Midway through the years, I pause.
And how “Shopping is Cooking” became the next leitmotif of my kitchen memories
1987-2022 Midway through these years, a deeper understanding unfolds, but first, there is a break and another journey.
2001-2002. After all those early French years, I took a mid-life pause. I was turning 50, and after 15 years of running the barge, cooking three meals a day, making beds, and cleaning toilets, I was ready to switch gears and reboot my career. I always tell my younger friends that all women must do something crazy when they turn 50, and I was no exception. I needed to tie up these gypsy years afloat with a big bow of celebration. It would be a last long Ta-Da Adventure on the Julia Hoyt—from Camont to The Netherlands and back again—before I turned in my captain’s cap.
It was Spring in 2001, and together with my mustachioed hound Dupont, the first of the faithful companions, I kitted up the Julia Hoyt with a couple of friends as willing crew and the occasional paying guests to help fund the journey. I had an ambitious agenda to sail north to the founding waters of my 1872 Dutch Tjalk in northeast Friesland of the Netherlands over the next five months. This journey would serve as the research for a pilot for a Public Broadcasting Station television show I dubbed “The Long Village,” discovering the foods of France slowly region by region. This would turn into an 18-month pause in life at Camont—five months traveling north, seven months wintering over with a refit at a boat works in Holland, before returning six months later in the Fall of 2002 to homeport at Camont. The TV project would flounder in that vast no-funding land of public television. The Food Network had just started, and although the founder approached me, I was sure we were made for PBS. After a little of that “too soon/too late” pinch, the BBC scooped the idea, and I set it aside. I was eager to stop traveling, having made astounding discoveries about my untethered life on that last long voyage (a mild addiction to adrenaline and risk?) and a strong longing to be rooted at Camont and to plant a garden and an orchard to support my waiting kitchen.
I wrote this book to share what I had been taught, as I learned it, a very regional and distinctive cuisine prepared with the seasons and geography in mind. It is not the definitive book on the cooking of Gascony. It is not the ultimate travel guide to Southwest France. Rather, this personal travel tale celebrates the people and cuisine I discovered here, in a quiet corner of the long village. This is a journey aboard the Julia Hoyt, an edible souvenir of lively tables and good food.
A Culinary Journey in Gascony by Kate Hill
My first cookbook, A Culinary Journey in Gascony, published in 1995, was a typical eyes-wide-open newcomer’s point of view. Everything was shiny and new, delicious and different. The recipes were appropriately simple and an introduction to how people cooked at home in France. However, cooking in France soon captured my heart in a much deeper way as I tied the dishes to the greater tapestry of geography, history, and culture. Learning the language and making strong friendships kept me weaving information together until I felt sure of myself in my kitchen. I had never really expected to stay so long in France, let alone nearly 40 years.
When I returned to Camont in October 2002, I tied the barge to a couple of thick Poplar trunks (the equivalent of throwing an anchor ashore) and sighed a captain’s rest. I now entered the next phase of learning to cook with a laser focus on ingredients that one can only learn in the middle of a field of perfect radishes and turnips or smelling the floral hay fed to milk goats. Why did things taste better here? How did the different products—everything from ducks to prunes to wine—grow, evolve, and mature? Who grows this food? Could I learn to grow my own food, including chickens and ducks for eggs and meat? And raise a few sheep and goats (bad idea!), and learn to butcher pigs and make charcuterie (excellent idea!)?
Like in other complex things, I had succumbed to that first seductive taste for knowledge. When I let myself loose in my second decade of cooking in France, I dove deeper and deeper into the Why rather than the How of French cooking. I read recipes written in old French cookbooks and looked for stories of family tables in novels and movies. I shamelessly invited myself for meals at my neighbors' homes, especially on the farms, and cozied up to my market vendors for the insider’s scoop on how that direct sale market system survived over several hundred years of agricultural history. And this is where I found my next group of teachers and mentors—the Village Markets.
In the more touristed parts of France, especially during those brief summer weeks when everyone is a tourist in their hometown, the weekly farmer’s markets swell with seasonal specialties. But year-round, rude weather and scarce crowds included, the weekly village markets sustain the farmers and growers. It was here that I began my next phase of learning and understanding to cook. The fluctuating economy of buying just enough fresh peas for one meal or overfilling my basket with eye candy in the form of a flat of peaches. Buying a wooden fruit box of almost anything feels like winning the lottery. I would soon learn to make very small batches of confitures; two kilos at a time will fill 6-7 jam jars. Keep one to eat immediately, another to gift a friend, and stick the rest in the pantry for a few months.
“The French Queen of Confitures, Christine Ferber, is my guiding light in all things fruit preserves. I recommend her original book, Mes Confitures, to all. It is available in English as well as French, used and new editions.”
“Shopping is Cooking”
I see the younger me at the market each time I carpool with some of the writing residents, newly arrived from foreign shores and wondering what they are getting themselves into in the heart of rural France without a guidebook or a set itinerary, let alone a shopping list. After decades of shopping here, I have set vendors and certain things I am looking for each season. If it is April, there will be artichokes, asparagus, strawberries, and fresh spinach, which will bolt and go to seed in the first hot weeks. But there will also be fresh unsalted goat’s cheese, faiselle, which is perfect for making a little sweet cheese tarte. And I bought a bunch of tied pencil-thin leeks to plant in the potager, which is 100 to a bundle. There is also so many fragrant strawberries but it is too cold to be sweet enough for jam. In June, there will be Mara des Bois berries, which are better for confitures.
My newbies are used to mostly shopping in supermarkets. Here at the farmer’s market, their eyes glaze over; a lack of language skills coupled with no knowledge of seasonal expectations can be distracting. They career between the red and white umbrellaed stalls, sometimes following me, sometimes just wandering with an empty basket until they remember they must buy enough food for the next few days. I remember those early days.
Now, having quit teaching in person, I mostly shop for myself, not for a multi-course cooking class or a house full of guests and friends. The residents at the Relais de Camont shop for their own meals prepared in their own kitchen, depending on their own interests and desires. And while I only occasionally entertain, scaling down shopping at the market is the hardest thing for me to do. I still buy a fat deep yellow farm chicken once a week for roasting or braising before making a pot of soup. I buy too many vegetables. Always. I was locked into the abundance theme for so many years that the wealth of selection is still difficult to master.
I remember well the maxim that I picked up from a gardening magazine many years ago. Scrolled at the bottom of each page were a few wise gardening words, and as I thumbed through gorgeous landscapes and perfect perennial borders, I spotted three words that would serve me for years to come, both in my garden and in my kitchen. “Weeding is Gardening” became “Shopping is Cooking” as I applied the basic principle that when we pay attention to the first steps, the rest comes easier.
Over the years, shopping graduated from a couple of straw baskets and an oversized tote bag to a wheeled cart woven of willow and strapped to a couple of sturdy all-terrain wheels. This month, come with me on a market day, like this week, when I spent an hour or so (minus having a coffee as the boulangerie was closed!) threading between the stands and stalls, wagons and trucks that line the village park. Here, shaded in summer by pollarded Plane trees and anchored by a 19th-century bandstand where, if need be, we can take refuge from a passing rainstorm or rest a minute while waiting for the others. You’ll meet my favorite vendors and some of the special recipes that they shared with me over the years.
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Whata great read, thank you. A chicken a week and to many vegetables is exactly how I shop/cook too
Yours is one of the few posts I read with heartfelt appreciation and a strange nostalgia. Not for a life I once lived but one I feel and understand in my bones. Thank you for bringing me along in the markets and homes of you French countryside. The concept of "Finding France" -- where you are, as you are-- has somewhat softened my longing to be in France, as does the gardens i tend and the markets i support here in Portland, Oregon. Still, your writings seduce and appease my "nostalgia" and I thank you for it. I may yet show up for a writers residency, but till then....I will harvest the backyard asparagus and live in my imagined French village.