Flavors to remember

YES, I am a city boy, born and raised in the great city of Paris, France… actually, that’s not all of it… I was also raised in Northern France, eight miles away from the Belgian border, in the French Ardennes, where my mother’s parents showed me what it was like to live way back when… I spent my first sixteen summers in a small village of no more than two thousand people: Pouru-St-Remy. Best of all, that was the terroir where my grandfather, grandmother and my four great aunts lived, and where I witnessed a way of life which I now admire, from a land for whose flavors I long.

Of all the “tasty” regions in France, the north eastern Ardennes region is probably considered one of the least remarkable; this was not the land of spices, not a place like Provence, where plants advertise themselves to your senses when you step out of the house; but to me, this was the place where I learned the real flavor of fresh food, where the butcher grew the animals he slaughtered himself (that was my uncle). This is where we ate fish on Fridays and chicken (from my cousin’s farm) with green beans from the garden on Sundays, eggs from my great aunt – who lived across the railroad tracks, a few hundred yards away – milk from the lady up the street, who milked her cows in the next room and filled up my family’s one liter tin can every day. And of course, there was my grandmother’s weekly fruit tart, yet to be equaled by any dessert, anywhere.

Behind their large stone house was my grandfather’s garden and two orchards which, every year, faithfully yielded wheel barrels full of potatoes, green beans, apples, pears, hazelnuts, walnuts, deep purple plums, bright mirabelle plums, raspberries, strawberries, currants, blackberries, gooseberries, bilberries and, of course, grapes, which he tended so perfectly, in a way that seemed completely effortless. He also cared for twelve beehives, which produced over two hundred pounds of honey every year. Altogether, I probably spent about three months a year with my grandparents: during Christmas and Easter breaks, and the two glorious summer months.

My mother was the last person in our family with parents who grew their own food; a common fate for the next generation in that village. My mother was born, a few years before WWII, at the dawn of the world’s agricultural reset, when the vanishing rural population and agricultural traditions of the industrialized world were swiftly replaced by the mechanized and ubiquitous use of chemical fertilizers. During the war, in most of Europe, food was rationed but my family was able to complement their food tickets with whatever was left from their garden after the German invaders had helped themselves.

My grandparents produced and preserved a lot of food: their generation was the last (in France) to be allowed to distill their own fermented fruits, which included pear and plum liquor “eau de vie” (water of life), their own cider and wine, some made with grapes, others with nuts, orange rinds, and other secret ingredients. They would can green beans, plums, cornichons (sour gherkins) made out of young cucumbers and many preserves of strawberries, gooseberries,  plums and raspberries. At the end of every summer, we would fill up the car trunk with potatoes, honey and preserves that would last us the whole year and fill up our Paris apartment pantry. We put the potatoes in the cellar, away from any light, so they would not sprout.

As children take their world for granted, I had no idea I would ever miss those times, foods and flavors, or that I would go many years without, until I befriended a few local organic farmers who helped me rediscover the true flavor of produce and revive the fading memory of real food.