First Meal

By Elisabeth Fondell

Julia Child, the leader of the French home-cooking renaissance in America, never forgot the sensual delight of her first meal in France. Though I was not served oysters and sole meunière like Julia, I, too, will never forget my first meal in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

After a long flight, a reunion with my dear friend, and a short jaunt to Monaco in her hay-filled Peugeot, we arrived in Saint-Martin-d’Entraunes in the dwindling light. The mountain peaks around Haute Berarde shone a bright white in the sky’s final glow.

But before settling in for the night at the 300-year-old farmhouse, there were chores to be done. This was a working farm, and my friend, Lindsay, was tending it on her own. The cows grazing in a pasture at the foothills of the Alps needed their evening milking. This was done by hand into metal pails. I learned quickly and soon assisted with the twice daily milking, finding satisfaction in the process and visible sense of completion as the milk level rose to the brim of the pail. The milk went into a cooled water basin in the milk room, the pigs were checked on, the pails washed in the medieval-looking water trough, and the chickens fed.

At last we could relax. It being a warm evening and already rather late, dinner was a simple but extraordinary affair. Lindsay went outside to the cheesery and grabbed a freshly-pressed wheel of cheese from the cave where the others sat aging in neat rows. Since this cheese was made just a few days before, it had a consistency and flavor closer to fresh mozzarella than the more musky, ripe profile of a fully-developed camembert or reblochon. A quick dash to the garden brought back a handful of oblong, juicy tomatoes and sprigs of fresh basil. Grapes were picked and placed in a bowl. Red wine was poured. A crispy baguette, acquired earlier that day at a boulangerie along our mountainous route from Nice, joined the offering. With the addition of olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic, our feast was complete.

As we sat in that basement kitchen carved into the side of a mountain, with an old stove, a pantry filled with home preserves and hunks of cured meat hanging from the ceiling, a scrubbed wooden table, bags of freshly-picked green beans, and aged copper pots, I felt myself drifting slowly and unreservedly into the mesmerizing pull of provincial France.

I drifted even further into this other realm the next morning as we ate a post-chore breakfast of fresh cheese, hunks of baguette, soft-boiled eggs, local rose petal jelly, milk still warm from the milking, herby olives, and espresso. We dined on the terrace with wildflowers picked from the mountainside and the sound of cowbells in the distance.

My first meals may not have been sole meunière like Julia’s, but they were just as remarkable.