saturday morning and I am composing my breakfast. Deirdre is still fast asleep, and I am going to leave her to it, as it is the most productive activity she can engage in at the moment, given the intensity of her last 2 weeks. They were my 2 weeks, too, but I am up, and I am antsy and a little hungry. So I take a moment to assess my supplies for breakfast.

I fry some bacon, enough for Deirdre to have some too, once she’s up. I perform one of my favorite activities: carefully preparing half a grapefruit, cutting around each section and then the perimeter. I fry one egg in the bacon fat, with salt and pepper. I put a small slice of apple cake—a happy discovery in the fridge—on the edge of the plate. And I have brewed another espresso, and sugared it a little. Everything is ready and perfect…

Oh, no, I have done wrong by the egg! As soon as it hits the pan, I know the fat is too hot, because it’s spitting badly. I turn off the heat immediately, and then scoop out the egg, somewhat crispy and blistered, after barely a minute. At least the yolk is still runny. But I stand there at the counter, looking at it on the plate, bright white with it’s golden brown edges, and I know that most of the white is simply too overcooked. It takes at least 30 seconds for me to accept this conclusion. An ‘overcooked’ fried egg I can take, as long as it still falls within what I have slowly come to recognize as the spectrum of acceptability in fried egg aesthetics. I used to think a perfectly fried egg never had any crustiness whatsoever, but was tender throughout with a very runny yolk, whether sunny-side up or over-easy. This is not one of those eggs; this really is overdone, and there’s no escaping this demoralizing truth. But that yolk is still so runny, and it’s leaking across the plate. There must be a way. I must salvage this breakfast! Too much has been invested to walk away now!

(Here, in this composition, is that cinematic moment when we see a closeup of the battered warrior, or the boxer, or the bully’s victim, face down on the dirt, or the mat, or the floor, already beaten, crumbling at the threshhold of defeat, and we see the bitter, self-loathing acceptance of the overwhelming power of their enemy in the exhausted and foggy eyes. We see them stop cold in the face of fate. And we see something change inside them. (You can use any and as many analogies as you want, and mix them as you wish.) In this moment of surrender we are witness to a subtle shift of the continents within the heart; the stirring of a slumbering beast; the birth of a revolution. We see, inside those eyes, the turning over of the final, relentless, flush-filling card; the re-loading of the empty gun; the last tumbler clicking softly, slowly, gently into alignment. An alignment of the planets. Impossibility reveals the merest mote of the possible, a flower of the only hope, a flicker of the flame among the smouldering coals. And we see them push themselves up again…Can you see it?! Where’s the phone? Get me the coast! No, wait, get me Rio, I want to talk to Jonathan Nossiter! (the never-say-die director of Mondovino, and author of newly released Liquid Memory, what I might call a dissertation on choices).)

Given my options, these are the choices I make: I taste a small bit of the white, then cut off most of it—the worst of it—and put it in the compost. I look at the plate some more, and I notice that the egg is now the same size as my slice of apple cake. I put the egg on top of the apple cake, and slide the cake into the puddle of yolk. I add the bacon to the plate, and the half of brilliantly red grapefruit. Ruby-red, snowy-white, golden-yellow and meaty-pink. These are the colors of my pennant of salvation, of redemption, of irresistible destiny.

I eat it standing at the counter, while the egg still has some heat in it, down the coffee, and put everything in the washer. Deal done. And good options salvaged out of a small maw of momentary crisis. My choice was not to give up.

And now that Deirdre is up, we can discuss our options for lunch.

re-opening night

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:57:00 +0000

You would think opening a restaurant again after a month of being closed might be a herculean effort—like opening a summer house after a long winter. Remove the white sheets from the furniture. Throw out the camphor moth balls. Open all the windows. A month in a restaurant’s life is very long, kind of like dog years. A month can make or break a place. But we have been lucky in where we set up shop. Our village of Woodstock is somewhat seasonal in nature. While we are a real town with real people who live, work, eat, and sleep full time there is a natural cycle to our year with the months of November and April being extremely quiet. Not only do visitors tend to skip these more homely months, but our locals tend to hunker down in November, staying at home to nest for winter, and depart for sunnier climes during school breaks or long weekends in April just to stop from going crazy from the long, Persephone months.

From the get-go, we have taken two breaks a year during these two still months. Owning and working a restaurant is tough and constant business, and while we love what we do, we need to break the hard rhythm of being on our feet a good portion of our days, provisioning, cooking, pouring, serving, washing, sweeping, talking, and smiling. When we are in full swing, there are no sick or personal days, there are no long weekends. For thirteen years now we have broken twice a year to rest and rejuvenate. For thirteen years, we have re-opened our restaurant twice a year.

In those early years, re-opening took almost a week. There was spring cleaning, even in winter: dining room, refrigerators and freezers, wine inventory, washing walls, waxing floors, purging. Then there would be several days of cooking to prepare the menu for opening night. In the early years, we also had a much larger space. Now, since we’ve moved upstairs into a tiny room in the building, a space that looks like it couldn’t physically exist when you look at the façade from the street, re-opening takes about three days. We are also older, and I hope at least a little wiser and efficient.

Since we were home a good portion of this past November, and we didn’t fully shut down the restaurant, re-opening took about two days—a record set. Two days to wax the floor, two days to inventory wine, two days to mix and age dough for bread, two days to make a soup, two days to sort the mail, two days to organize reservations, two days to decorate for the holidays (including a late night hike to cut pine boughs for the entrance to the restaurant, buffeted by a cold north wind and several falls in the snow as we haven’t gotten out our snow shoes yet). On the night before we re-open, we bring home the makings for gelato because we’ve forgotten the ingredients in our own refrigerator. It’s midnight, and we are lighting the fire and the house is redolent of warm dark chocolate and heavy cream simmering on the stove.

Two hours before opening, we are finishing arranging the fragrant white roses ordered for the occasion, stringing the white holiday lights around the door, inventorying the four cases of new wines arrived at mid-day—a bright, fizzy Reisling from Lombardia that I set to chill; an obscure Lacrima di Morro, heavy with the red scents of roses, bitter orange and peach; finalizing and printing menus. The soup is made from cabbage culled from our garden and our orchard’s apples, elegant and brothy. The little hand-rolled polpettine, or meatballs, are made from local ground pork, lamb, and venison. We have forgotten the stash of dried currants in our home kitchen, so Caleb improvises with a sauce of wine and raisins. We rejuvenate the cured white matsutake mushrooms brought to us by the wild-gatherers Les and Nova for a special pizza. Sometimes we cannot help but be seduced by the exotic or childhood memories, and we have gotten a bowl full of persimmons to slice like tomato and serve on a soft local chevre and season with salt and pepper and a pungent and green olive oil. I used to eat persimmons as a child: we had a tree over our driveway and they would fall mercilessly in the late autumn. There is the chocolate gelato, and a puree made from our apples served with fresh yogurt and honey.

At six o’clock, the candles on the tables and bar are lighted, the soup is simmering, and the door opens…..

--Deirdre

thanksgiving memory redux

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:37:00 +0000

Twice a year, we would have two very formal meals at my house: Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. My grandparents always came for Thanksgiving-- my father’s mother, and my mother’s parents. We would add all the leaves to the dining table because that would make us nine for dinner. We ate in our dining room every night as a family, and my mother loved the trappings of a good table, so we always ate off of good china. But at Thanksgiving, the table would be set with a long, heavy white linen table cloth with embroidered linen napkins cleaned and pressed every year by a service provided at the local sanitarium which gave those less fortunate than us a way to earn a little spending money. I always wondered what they hoped to spend their hard-earned pennies on.

The table would be set with my parents’ wedding china, a beautiful and simple center pattern of brown wheat-like sheaves with a spray of turquoise and terra cotta dots for flowers. The pattern was English and called “Autumn” as my parents were married at the beginning of September. The wedding silver was substantial and ornate with monograms engraved at the bases. I have no idea where it came from, whether it was registered for at the local jewelers in Cincinnatti where my parents grew up, or if the set had belonged to someone in the family and been bequeathed. It would take days to polish after the close of the holiday season. Heavy, cut crystal water goblets and wine glasses made in Ireland marched down the length of the table. Then, there were all the silver serving dishes: platters and bowls and shell-shaped extravaganzas. On the side-board, the silver coffee service -- to be taken in the living room after dinner -- would be set up with small bone-white and gold demitasses, minute silver spoons, a claw-footed dish filled with sugar cubes, and a claw-footed pitcher filled with cream.

The meal itself was achingly simple and traditional. My mother, who is actually a good, solid cook, doesn’t like cooking as much as she likes setting the scene: preparing the table, putting fresh flowers in every room, ironing bleach-white hand towels that were bought as souvenirs from faraway travels, and orchestrating a grand meal. In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, the town I grew up in didn’t have caterers, but there were women who cooked. They would hire themselves out to cook and present for engagement or holiday parties, ladies’ luncheons, or large family gatherings. My mother knew two women who were considered queens of the local kitchen: Fanny and Charlie-Belle. Sometimes they would work together, sometimes they would work separately, and they were classic soul food cooks. My mother would book them for the following year’s holiday meals at the finish of the present year’s holiday to be sure she had their expertise. To have Fanny and Charlie-Belle cook for you at any time, let alone a family holiday, I’m sure was quite an accomplishment in the small-town social strata of Southern Indiana.

Cocktails would be served in the living room with shrimp cocktail and cheese and crackers which my sisters and I would pass around, my mother making every effort to teach us to be young ladies. We were expected to dress for dinner, and I always got presents on Thanksgiving which proved to be a bit confusing as I got older: a new coloring book, or set of Pilgrim paper dolls. In hindsight, I’m sure this was my mother’s way to try and keep me occupied for the afternoon, and out of her hair. The menu was always the same: crudité of carrots and celery served with a tangy sauce a lá Russe (made with cottage cheese, mayonnaise and Heinz 57, I’m almost positive), black and pimento-stuffed green olives, then whole-roast turkey with savory stuffing, mashed potatoes, thick turkey gravy (the one thing my mother would make for the dinner), peas, and creamed onions. Both apple and pumpkin pie were always served, to be followed by the dark, strong coffee in the living room.

But the crowning glory of that meal was not the crispy skin on the turkey, or the perfect velvety smoothness of the potatoes, or any of the other sleights of hand performed by the those kitchen magicians Fanny and Charlie-Belle. It was in the unquantifiable goodness of Charlie-Belle’s Parker House Rolls. The Parker House was an elegant hotel in Chicago known in mid-century culinary circles for these rolls served at table. Charlie-Belle was famous for these rolls all the way into the next county. I don’t know where she got the recipe or learned to make them—I wish I could go back in time and ask her now. Oh, how many things I would ask her! The recipe was a carefully guarded secret and added to Charlie-Belle’s mystique. Charlie-Belle knocked it out of the ball-park every year. The memory of the taste of those warm, soft, slightly buttery and yeasty flavors mingling with the cold fresh butter we would watch melt into the fine web of the crumb, still lingers.

-Deirdre

A true fall day.

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:17:00 +0000

Early October, 2009

Today has been a true fall day: clear, cool in the shade, warm in the sun, and breezy. I’ve been working out in the gardens and in the hoop house, planting and transplanting, building cold frames, and adding garden refuse to the compost heap.

The first flock of geese went over sometime in mid-morning. A low-flying, ragged formation, making a racket, like a committee whose discussion has degenerated into a shouting match. I was pulling out the tomato plants, setting aside the good tomatoes to ripen indoors, and the geese made such a commotion I had to step outside the hoop house to see what was the matter, imagining that some raptor had flown too close, and expecting to see geese flying in all directions. And while they were indeed an ill-formed bunch, more of an airborne pileup, they were all going and simply making a lot of noise. Perhaps they were new recruits assigned to form their own flock, and hadn’t yet figured out how to fall in, but had lots of ideas on how best to do it.

The next flock went over not long after, and I barely heard it from inside the plastic shelter of the hoop house, so high were they. I put down the turning fork, listened for a moment, then stepped over the tomato cages, (tripped over is more like it) and went out for a look. I had to hunt around the sky for a minute, but they were up there, a faint, long, strung-out V, a little lopsided but clear and steady, and earnest in their work. Their honks sounded like each goose was contributing to a vocal rythmic encouragement, or making occasional reports from the periphery. They came from the direction of Mt. Lafayette, and sheared off toward the Hudson Valley, I thought. I wondered where they would be at nightfall. I wonder if my brother saw them later in the day, down in Delmar…

The third group (now it’s almost lunch time) was large and determined, and low enough so I could hear the wind of their wingbeats. Shuffshuffshuffshuff…Not much talk, but while over my head a couple of birds broke rank from the rear and churned up the middle, then out the front of the V, altering course just slightly in the shift change, and the birds slid back on each side to make room, and then another came charging forward. It looked like a squadron of veterans.

Another high flock, so high it took two minutes anyway to find them, up in the blue void of the mid-afternoon. So faint, I couldn’t see how big a group it was at once, but my eyes slowly picked them out, and they kept stretching on and on, and reminded me of the stories about the huge flocks of passenger pigeons from the 1800’s, which could extend for miles and miles, and millions of birds, until we shot them all, every last one. These geese were out of range, and I could never see the whole flock at once, so faint were they.

The last bunch of the day wasn’t too big, nor too high, nor too noisy, nor too disorganised or too orderly. But it was getting on toward sundown, and they had an air of… well, one sensed they knew that it was getting on, that the day was running out, but that they had to push on, even hurry on, perhaps even through the night. There was nothing leisurely about them. “Come on!” “Let’s go!” I even shouted after them: “Go go go!”

It was a varied and sporadic parade that day, but they were all headed south.

-- Caleb

"Hey, Mrs. Michelle Obama, How do you like me now?"

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:40:00 +0000

(Garden Update: December, 08

One of the reasons I have been remiss in keeping my hand in with postings is that I have been busy trying to extend our gardening season by installing a hoop house, or high tunnel, or plastic-covered greenhouse. It’s my first time, so I’ve been a little excited and nervous…)

Garden Update: November, 09:

Here it is a year since we installed the hoop house, and elected our new First Lady into office. Or House, if you prefer. (And let’s not kid ourselves: We were voting for Michelle, as much as for Senator Obama.)

It’s been a busy year, both here on Mt. Hunger Road, and in Washington, D,C., a year in which much has been learned, and endured, and a year in which much has been taken as inspiration in our pursuits. If the First Lady can bring the focus and conversation to bear on our collective vulnerability to the weaknesses of our food supply, I believe much good will come of it. Toward this end I think it important to examine our individual wants and expectations from our food supply.

Not only do I want vegetables particular to the needs of our culinary mission at the restaurant. I want to be less vulnerable to any hiccups in the supply chain (from field maladies, weather-related challenges, and transport SNAFUs) that might deny me access to produce. I want to know what is being done to my food before it reaches me. And I want to grow some of what we need myself. Working in the garden pays us back in so many ways beyond just helping us control our costs in our restaurant. It also provides unbeatable freshness, flavor and nutritional value.

Last year it was too late to sow new crops inside the hoop house in time for a proper winter harvest. We were just trying to get the thing up, covered and closed in, and we had to make do with the escarole and radicchio that remained from the summer season, which happened to have been sown on that site. But that was a small harvest and soon exhausted, and so we had to buy greens through the darkest part of the winter, until newly sown greens finally came up beginning in March, just in time for April vacation. At least by the time we re-opened to start the long season at the beginning of May, there were arugula, curly endive and new baby radicchio ready to be cut, and I had to start propping the door of the hoop house open for the day to keep the crop from overheating. And then the rains began…

Well, Madame First Lady (will I ever be able to address you as gardener to gardener?) this year it’s going to be different. (Ha Ha! Isn’t every year?) We’ve learned a lot, we’ve talked to some gardeners who know much more than we do (thanks Kevin, the brothers at Fable Farm, Eliot Coleman), and we’ve done some reading. We managed to overhaul the interior of the hoop house, build cold frames to protect the greens during the coldest periods, and sow in time so that we will have things ready to harvest by the time the scarcity of daylight brings growth to a screeching halt. We even had the tomatoes inside, so even though the summer was cool and wet, they did ripen (right up into October), and avoided the blight which so devastated tomato and potato crops in this region. (I finally pulled the plants out on October 12. Ripening had slowed dramatically, and the low nighttime temperatures were starting to damage the fruit. But we were able to use only our own tomatoes at Pane e Salute all the way through October until vacation.) There is now newly sprouting spinach under the plastic of the cold frame, where the tomatoes once sprawled in all their bushy and disorganised glory.

So Madame First Lady, if you would like to swing by for a cup of tea to be taken in the sun of the hoop house this winter, there is a little space with two chairs and a table, where we can talk about your plans for the winter garden at the White House, what to sow, soil amendment (no congressional or state votes needed, and no doubt the most productive use of BS ever seen in D.C.!), where to source starts and seeds, President Obama’s and the girls’ salad habits, and how best to promote the expansion of the conversation about our food, a conversation our country so much needs to continue. What will it mean to Americans to see the White House growing food? The implications could be tremendous, especially when you produce “too much”, and you have to give away the excess to neighbors and visitors, one of the great pleasures and purposes of having a garden, when one is blessed by the space to do so.

-- Caleb

(In the photos: 1^st and 2^nd photos, construction of the high tunnel in October ’08; 3^rd, 4^{th and 5th} photos, November 2, ’09. The boxes of radicchio di Treviso, escarole (bionda a cuore pieno and bubikopf), arugula Sylvetta, and curly endive (Romanesca da taglio), and (far left box) frisee; curly endive close up, ready to be cut for salad; Spinach has just sprouted under the plastic in the right-hand box.)

divide and conquer

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:32:00 +0000

This fall, I’ve decided to finally divide the iris. I’ve been growing different varieties of iris here for ten years, and I am chagrined to say this is the first year I have set out to dig up, thin, replant. But it is such an arduous job…I hate it and love it.

An old friend who also happened to be a incredible gardener gave me a gift of iris when I first started my garden. She was digging up and thinning out too and I was in sore need of plants. We had tilled a large area in a wild field next to the house, blithely forging ahead without knowing all the mistakes we were making , and there was a lot of space to fill. Since patience has never been one of my virtues—one of my faults as a gardener as I’m always looking for instant visual gratification—I was happy to take as many plants from friends and family that I could that would go forth and multiply, and quickly. Blithely forging ahead. I took gifts of mint, veronica, scented geranium, phlox, and gooseneck loosestrife. My mother gave me tansy (looking back at what is now the scourge of my garden as it snakes everywhere, I wander if she was mad at me…), and my friend Robin gave me both Siberian and bearded iris.

About five years ago, these iris were the showpiece of my garden. They bloomed in June, right before and then continued on at the same time as the blue-flowered veronica and the magenta peonies—another gift from another gardener. Things went along roughly the same for another four years, this always being my favorite time in my garden. Every fall though, I could see that the iris were getting denser, and their foliage and mat of roots encroaching on other plants, hiding the sedum and small plants of catmint, even encroaching on themselves.

This June barely any iris bloomed. Too thick and congested, they had no room to gather enough energy to flower. I bolstered myself to dig up and divide.

The worst part of this job is finding the time. The garden has grown to such an extent now, and there are other gardens—vegetable, orchard, vineyard and now a new plot for a new varietal rose garden—that need tending too, that this whole gardening concern could be my fulltime job. I have a lot of iris, and to dig, divide, and separate is a meditative and lengthy process. But this is also the best part of the job, the satisifaction of freeing each bulb from the confines of our thick, clay soil and the other roots of its brethren, to take the time to look at how different each of the iris are in their bulb form, and then to plant them back in loose, well-composted soil, knowing that next June they will burst forth on their slightly exotic stalks and color the garden in all their shades of blues and purples, the gardener’s prized color like the cobalt blue paint of the Renaissance painters.

--Deirdre

vendemmia!

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:51:00 +0000

A summer we didn’t really have is gone. Time flown, I’m wondering where we’ve been, what we’ve been doing since our last post. Sometimes living gets in the way.

Fall has settled in now on our pie-shaped piece of meadow and wood. The leaves have started to change to the reknowned oranges, golds, and reds. Yet--even though it is already October, out the windows of our house I can still see a lot of green, and the gardens are still producing valiantly: roses, phlox. rudbeckia, tomatoes, radicchio, zucchini, and Piemontese beans.

On these gray heavy days of late, I can almost imagine we might be in the Piemonte in northern Italy. The woodsmoke hangs and the air is raw just like there at this time of year. The wild-gatherers bring exotic mushrooms to the restaurant—this week white combtooth. And yesterday, our grapes arrived from the market in Boston.

The grapes are from Boston this year because there is a dearth of grapes here inVermont. All of sudden, everyone wants to make wine. People are begging, borrowing, trading, making promises they must keep for a few slugs of grapes. I, too, have negotiated, and if the weather cooperates, harvest here in Vermont will begin any day now, and I will pick up a case or two of Marquette, so that I can begin learning to make wine from a grape I have planted heavily. There is a frisson in the air between the local wine makers, the anticipation of harvest and the pressing. We are very careful not to reveal where we have acquired our bounty—we don’t want to lose our access; we don’t want our gracious vineyardist to be inundated with requests for next year. We protect our sources, so that we can assure ourselves that again, we will get to make wine.

Our Boston grapes are plump and healthy: two slugs of Sangiovese, and one of Barbera, all grown in California. I have gone easy on the amount of grapes to make into wine this year as the goal is to make wine cleanly and properly, to learn the most from a little. Since we have so much work to do still on preparing our cellar—all our time has been devoted to the actual vineyard itself—we don’t have enough space for proper storage for a larger quantity. So, we go to a friend’s cellar who has been making wine for the last seven years to crush, test for sugar, test for acid, and prepare the yeast. When I make my own wine from my own grapes, I will use less intervention. I will rely on wild yeasts that grow on the skins of the grapes and in the seeds, and I hope that the acids will be balanced because of how I’ve cared for the soil. But for now, since I don’t know the growing conditions of these grapes, I will use cultured yeast, the point of this excericise not only to make drinkable wine, but to learn more deeply the chemistry of how to make wine, so that by the time I do have my own harvest, I will understand more intuitively the process. I will know it in my muscles and bones, in my tastebuds, what the must will do, what the must needs. I am learning by osmosis.

We are a fine group, three couples, cranking the crusher, blending grapes, taking notes, practicing the science. We taste other people’s wine while we work-a Marquette made only an hour and a half away from here. Late afternoon turns into evening, and we adjourn upstairs into the warm kitchen to prepare dinner and watch our cultured yeast grow and bubble near the stove. We eat a beautiful meal of grilled chicken, flattened and pressed by bricks in that old Italian style, served with roasted beats and squash, a spinach salad with fennel, almonds, and pears. We finish with plums poached in a little of the Marquette served with fresh whipped cream. A dish in Italy bawdily called Cosce di Monaca—nun’s thighs! All the while we taste through a varied and staunch line-up of wines: Grecchetto from Umbria for the white, Aglianico from Basilicata, Sagrantino again fromUmbria, and to finish, a Brunello. Well, not exactly to finish, there is still the small Venetian glasses of Vin Santo to end the meal with the plums. Holy wine for a holy dessert.

Roger and Deb, our hosts, send us home with a mason jar of fresh grape juice crushed from the Alicante grapes Roger is using in a blended wine he will make this year, so that tomorrow morning, we will have the juice with our breakfast just like countless families in France and Italy who will start their mornings with fresh grape juice during the crushing of the harvest, and have started their mornings during this season just like this for hundreds of years.

--Deirdre

weather

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:26:00 +0000

Has it really been two weeks since the last post???? What have we been doing? Planting 230 vines. The weather has confounded, rain, rain, rain, making the ground too wet to plant. Bare root plants of La Crescent, Frontenac, St. Croix, Frontenac Blanc, and Marquette waiting, waiting, waiting. We grab at the sun on the 1,2,3 days it shines and work from early til late. The heat feels good. Now, all the vines are in and staked, some still to be tied. The rain splashes up on leaves causing black spot on some. Just like the roses. And the Japanese beetles have come. Late, but still here. They are like Venetian lace-makers creating a fretwork in the leaves. How satisfying to smash them between two pieces of broken terracotta! The beetles, not the lacemakers....Bloodlust and more rain....

--Deirdre

come hail or high water

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:46:00 +0000

It rained from lunch onward, then miraculously it stopped. This after 24 days of rain in the month of June and the beginning of July. But who’s counting? I hadn’t been until someone brought it to my attention. Last year we joked that it was our English summer because then there was also rain in June and the roses were fat and sodden, and our young cousin Claire came to live with us for a few months to garden and work in the restaurant. We made jokes that we were introducing her to local society and that we must find her her own Mr. Darcy. This summer really has been like an English summer, and more so. And all on account of the water. Ha! I meant to write weather.

It is July now and we are hosting the first of our summer outdoor degustazione, or wine tasting events—la garagista. Only a few days after the 4th of July. The 4^th of July passed as a long day of rain with a fire in the woodstove just to get the chill out of our bones. Where are the hot 4^th of July’s I remember? When the evening is still so warm and the air thick like cream that it is a relief to hold a cold glass with ice in it next to your cheek or along your own jugular vein? Where is the 4^th of July when we ate dinner under the locust tree, just the two of us, dressed in linen because it was so hot, and watched the fireflies illuminate the meadow? No, this is the summer of cold and damp.

It has been hard to keep up with garden chores and clean up because of the inclement weather, and worse yet trying to prepare the earth for the 300 or so vines that have arrived in cardboard boxes with packing peanuts and stuffed snuggly in black crates. Our clayey soil clumps with wet and is too drenched to properly till. We have yet to open our terrace for the season. There’s been no reason to hunt for the shade of the rose pergola. Two cushionless chairs sit forelornly against the wall, and the gold painted chandelier with the two remaining bobeches hangs high and candleless just like it did all winter. At least then, the glass beads caught the light and looked like icicle or snowflake. The light on these rainy days has been too flat to reflect anything.

The weather report for the evening of our tasting calls for heavy downpours and thunderstorms with the threat of high winds and the possibility of hail. Hail, the vineyardist's nightmare. But we forge ahead. We open the terrace bringing cushions and furniture. We lower the chandelier and fill it with candles that I know, even on a good day, will never stay lighted. But I am forever the optimist. We move potted roses and lavender, and finish weeding. We pretend that we will have a nice day. For a moment, we balk and think to move the event to the restaurant, but that defeats the purpose of having guests wander the gardens and plant a grape vine, or toast to a visiting winemaker’s new vintage in the garage. So, we hold fast and feel courageous. We’ve already had 23 days of rain. Will anyone really care if they are out in another?

When the rain stops , we wipe off the wet tasting tables and chairs, set up the candles and torches, and put out the white table clothes. We put a tarp on the balcony covering the terrace (we have big plans to put a roofed pergola on top of the balcony which will also shield the terrace, but have yet to get around to it…), the same tarp that covered our house when we took the roof off in order to rebuild it and made every precaution to keep the house from the elements, and it rained, and rained, and rained, and the rain came in the windows and down the walls, the same year I made my first rosolio. For a moment, while we are writing the suggested wine pairings on the black board, and lighting the torches, the sun even comes out. We are all dressed for the evening, and dressed for the weather, our rain boots either on, or ready to be jumped into.

Miraculously, the rain holds off while the clouds gather. Guests start to trickle in, parking in the field and walking across a plank bridge over a gushing swale. The flower garden is spectacular in the gray and dying light, all the flowers and roses shown off to the most dramatic impression against such a drab background. Guests joke about good luck, and say, “I think it won’t snow tonight!” Chris Granstrom, our featured winemaker from Lincoln Peak tonight, from our own Vermont, shows off his stellar line-up of Vermont grown and produced wines –the whites and reds and dessert--to great effect. No one can quite believe such lovely wines can come from Vermont.

At precisely 7:30, the official close of the party (but all good parties never end when they are supposed to--) a huge clap of thunder. I am in the vineyard with a few people planting vines. I go to the garage to get more stakes, and I am caught inside. The rain comes fast and furious. The wine table in the stone garden where Chris and his wife Michaela were pouring tastes comes flying into the garage, along with wine boxes and half-soaked guests. The sky has darkened. The candlelight is bright. Someone’s car gets stuck in the field, and a help party is dispatched. A small river of water speeds down our entrance past the garage and toward the house. Someone hands me a glass of wine. There is laughter and good cheer. We will not be defeated….

--Deirdre

chicago: no. 2 King's on 5th

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:29:00 +0000

Several years ago, my mother told me my great-grandfather had a restaurant in Chicago. I thought perhaps I’d come by this restauranting we do honestly. No one is still alive who knew what kind of restaurant he owned, or what kind of food he served. Since my great-grandfather was originally from Stockholm, we wondered if there was a variation on a smorgasbord, or if the Friday night special was Swedish meatballs.

We did know the restaurant was named King’s. And we did know that it was “across from the newspaper”, the newspaper presumably the Chicago Tribune. We knew that it had been offered as a morgue when in 1915 the ill-fated and poorly designed steamer The Eastland capsized in the Chicago River and over 800 people died. We knew that the building was somewhere across the river from the now-famous Merchandise Mart. We knew that the restaurant itself had gone under when the Depression hit Chicago hard. We knew that my great-grandfather had died shortly thereafter, and my great-grandmother had come to live with my mother’s family in Evanston.

What we didn’t know was that the restaurant had been across from the first penny daily called The Daily News that was regarded as the best broadsheet in the city until the Tribune absorbed it in the mid-sixties. We didn’t know that Charles Henry Weegman, once President of the Chicago Federal League Baseball Club, came to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair from Richmond, Indiana, and was so inspired and impressed by the city, he came back to live and started out as a coffee boy at King’s. He went onto start his own restaurant chain of lunch counters that thrived in the city. We didn’t know that King’s was the newpaperman’s haunt all during it’s life, and we didn’t know that the Chicago Press Club, one of the official founders Mark Twain, took the floor above King’s for a year while they looked for more permanent digs. We didn’t know that the building that had once housed King’s, long gone now and replaced by a monolith, had been at the corner of Wacker and 5^th, and that 5^th Avenue in Chicago is now called Wells Street. We didn’t know anything about my great-grandfather’s business partner, Charlie King. And we still don’t. We can only guess that he is the mysterious man in a handful of photos that my mother found in a dresser drawer. A man with a mustache, looking out from beneath his eyebrows, looming next to my great-grandfather, jaunty porkpies shading their heads, a palm tree in the background.

--Deirdre

chicago: no. 1

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:31:00 +0000

We arrive in Chicago to blue skies and intense heat. The first thing I say getting off the plane is “This feels like home.” I grew up eight hours south of Chicago, and our summers were marked by long, hazy days. After several weeks of gray and rain and mist at home in Vermont, this feels divine.

Lunch is at Reza’s in River North, just a few blocks walk down Superior from our friend John’s apartment. It is in a huge space that looks like it could have once been a dancehall or a train station. The walls are painted a deep mauve, the trim is dark wood. Massive, gold-framed mirrors hang. Fantastic turn-of-the-last –century light fixtures with pressed metal details of fruits and vegetables suspend from the very high ceiling.

Reza’s has an all-you-can-eat middle eastern buffet for $9.99. I feel like it’s Christmas in July, even though it’s just June. Caleb orders the vegetable sampler, and I go for the buffet. I fill many plates with Greek salad, a Persian salad of tomatoes and cucumbers with herbs, hummus, falafel, tahini, and highly spiced meat dishes made with lamb or beef and a hot bean dish in a smooth tomato and pepper sauce with lots of cumin. We finish with Turkish coffee and cannelles soaked in syrup. We are in heaven, and I wonder if somewhere in my own lineage there is some beautiful Persian woman who could cook like a god as these flavors seem to suit my palate so well.

It is late in the afternoon, but we are not the only ones who need to come in from the heat for a bite and respite. A handful of families fill a few tables in the cavernous dining room, all of middle eastern descent. All the women wear head scarves, and a sign at the door encourages patrons t o make reservations for Ramadan now. Another couple who is not middle eastern sits by the window. The waiters are both middle eastern and not. I wonder if Reza’s caters to all middle eastern communities in Chicago. Is Yom Kippur celebrated as well as Ramadan? Are tensions here lessened because of the desire to share in these dishes that travel from one place across one amorphous border to another, where the ingredients and recipes are rather fluid between all these peoples? As the buffet closes, the waiters, dressed in their black pants and white shirts with black vests, sit down and eat at a long table together.

--Deirdre

wild strawberries

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:05:00 +0000

Their long tendrils have always snaked and twined through the perennial garden, a hold over from the fact that our first efforts at gardening were gone about backwards. Our gardens are in a field thick with native grasses, clover, madder, goldenrod, buttercup, sensitive fern, and apparently wild strawberries. When we first broke the land that is now a terraced rose and flower garden, we didn’t know about nifty machines that scrape the top layer of sod from areas in which you’d like to garden. We knew about solarization—when you mow the grasses and weeds, wet them, and cover with sturdy clear plastic, digging the ends down into the earth to trap the vegetation so that after six to eight weeks of high sun the meadow growth is dead. But I am too impatient, and wanted to get started “right away”. So each year we wage the constant battle of weeding and digging invasive weeds out of the flower garden. Each year the weeds gets a little less, but I think there will always be a ghost of the field appearing between the rugosa and lady’s mantle.

Along with the wild mint that invades the beds, wild strawberry has always been present, and the two get pulled-up throughout the summer. I have never seen one of these culprits bear fruit. But this spring, I found a beautiful specimen looking full and pretty with yellow blossoms, and I thought, why not see if anything happens? At the same time, our daily walks through the field that is now becoming the vineyard, we see and name the things growing because we know these will effect not only the growth of our grapes—indicating the health and type of our soil—but also the flavor. We find an intricate and almost hidden network of alpine strawberries with tiny white flowers spreading across the top of the meadow floor. I am pleased at the thought that my wines may have “wild strawberry” somewhere in their flavor profile.

Just a few days later, I am clipping the grasses and weeds from the vine rows by hand, crouched down with a Japanese scissors, and I see a little flash of red. A wild strawberry! I pick and taste. It is lush and delicate at the same time, bursting with bright flavor. I see another spot of red, and another. The field is covered in fruit. I call Caleb to drop his work in the green house, and after the sun has slipped behind the crest of the Chateauguay above us, we pick strawberries for dessert.

I am still waiting on that succulent-looking plant in the rose garden.

--Deirdre

queen of the nile

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:01:00 +0000

This is the first year they’ve bloomed, these iris colored the deepest black with a dark purple fur at their centers. Two years ago, they caught my eye at one of my favorite local nurseries. They stood tall, majestic, and elegant. As if they were always dressed for a formal party. At the time, I was working on a bed that hugs a stone wall in a terraced garden. I had planted woody hydrangea with loose white panicles for structure, backed by arborvitae for winter interest (provided that the local deer who never pass through our meadow don’t develop a nose for these sweet evergreens and decide to follow the scent and find themselves suddenly in a veritable cornucopia and demolish them for dinner).

Between the evenly spaced hydrangea, I planted catmint and transplanted wild daisy because they make such pretty points of white that seemingly float above all else and because they cost nothing. I thought the black iris would provide contrast and look grand against the haphazard shapes of the stone walls made from the numerous collapsed stone walls encircling our property. The same stone walls that hellbent farmers from so long ago built from the constant supply of stones that came up through the meadow that used to pen sheep or wheat or corn, hellbent in that they thought they could eventually rid this land of all this rock.

I brought these iris home, these Queen of the Nile, a proud collector of something exotic for my fairly traditional collection of flowers and foliage, and planted them in that terraced bed. The following year they did not bloom, and I thought perhaps they were some kind of tongue-in-cheek joke that you might find in a book of cartoons by Charles Adams. Here are the black iris, appropriately named after the wicked Cleopatra, bought by the Adams Family and planted in their poisonous garden, and look at them! Aren’t they delightful? They look horrible and straggly, and of course will never bloom!

But this year, they’ve proved the joke wrong. They have bloomed and keep on blooming, new blossoms traveling up the strong spine of their stems until they are unleashed from the green almost palm-frond textured envelope of the bud casing. They are almost as tall as the hydrangea, and they do, indeed, look grand.

--Deirdre

in the garden

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:58:00 +0000

Memory of springtime travel in Paris and Italy is gone. For the moment. We have been pulled by the flurry of activity planning and traveling for our two new books, crisp black-jacketed beauties, one with a blue spine, the other with a red spine: Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (www.chelseagreen.com/.../libation_a_bitter_alchemy:hardcover) and In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love (www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/in_late_winter_we_ate_pears/). Organizing. Scheduling. Driving. Flying. Teaching. Reading. Signing. Cooking. Pouring. Speaking. Inventorying. Serving. Washing. The restaurant is also full of the new season, and we go from one thing to another without much time to stop.

With all this motion, coming home roots us, and we find that we cannot keep away from the gardens or the vineyard which is a good thing because they need our attention the days we are here. There is the hoop house to clean out, the rose garden to weed, the peony hedge to mulch and stake before the big, fat blossoms sigh to the ground. The rain has been almost constant, and Caleb takes the temperature of the soil. The seedlings are slow because the earth has yet to warm up adequately. But the radicchios love the weather; the roses love the weather. The tomatoes, newly planted in their new bed, must be moved into the green house where it will be warmer.

It is a pleasure to be out in all this verdant work. The perennial garden is always at its best at this time of year. Everything is in bloom: the squadron of iris, the rugosa roses, the fragrant chive, the scented geranium, the clamoring veronica, the arching bridal wreath. Even the first of the lemon lilies which smell like citrus blossoms when you walk past. Here, we catch a fragment of memory, of walking in a springtime orange grove in Calabria, the bees from the nearby apiary buzzing amid all the perfume. But then the memory is gone, and our climbing grape vines catch the corner of my eye. It is time to trim the grass beneath their armature.

--Deirdre

sunday lunch

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:46:00 +0000

After the Brancacci Chapel, there is lunch. The Trattoria del Carmine anchoring one side of the piazza has been calling to us all weekend. Little did we know it’s one of our good Livornese friend’s favorite spots in Florence. It is perfect inside. Simple, and warm on the cool, rainy day. The tables are packed with locals. Families out for lunch—they’ll be ordering the beefsteak; or tables for two with older couples out on dates, smiling, flirting and holding hands. We have been eating, eating, and eating, and while we are hungry, we cannot eat too much. We order with reserve. A half carafe of red wine. A plate of prosciutto, a cup of consommé (I haven’t had comsomme since dining at my grandmother’s when I was sixteen!), grilled dorade with lemon expertly filleted by our waiter, tableside. A plate of spring asparagus with a fried egg. I finish with a selection of cheese which is delicious, but proves too much. Caffe at the finish. We take the long way home to walk it all off, and I think I will never be able to eat again, or at least I need to lie down right here on this cobbled sidewalk and take a nap. At least until I find a pair of spring green driving shoes on sale in a store that flauts the convention that all stores are closed on Sunday afternoons…..

noir

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:32:00 +0000

Noir appears like an unexpected mirage on the side of the street. What attracts is the crowd of people leaning against and sitting on the wall front on the river Arno. Glasses of white wine, of Campari Americanos, thin flutes of prosecco catch the fading light. On embassy row, next to the British Embassy, Noir rocks it’s early evening crowd with a dj and club music that sound like the summer beach dances on the island of Ibiza.

I order a Campari, Caleb a gin and tonic. The aperitivo buffet is full of platters of couscous, cured meats and cheeses, olives, rice salad, anchovies, cornichons, Russian salads, breads. Young bariste replace the quickly emptied dishes with new or bring trays of little bite sized crostini or sandwiches out to the revelers on the river. It’s Friday night and it’s the city of Florence. Men and women dress for each other, dress for themselves. Fashion asserts itself: black boots, black jackets, freshly pressed shirts, loose, almost careless hair. The sun sets over the bridge casting pink reflections in the smooth water only rippled by the lone swimming nutria below us. The clouds call to mind 18^th century painters. The last glow of light catches the cigarette smoke and the tango between dancing eyes of men and women out on a Friday night.

how did we get there from here?

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:17:00 +0000

Where did Calabria go? Campania? Lazio? Florence? We were just there, and are now not there. We are now here—at home in Vermont. Exhausted computers and sheer mountains, thick walls and poor connections kept us detached from the wider world which was both a blessing and a frustration. How strange to be so reliant on lines emanating from cell towers like so many infinite fishing nets. We will have to travel backward, recapture a week ago, two weeks, three.

My memory finds me in Florence. Almost twenty years ago we lived here. There were no cell phones, no computers, or internet then. We called home a couple of times a month on the orange and black pay phone in the little piazza in front of our apartment. We sent postcards, the backs of which were crammed with images and news. We seemed very far away.

We go in and out of service like we go in and out of tunnels driving on the highway northward. We have made our own slow slouching from the toe of the boot and up the bony ridge of the shin. A drive in a day of sun—there have not been many of late—and the air feels hot. We arrive fairly easily into the center of the city, to the Piazza del Carmine. Luck is on our side. The Signora has returned from her walk with the dogs and is available to open our rooms, and we find free parking a stone’s throw from the towering front door. Our windows look out upon the cloister we share with the Brancacci Chapel where Masolino's Temptation of Adam and Eve and Massaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden layer the walls with color and perspective.

--Deirdre

buon riposo

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:30:00 +0000

We stay at a country house on a hill overlooking olive and orange groves that lead the eye down to the sea. On this hill, there were once mulberry trees used for producing some of the finest silk in all of Italy. But like so much else in this wild place called Calabria, that is no longer true. Our accomodations are simple yet elegant, the house belonging to a noble family. We have all that we might need: a kitchen in which to brew jasmine flower tea or cook a pasta with fresh fava beans, sheep’s milk cheese from Crotone, and pancetta cured by a farmer’s wife who lives not far from where we are staying. Pythagorus hailed from Crotone, about an hour south of us on the coast. In that city, he taught his mathematical theorems and held dialogues on philosophy--the scene really still the same in every modern caffe bar on every corner or street in all of Italy.

A cacophony of birds wakes us in the morning as if we are housed in a tropical aviary. The wild cats, a black one, a white one with a black tail, and a silvery tabby who looks like a rare panther from Mesopatamia watch us at the table outside from beneath the oleander. Their eyes flash green with hunger and we feed them leftovers from our bowls until they are contented and settle down to bathe and sleep. The sun is hot these days, duplicating our northern summer, and we are told that the rains have stopped now. We seek out the sun, then once that has become too much, we search for the shade. Calabria, a land shaped by strong sun, is defined by shade. We are told there will be no water until autumn. The orange trees are in flower and the air is scented with a fat and slightly waxy perfume lulling us. Yesterday, the sky was filled with gauzy haze, perhaps a condition promoted by the grove fires as the contadini prune the trees and burn the leaves and thin branches. Beyond the Ionian, the horizon appears as fog. Today, the clouds streak like wisps of mares’ tails and the eye leads out into the water. A white boat chugs along the surface, somewhere a fisherman fishes, though we cannot see him. The afternoon is heavy with tranquility, only the birds and the rustle of wind. After coffee, we break the quiet with eating fresh strawberries warmed in the sun.

--Deirdre

aperitif

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:14:00 +0000

It doesn’t matter which of the three cafes you choose of an evening at the congress of streets convening across from the Ecole Militaire. You must have Sancerre, the pretty, aromatic white wine, or a glass of champagne, to be consumed alongside oysters dressed in fresh lemon and shallot vinegarette. A kir would suffice as well. The waiter will probably bring a dish of olives or chips to salt the palate. Here, there is a great Parisian show: you take note of the current fashions handled expertly in Parisian hands: leggy boots with narrow heels, skirts with flirtatious flips, stovepipe pants, scarves and foulards wrapped elegantly around necks. Tourists idle by, dazed because they have just arrived today and they are jet-lagged, or because they have spent all day in the sun with their heads tilted up looking at great monuments. As the sun disappears behind the Champs de Mars lighting the sky violet look to the right and watch the spire of the Eiffel Tower over the buildings, the lacey pattern of iron and grid caught up in the newly leafed branches of the park trees. At the top of the hour, white lights shimmy up and down the iron confection, the quotidian moment of the evening hours marked by such festivity, a hold over from the millennium celebrations. While the waiter lights the candles on the tables, the flashes of sparkle mingled with the pearled bubbles of the Champagne and briny oyster make for the sublime.
--Deirdre

first tango in Paris

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:06:00 +0000

A handful of pilgrimages in the city of Paris. Paris itself is a pilgrimage, a city worth staying in for as long as you can. I have a list of desires: a walk in the Buttes de Chaumont, an aperitif at the Hotel du Nord on the Canal St. Martin, oysters and champagne at the café, any café, at Ecole Militaire, dinner at Le Baratin in Belleville. We decide not to see the classic French film Hotel du Nord because frankly it is classically, tragically French. Two crazy lovers who make a suicide pact in a room above the bar at the Hotel du Nord, a pact that goes awry, and a man who suddenly finds himself a murderer enlists the help of a pimp and a prostitute to escape. As you can imagine, the story does not end well, and we are no longer young students who thrive on tales of obsessive love and existentialism. Instead we search out affirming narratives : meals that begin well and end even better.

Our reservation at Le Baratin is late, but we don’t mind. We’ve needed all this time today to walk and see and we find that we arrive back home with only an hour before we must go out again. The restaurant appears almost out of nowhere off a long, straight street that gradually falls downhill, around a corner to the left like a surprise. A busy Friday night. One waiter, one chalkboard menu. Simple bentwood chairs around wooden tables. The old leather seats on the bar stools are cracked and show their stuffing. Wine bottles are scattered all over the bar. The white and tiger tabby slinks beneath the tables and sits on the bench hoping for scraps. The barman’s mother (he is really a passionate and erudite sommelier, and we assume she is the barman’s mother—there is a likeness in the curve of the nose) sits at a table for two, alone, with a glass of wine. From the chalkboard menu, we choose the carpaccio of mullet with red onions, yellow beets, and finely diced strawberries, a ceviche of cabaillaud in citron vert, thin slices of raw beef in an exotic sauce of apples, walnuts, and hot pepper, asparagus (it is meant to be white, but the white are sold out) with gossamer pieces of lardons. The lamb roasted in the oven is served with wilted chard and three little potatoes. The cabaillaud is grilled simply and served over a potato puree.

We choose two wines: half carafes of both, and both young and organic. A bright Grenache, the other a silkier Rousillon. The young waiter who has come out to save the elder tells us the winemakers of both our wines are sitting next to us at the bar chatting with the barman, or perhaps barman is really just entertaining his guests. As the evening progresses, a block of chocolate fondant arrives along with the comice pear that has been poached in red wine and fanned across the white plate. A confit of pineapple is sweet and without artiface. One winemaker measures the sugar content of the Grenache with an hydrometer to discuss the numbers with the others at the bar. I wish for my camera. The proprietess, our cook, an Argentine who came to this city over twenty years ago, finishes her evening standing at the door to her domain, the small, tight kitchen, drinking a glass of red and smoking a cigarette.

--Deirdre

wish you were here...

noreply@blogger.com (Deirdre and Caleb) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:55:00 +0000

Place Dauphine. Paris. Springtime. The lime trees in the place have leafed out even since yesterday. We have long been coming to this triangular sanctuary, cool and tranquil, in the heart of one of the busiest sections of Paris. We sit at the Cave au Palais where we have always sat to have a glass of wine or a hot chocolate on gray, rainy days in the city. Today, we have lunch. The sun is out, and perhaps our northern skin has gotten a bit too much light and heat this morning when we sat earlier in the open, treeless expanse of the courtyard of the Louvre and drank café crème and watched the people walk by. So we sit now in the cool of the shaded awning. Three men play boules, and an older couple sits on a bench beneath the broad canopy of trees. La Madame wears a pink suit. I am wearing a silk scarf bought years ago in Paris, a gift from my parents when I got married. Sunlight filters through young leaf and branch creating a chiarocscuro on faces, a hand, a fine shoe. We come to Place Dauphine every time we are here., a pilgrimage based on two or three sentences in novel, a French policier written by the formidable George Simenon. We’ve long followed the stories of the irascible Inspector Maigret who sits in the Palais de Justice that fronts on the Place Dauphine, the inspector who always orders sandwiches and beer from the restaurant on the Place during the most intense moments of a case. We should be eating sandwiches and beer, but we cannot reject the salad of grilled shrimp with orange and grapefruit, the block of foie gras, the simply grilled dorade served smoky and with lemon, the entrecote, my favorite cut, cooked rare with a classic pepper sauce, or the rich boudin noir served with fresh greens. How can we say no to perfectly salted and roasted potatoes, and buttered green beans? Impossible to turn down a Bordeaux, with a vintage of nine years ago for a relatively paltry sum. The meal is long and finishes with cheeses and a perfectly torched crème brulée. The sun has moved, the air a bit cooler now, only a small shot of thick coffee to warm us and close the palate and the meal.