My French Kitchen Daily

“The carnival is gone. Once a year the village flares into transient brightness, but even now the warmth has faded, the crowd dispersed." – Harris, from Chocolat










July 28


Some mornings he woke not far from the sliding glass door just inside of the balcony overlooking Lake Monona. On these mornings he knew it would have been much better to have headed home after the clean-up in the restaurant, after the last of the dishwashers had headed home themselves, but that he might drift up into his office without thinking much about it at that late hour, as the city near the capitol, where the buildings met the lake, there was such luminous sort of haze over it all that it seemed quite unlike any city that one might find in the midwest. Last night he had looked over the lake, a steel bluish gray, and there was nothing there save the party barge barely bobbing at the dock. A few street dwellers sat like tree limbs on benches, and he felt for a minute that this might his coast at Brittany and he held out this feeling and he thought for a moment that en pot, his mark on the city, was a transportation of the real thing and it gave him a very sound feeling and he did not want to sleep. "Head home," Andreah, the hostess, had told him; he had already been in the kitchen since that morning, placing cold product into all of the proper places in the cold room and closer yet into the refrigerators. "This is our first night of bouillabaisse," he said and of course knew that everybody else knew this also, for it had been of great discussion for several days ahead of time. Andreah had been a cook herself and knew the trade well. She had grown up inside a restaurant, her grandfathers, in a small town not far out side of Madison, had skipped around several restaurants around town until she had children, and then decided to take her skills to hostessing. She was an easy pick for him the day that he hired her; in fact, she was the first and only person that he interviewed; some people understand the restaurant business, others are the business. He had tied his waist band and had already begun to pull out the sole, when she walked up to him.