My French Kitchen Daily

"We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hot plate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter." – Joanne Harris, from Chocolat









July 26


He had not been here long, along the coast at Perros-Gueric, such a small and stone-filled village overlooking the sharp and snapping foil of the coast of Brittany, but he found his fishmongers down at the docks as quickly as he could. "I have been told to make Cotriade," he had then told the larger of the two men who were clearly unloading something other than fish, likely Langoustine, and the man did nothing more than look up quickly enough to assess the seriousness of the eyes, and shrugged his shoulders down the dock to an old man who working the nets of his trawler through his hands. "Good enough," he said, and brought his basket along with him, as he did then in the beginning. Here at this part of the coast there was a sort of painting quality to it all; who could make such scenes up? He had been land locked back in the states for many years; here the world was not about land, but its more dominant counterpart, the sea, it was as dominant as any chain of farm fields from the midwest might have ever been. The men who working these docks weren't really men of this age, he thought, but maybe with a little different style of hair or more advanced sea coats and rubber boots, were really of the past weren't they? He had been trained to consider food as story and take the time to get to know

each character, each player, the scene, the context, of course, but here it all was in an instant, the novel itself, and he was merely walking through it a minor player himself. There were moments, he thought then, when history takes its proper place and overwhelms you; it presents you with a scene that assures you of your insignificance. He felt mildly sheepish approaching the old man at his boat. "The two men there," he pointed, "said you might have sole for my cotriade?" He could not expect himself to speak the language at this point and hoped for English in return. "English, ah?" His eyes were of the sea, oysters themselves, a nose of tan leather. He did nothing more than reach down below decks and picked out two fish, one per hand. "These two are for you" he said in chipped English, "if you promise to do well by them. These two I catch by single line. Good little fighters." He had taken them back that day to his small kitchen where every essential imaginable was available to him but much was hidden and loaded in drawers that he would not have guessed. His partner, Dash as they called him for his sometimes frantic pace in cooking, had guaranteed him all of the necessary tools if he came here; he was correct, all could be found, but only after some searching. He spun around to his first enter, Grilled Sole with Hollandaise. The first step, he knew, was complete. He had retrieved his fresh fish. All else would come much more easily. He would save parts for the cotriade later.