Truth and Vipers

"There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them." -- Isak Dinesan

Earlier today I pulled some books off the bottom shelf of my study bookcase. I had decided it was time to add more books to LibraryThing and these had been lurking in a dusty corner for far too long. As you see, there is a theme:

Back in the day, we were avid home wine makers (and drinkers!). We planted twenty pinot noir (Burgundy) vines in the backyard and took several wine making and tasting classes. It was so fun! We made our own wine for a few years. It was so-so, and eventually we moved on. But one of the best things we did was travel to France. We used "Adventures on the Wine Route" by Berkeley wine importer, Kermit Lynch, as our guide through French wine country. We had many of our own adventures and have never even once been sorry we made the trip.

We traveled by train from Paris to Dijon. In Dijon we picked up a rental car and spent the next two weeks driving around Burgundy, Provence, the Languedoc, and Bordeaux. Here are few pictures of Burgundy:

Wine "growler" shop in Gamay

Burgundy Scenes

The center photo was taken near Savigny-les-Beaune. We were there looking for a particular vineyard, "Les Serpentiers". We were never sure, but hoped this picture was the vineyard. According to the wine making brothers Pichenot, Kermit Lynch tells us in "Adventures on the Wine Route":

"Having always loved the vineyard name, "Les Serpentiers", which goes back to at least the thirteenth century, I ask if they know its origin.

"There are a lot of vipers there."

"Not really. There in the vineyard?"

"It's true Just ten days ago a young woman was bitten and spent a day in the hospital."


We did not encounter any vipers, but we did encounter friendly people, breathtaking scenery, and some fabulous wine. Truly.

Let's Bury the Wine

Curemonte, France

It is lovely, isn't it, this quiet medieval village in central France with its chateaus and imagined winding cobbled streets. Are the crumbling ruins of a chateau still hiding there, on a hill overlooking the village? Those ruins, where Colette, nearing 70, took refuge in the summer of 1940 after the German army entered the outskirts of Paris. Colette writes:

"We have been here since 15 June. We had to leave on the fourteenth or the thirteenth, because the Germans had reached Mere. And I wanted to stay. And despite everything, I regret not having stayed. Curemonte, in ruins, has been loaned to my daughter by one of her brothers. We are waiting, and with such a hunger, to go back to Paris as soon as there is a route open. Not enough petrol...

'When it rains, the damp soaks into and revives the colours of the little dome, twelve or fifteen feet above our heads, which forms the roof of a little circular room in the ruin. In dry weather, the same paintings, apparently dating from the Renaissance, turn pale and powdery. We gaze up at them from below, there is not a single wall solid enough to lean a ladder against. These inexpungeable frescoes, consisting entirely of geometric decorations converging on the keystone of the dome, are painted very closely over a background of dark stone. They once enlivened with their yellows, their blues, and their olive greens, the solitary state of a Lady who kept herself warm without the aid of a fire, her feet tucked up in her great skirt...

'It is her bedroom that we are burning, its wooden panels carved into flowers and picked out in colours; under the paint it is crumbling away and as soft as sponge. From her little square window, the Lady used to see the invader, the ally, and the merchant mount the hill; she used to watch for the approach of what we lack: her freshly churned butter, her honeycombs, her rents paid in kind with chickens strung up by their legs, and the fine-ground flour...The curfew was not, as it is for us, the moment to be dreaded above all other, the moment when we all know that we can no longer count on anyone but ourselves until the coming of the clear dawn, cold as in all mountain districts, and heralded by a hundred goldfinches perched on the tips of the pea stick."

She remained in the chateau ruins with her husband, her servant Pauline, and her daughter Bel-Gazou's family for only a short time. In September she made her way back to Paris ("I'm used to spending my wars in Paris!"). The following year her husband, a Jew, was arrested by the Gestapo and interned. He was released several months later and left Paris to escape possible re-arrest. Suffering from arthritis, Colette remained in Paris.

I am continually in a swoon as I read Colette. Her writing is evocative, beckoning, picks me up and swoops me back in time. I hover over her shoulder while she, at her desk near a window in her beloved Palais-Royale apartment, scribbles on sheets of light blue paper (her "fanal bleu, or blue beacon light"). 

Nearing the end of Earthly Paradise, her collection of memoir pieces, I think her writing is getting stronger, more alive. A lifetime of writerly observation has given her pen a knife-like edge. She chronicles her life with a keen sense of certainty. And, her mother, Sido, remains the major influence on her outlook.

Writing about her own experience during WWII, she remembers how Sido reacted to her first glimpse of a Prussian soldier on a country lane in Burgundy during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870: 

"It was up in Fox Lane...At dusk there is almost always a mist up there, along Fox Lane, because the spring is smoky then. So there I was, and I saw a soldier with a spike on his helmet standing in the middle of the lane. He was holding his rifle as though it was a shotgun. I could just make out that he had a thick, short beard. I think he was a Bavarian. Because of the dusk and the mist, there was no way of telling the colour of his uniform or of his beard. And for a moment I had the impression that the whole German Army must be composed entirely of grey men just like him, grey clothes, grey faces, grey hair, like people in engravings...

'What did you do?

'I went straight home and buried all the best wines."

Of course.

Provence, 1970

Well, I finished  Provence, 1970 by MFK Fisher's nephew, Luke Barr.  It is a satisfying "easy" stroll through a bit of food writing history.  I introduced this book here:  Friday in Provence.

Coincidentally food writers MFK Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, Simone Beck, Richard Olney and the editor Judith Jones found themselves in the south of France in December, 1970.  They were all known to each other, and in some cases were good friends and collaborators on various projects.

The very American Julia Child and the very French Simone Beck ("Simca") met in Paris in 1949.  Over many years they worked together and co-authored Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vols. I and II. The wonderful 2009 movie Julie and Julia tells part of this story.  Each had country houses in Provence, near Cannes.  Child's "La Pitchoune" was located on Beck's estate. They were both there with their husbands for the holidays in December, 1970.  Fisher, Beard, Jones, and Olney were also in the area.  Olney lived year around near Toulon, about two hours west of Cannes.

La Pitchoune

From the back cover blurb:

Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment when six iconic culinary figures -- including Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher -- found themselves together in the South of France.  They cooked and ate and talked late into the night about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.  Drawing in large part from M.F.K. Fisher's detailed journals and letters, her grandnephew Luke Barr has recreated what was in retrospect a key turning point -- when the democratization of cooking and taste became part of the national conversation in America.  His dramatic retelling of those weeks in the scenic hills above the Cote d'Azur traces the beginnings of a modern American food culture and how, without quite realizing it, these players changed the course of culinary history to reshape the way we eat now."

Soon after, a new figure in American food culture appeared, Alice Waters.

"...Waters and her generation of cooks had found a new idiom, an entirely original continuation of the legacy of the winter of 1970, a modern art of American eating.

It made a certain, perfect sense that Waters had embraced both Olney and M.F., as different as they were.  For Waters, avatar of the new American cooking, was rooted both immediately as a cook in Olney's bohemian purism, and culturally in M.F.'s groundbreaking literary sensuality.  Cooking was for Waters about more than food, it was a philosophy..."

And, as we all know, the rest is history.  Fresh organic produce from local farmer's markets, home cooking from scratch, growing our own food and making our own bread have become the norm for many many
Americans.  What started as a glimmer in the eye of those six Americans in Provence in 1970 has become a new way of life all over this country.

Thank you very much.

TRUTH, Travel and Food

I have finished M.F.K. Fisher's "As They Were", a collection of autobiographical essays, short stories, and a feature article.  The pieces are mostly about TRUTH, but also about travel, food, remembering, and looking forward.

Good Book!

I wrote here about the exceptional short story, "The Flame and The Ash Thereof".

Following on are memoir pieces about a childhood visit to an elegant restaurant, her first such dining experience; two rustic kitchens in Provence and how she managed to keep herself and her daughters in provisions; a trip to Dijon to see for herself a hotel with running taps of red and white wine piped into some of the rooms.  She also writes about the lonely winter trip to Arles and Avignon after leaving the 1970 food writers gathering as well as several fascinating accounts of trips to Europe by freighter from San Francisco. One beautiful piece pays homage to the Gare de Lyon, the iconic Paris train station for Mediterranean-bound travelers.

Gare de Lyon

The final essay is about MFK's decision to build "Last House" and remain in California rather than retire to France as she always thought she would do. She says she is grateful for the chance to CHOOSE where to live out her days.

All of the stories collected here are very fine, but for me, two memoir/fiction pieces stand out.  I have already mentioned and written about "The Flame and the Ash Thereof".  The other piece, "The Wind Chill Factor: A Problem of Mind and Matter", is a powerful meditation on keeping one's sanity.

"Mrs. Thayer" is staying in a friend's cabin in the dunes at the tip of Long Island when a Nor'easter hits and blizzard conditions keep her housebound for six days and nights, alone. She wills herself to stay sane as the doors ice shut and the cabin walls groan through the onslaught of wind and driven snow.

"The wind had become different.  Its steady pressure of sound had changed to a spasmodic violence. Snow was stinging against the northern and western storm windows, and Mrs. Thayer knew that the doors on those sides were frozen shut. It did not matter. A door to the outside place where people changed bathing suits in the summer began to bang hard, in irregular patterns. It is unhinged, she said with a sly grin. It did not matter either. The whole thing she must work on was to keep herself inside her own skin, and she was the only one there to do it, and with real sweat she did."

I have a personal connection to someone who went through a similar ordeal, alone, in a major hurricane. Her description of the experience came to mind as I read  Mrs. Thayer's account.  Very compelling writing.

Finally, this collection of stories weaves a tale of a woman, mostly on her own, moving through life observing the world, and telling us how things REALLY are. And, in the end, isn't what is TRUE the most important thing?