Cook this

A cooking class in Provence confirms my hate-hate relationship with cooking

I am lost again. I was due 20 minutes ago to my cooking class in Arles, in Provence. I should know how to navigate these narrow stone lanes since I’ve been staying here for nearly a month now. But no. I turn a corner and realize I’ve been here before. I’m officially going in circles. Google maps has given me up for lost, its little blue dot ping-ponging around the screen, abandoning me like a salesgirl in a chic shop. And now I’m sweating like only a menopausal

But if this was what it took to learn to make lapin, the Frenchiest of French meals, then so be it.

The cooking class — a bonus for forking over a mad amount of money for a month of desultory French language classes — is to be held in the chef’s home, which seemed unduly intimate when I was first told this news. The chef already had three advantages on me as I saw it: 1) she’s French. 2) she’s a chef, and 3) she’s French. And now I’m doing all this on her territory, alone with her? But if this was what it took to learn to make lapin, the Frenchiest of French meals, then so be it.

Finally, I see her standing on her stoop, like my childhood piano teacher looking for her errant student. I wave, make up some excuse, wipe the sweat from my face. She clucks, an ushers me into her home, a fourteenth century stone fortress , gloomy and dank.

Not only is she not-French, but I have somehow managed to get the one vegetarian in the country.

She is speaking rapid-fire French. I nod and reply, but even I can detect the accent. Is she — British? This throws this whole endeavor into a new light. Or actually, it confirms the desultory-ness of the entire French classes. I am learning to cook French cuisine from a Brit. Before I can confirm the accent, she whooshes me into her kitchen, an Earth Mother cave of legumes and grains and flour of many varieties lined up in jars, of misshapen clay urns, olive oil and fresh garlic, and a door to a courtyard with a camellia tree. She retrieves the ingredients for today’s meal from a tin pocket-shelf nailed to the outside of the door. A slug clings to a stalk of celery.

“I am a vegetarian,” she proclaims, as she deposits the pile of greens on the red-tiled counter. She has a lazy, wispy way of talking, like Sandy Dennis in “Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean.” “So I have rearranged your requested meal.”

Not only is she not-French, but I have somehow managed to get the one vegetarian in the country. No lapin for moi. Instead, we will cook artichotes en barigoule. Well actually, she will cook and I will watch.

She begins peeling the artichokes. Her movements are slow and deliberate, her manner a preternatural calm, never a raised voice even to her tween daughter who arrives from the market with a dripping tree branch that is the fresh bay leaves chef will need, along with a bag full of slimy snails. Not the kind you eat, however. The daughter, silent and lanky, rescued them after last night’s rain, her mother explains for her, and now will set them “free” in the patio. She also has two big blue snails in Tupperware that she is breeding. A girl, still a girl, who loves animals with a passion. She’ll transfer that love to a man one of these days and be lost for years. Sandy Dennis looks on with mamma-bear pride.

This is like watching Mister Rogers when you were expecting Electric Company.

The onions in the skillet begin to steam up the window and scents fill the kitchen. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and peel off a top layer of clothes. She is lecturing on the superiority of a German brand of mixer. “The American brands are insufficient,” she says staring at me intently. My hip and lower back ache from the hard stone floor. I shift from one foot to another to stay alert. It’s like watching Mister Rogers when you were expecting Electric Company.

After 30 minutes, she lets me soak a bit of dry bread in water, add an egg yolk, and mix. Woo-hoo! I’m whisking. In France.

“Not like that,” she snaps. And then recovers with an angelic smile. What’s this, do I detect a suppressed rage? Is she one of those women with the warm smile at the PTA meetings but who explode over a mushroom skinned the wrong way at home?

I continue whisking. It turns out my accent ear was correct. She is British. She and her husband came to France every summer for decades, and eventually settled in Arles full-time. A few minutes later, she firmly takes the whisk from my hand and finishes the task.

There’s a lot of things that happen in your 50s — hot flashes, desiccated skin, disappearance of muscle — but one of them is an airhorn blast of utter honesty.

“We will now stuff the artichokes with mushrooms and bacon — my one concession,” she smiles. I smile back, kind of afraid now. She proceeds to wrap one piece of paper-thin bacon around the artichoke. The kitchen clock ticks loudly. Tick, tick, tick. She methodically ties a string around the wrapped artichoke — tick–, tick–, tick–, tick–, tick–, tick — and finishes with a perfect, perfect knot.

I think my skin may explode.

Why do I allow people like Sandy Dennis here to show me how to cook something I could do perfectly well from a cookbook, and then pay for the pleasure? Perhaps a conversation for later, on a couch. Right now, I am being instructed to hold the oven door open.

Somewhere in my buried psyche I suspect that I’d wanted this class in Provence, ground zero for cuisine, to restore my flattened desire.

I have a growing hate-hate relationship with cooking. I once thrilled to the art of deboning a chicken or straining tomatoes through cheesecloth, but a flip switched somewhere about age 55. Perhaps it’s the freedom of the age that allowed me to admit that cooking is a chore dressed up as a passion. There’s a lot of things that happen in your 50s — hot flashes, desiccated skin, disappearance of muscle — but one of them is an airhorn blast of utter honesty: Wake up you idiot, the play is almost over! If the physical reminder of your obsolescence weren’t enough, then the mood swings pretty much top it off. “You cook the fucking dinner if you’re so hungry.” That kind of thing.

But as this interminable meal baked, it only confirmed my suspicion. Out damn kitchen, out.

Somewhere in my buried psyche I suspect that I’d wanted this class in Provence, ground zero for cuisine, to restore my flattened desire. But as this interminable meal baked, it only confirmed my suspicion. Out damn kitchen, out.

I began to prepare my escape. I would eat the artichokes and make my excuses. But wait, what was this? Was the daughter setting the table, by that I mean moving her snails and other pets off the dining room table along with all the school papers, overripe avocados, curled photos, rubber bands and paper clips, a pair of repaired shoes, and a bowl? Was there a full-on French meal ahead of me? Please, no.

The artichokes came out of the oven. I begged off. She insisted. My will to leave was no match for her. I ate two. They were, as all things French food are, superb. I tried to make conversation with a teenager, in French. At least she was like all teenagers, monosyllabic. That cut things right to the quick. I gobbled up the food, cementing the American stereotype, and made my excuses.

Out the door, down the street, I think I actually skipped. A few doors from home, I reward myself with a stop in Circa, an exquisitely curated boutique featuring the work of Arles’ artisans.

The door tinkles as I open it. In the middle of the shop, a teenager is plunking the yellowed keys on a baby grand piano. The piano, in rich rosewood from the 1930s, dominates the front of the shop like a pedigree race horse on parade. I’m beautiful, I know, it whispers. A discreet hand-lettered card, “not for sale,” sits atop it. I imagine it in the living room of a colonial Kenyan coffee farm where Denys sits in a leather chair with a smoky Irish whiskey listening to Karen play.

The owner, a sultry-voiced Lauren Bacall, approaches with a cigarette in hand. Her girlfriend smokes laconically in a chair in the corner, dressed in a kimono. She gets up, stretches like a cat, and walks into another room.

“Bonjour,” the owner purrs. “Puis-je vous aider?”

“Non,” I murmur, “seulement regarder.” I am having a hard time focusing on the art and not her. I’m not attracted to women, but this one is smack-down gorgeous. Smoky voice, nonchalance, sultry cool, with a capital C. Sade in silk slacks.

And suddenly, just like that, the Artichotes en Barigoule are not sitting right. My stomach burps, followed by a long deep rumble.

I stroll into one of the alcoves and pretend to stare at a painting but end up watching her write out an invoice. She looks at me over her half-moon glasses. “Do you like that one?” she asks. “I do,” I say, stumbling for French. “What about it do you like?”

“Uh,” — stall for time, stall for time. I feel like my 18-year-old self when my very chic and cultured aunt — who wore a sleek chignon and a lot of black — asked me what I liked about a Sargeant painting we were standing in front of and I said, brilliantly, “uh, the sea.”

Emannuelle — I’ve named her — sweeps over silently and stands behind me, staring at what I’m seeing. “Mmm,” she murmurs, as if she’s just eaten a plump scallop in a sublime sauce. I feel like a big lurching Midwesterner in a stuffed parka and the wrong shoes.

And suddenly, just like that, the Artichotes en Barigoule are not sitting right. I mumble a reply in English, which she swats aside in a dismissive wave, as if she didn’t have the patience for speaking plebian English. I really do need to leave, but I don’t want her to think I’m a dolt. My stomach burps, followed by a long deep rumble. I pretend to see something else I like and make a move toward the door, all the while gauging just how long I can last with the stomach. Luckily for me, my home is right around the corner and there is a bathroom on the first floor. There must be some Einsteinian theorem of distance-to-relief that signals my GI tract. The closer the bathroom, the greater the urgency. My mind has done the math and is literally, loudly urging me on at this point. I must flee.

And flee I do, ungracefully, with a lame “merci,” and then a cheek-squeezing race-walk to our front door.

I can now officially never return to Circa.

Later that evening, recovered from the artichokes, I put a slab of meat I’d purchased at the butcher into a Dutch oven, add some wine, pearl onions, carrots, and a smidge of flour and put the lid on it. No string, no painstaking wrapping bacon, no piles of artichoke peelings. Just a pan and a lid an a glass of wine waiting.

Outside on the patio with starlings swooping overhead, I drink my wine and add “freedom” to the Scrabble board while the simple meal cooks itself. I stare at my word, which apparently arrived on the board from somewhere deep in my subconscious. My not-French chef who taught me to cook my not-lapin meal doesn’t realize what she’s given me.