After having a real pizza moment today at Grimaldi’s in DUMBO, I’ve decided it is time to put up a dogmatic post about New York Superlatives.

Best Food Critic You Love and Love to Hate:  Sam Sifton.  As R said: “His writing makes me want to eat out with him, then kill him.”  You will be missed Sam!

Best Pizza:  Grimaldi’s.  The cheese makes those delectable strings when you sever a hot slice, but it is not of the slidey mozzarella family.  There are half-melted pillows of it, browned like a marshmellow.  And the crust is thin enough to make you feel elegant (flat food is more chic, whether you know it or not), but thick enough to remind you that yes, crust is a relative of bread.  Also, heat-blasted pepperoni that has curled up into little cups, oily thimbles of the hearth gods.  (that last bit was a Sam Sifton tribute)

Best burgers:  Shake Shack.  More specifically, Shake Shack Madison Square Park.  I have had the wonderful grace to have an eating companion who is rather obsessed, and I now have the authority to tell you that even at the holy temple at SSMSP, the consistency can be spotty.  So, even though I can tell you that the meat is perfectly lumped into a petite burger, charred yet never dry, overlaid with a necessarily overlarge slice of just-melted cheese, and accompanied by fresh from the crisper lettuce and tomato, all stacked gently together on a sweet soft round bun (potato bread?), it is only this perfect about half the time.  Which is a lot!  Which is worth the possible hour-long line if you’re not pre-cranky.  Their fries are barely worth it, and their concretes have nothing on Dairy Queen, but their custard is the best way to fill that tiny corner of your stomach that want a second Shackburger but can’t…quite…commit.

Best coffee:  Ace Hotel, Stumptown. Yes, yes, pretentious and sure the brand is stretching itself too thin blah blah their cappuccino has the type of silken brown foam that to me is all caramel and nuttiness.  In other words, it comes closest to tasting what coffee smells like.  Cue actual barista language.

Best Ice Cream:  Well, there are several houses of worship in NYC, although I have to be completely honest and say that Toscanini’s cardamom in Cambridge can be rivaled by no one, except maybe Berthillon’s armagnac and prune flavor in Paris.  Don’t I sound snobby!  Anyways, as for New York, I particularly like Goat Town’s tart and refreshing take on salty caramel, while the Bassett’s chocolate at Sweet Melissa’s is fudgier than any I’ve had.  Also, Momofuku Milk Bar has things like cereal milk soft serve, and once this alcoholic salty pistachio milkshake that tasted like how I’ve always envisioned manna.

Best Buns:  While I’m praising David Chang, let me just say: his pork buns.  Steamed buns, as soft and plump as a baby’s bottom.  In a non-creepy way.  Thin rounds of cucumber, hoisin sauce, a sprinkle of scallions, and a slice of roast pork as holy as anything so unkosher could be.  Look at those pictures.  My Jewish vocabulary can go no further.

Although!  If you happen to find yourself in Alphabet City, seek out Bauhaus.  Same pillowy, voluptuous buns.  Beef cheek (cheeks?), in those chunky shards that happens when beef is well-braised, with crushed peanuts and leaves of cilantro.  They used to do peanuts boiled in vinegar, but alas, no more.

Ok kids, that’s enough for tonight.  I’m starving and all I’ve got is corn pops.

You spend your days ogling useless sites getting a feel for the scene, you know, if you ever wanted to free-lance.  However that works.  In the meantime, you create wordpress blogs.  One for every catchline you think up.  Don’t bother to put more than one post per blog—they’re one trick ponies.  But tweet the shit out of it.  (Also, Facebook and gchat.  Networking, baby, you’re young and you know how to work the system!/annoy friends.  This may be a skill listed on one of your resumés.)  Along with blogs, create resumés.  It’s self-affirming seeing that whole bouquet of resumés up in your Microsoft Word search.  Sure it’s annoying to make up dates for that community play about Indians –Native Americans, but bullshitting is a skill that requires practice.  So said your graduation speaker, who got rich off of being a terrible person.  Tweaking margins is also a good skill, although college is over.  Remind yourself that college is over.  How less stressed you are now.  Think about the late night paper freak-outs, the late-night snack bar, the unlimited dining hall, the free gym at your fingertips, the…

Think of ways to get back into college.

Decide, one day, that free-lancing is terrible.  There’s no audience (mainly because you haven’t published anything), and galdammit, if you just sometimes crave approval.  It suddenly dawns on you that you want to become an actor.  Audiences up the wazoo!  Instant adoration!

Watch a lot of movies to research.  Learn that the quick eye-jiggle (searching look between scene partner’s two eyeballs) is a really good pre-cry thing.  Check out profile and ¾ angle of face, because that is really important.  If cheekbones don’t pop, learn how to make them pop without looking too Botox-y.  Troll around on Craigslist, but beware of the ads asking for full-body nude shots and numbers.  Keep things professional:  if the ad is in all caps, it probably isn’t that great.  Also, if they want sexy ladies with sexy feet, probably not that great/you don’t want to be the next tabloid Craigslist footless wonder.

Sign up for sites offering perfect casting, then quickly block their number as they begin calling you daily.  When you are experiencing your habitual sorry-for-yourself tears when Netflix crashes in the middle of True Blood (monster research), try to capture that emotion and bottle it.  Then, later, try to make yourself cry.  As it usually starts out with that twinge in your nose, you can lightly punch yourself in the face to kickstart the emotion.  Look up acting classes at fancy studios, realize that four classes are half of your monthly salary.  Punch yourself in the face to research bar fights.

Breakfast:  Cereal, milk, tea.  Your roommates reuse tea bags, but this is too reminiscent of that Depression-era mockumentary where they actually cut the penny in half.  Reusing tea bags is like eating a bagel someone chewed first.

Exercise:  Think about it this way.  You want to conserve calories.  Only rich people want to be in shape.  You want to eat as much as possible, as cheaply as possible.  If that means having a few TD Bank lollipops (green and/or purple) while just checking in on your incubating account, consider it lunch.

Lunch:  2 lollipops from the bank.

If you work in the food industry, eat as much as possible on the job.  If you work in a kitchen, you’re golden.  And probably fat.  But be careful:  it’s best not to go into work hungry, because you will become obsessed with how to best filch food on the sly.  While chopping those carrots, your only thought is how to get a good-sized chunk to pop in your mouth.  The pastry dough is uneven?  Trim that sucker.  The walk-in fridge is a great opportunity, those rows of quart containers just crying to be pried open and sampled.  Just don’t let anyone walk in on you with your figurative pants down, half a square of cold squash lasagna stuffed down your frost-breathing maw.

Dinner in the food industry:  midnight, after you’ve finished cleaning behind the stoves and mopped the floor of the predecessors to the chicken that’s now on your plate.

If you’re a waitress in a fancy place, good luck.  Food filching is virtually impossible in between yelling at/getting yelled at by the expeditor, burning yourself on other people’s dinners, bowing and smiling at annoying patrons.  Dinner:  midnight.  You’re too tired to be hungry anymore.  Look on the bright side: no one likes a fat waitress!

Bussers:  Gross, don’t even think about eating off the plates you’re clearing.  Well, unless it looks really good and relatively untouched.

If you don’t work in the food industry, you probably should.  Unless you want to subsist off of the packaged goods that sometimes show up during holidays and birthdays.

Day 2:  Rinse and repeat.  For every inquiry on Craigslist you send out, treat yourself to a spoonful of peanut butter.

Anyways, it’s this purple-black syrup that intrigues me.  It tastes similar to the rounded and caramelly sweetness of date honey, and I imagine it would be good trickled onto thick greek yogurt, or ice cream.  Can it be fortified or reduced as a sauce for venison?  Duck in prune juice.  I want to hear of a restaurant that does the opposite of menu-dressing-up.  Instead of glazes and braises and all those words that people like me live for, why not see how ugly a dish description can get?  Chicken alfredo, for example, would be chicken in white dairy gunk over noodles.  Noodles is a fun word but pasta sounds more elegant.  Chicken is pretty unattractive as it is.  I don’t blame people back in the day for putting everything on the menu in French.  Poulet en sauce de crème avec des pâtes. Or something like that.

This is perhaps an example of how blogging can make a writer lazy.  Or narcissistic.  No one wants to read about some nobody’s soul-searching, especially soul-searching that has no tight moral to be learned, or a recipe at the end.  I think I might be turning old ladyish before it’s really acceptable to throw in the towel.  I have Netflix, am particular about hand creams, and my idea of an adventure is wandering out into a blizzard to get carrots for a Moroccan Carrot soup.  Which is actually an amazing recipe.  I added a few cloves of garlic in with the onions, as well as a dash of paprika and curry powder.  Also, a bay leaf.  I’m still trying to figure out the exact taste of bay leaves…I fished it out and sniffed it before throwing it away–is it like juniper, something piney and full of depth?

The carrots far exceeded expectations.  Once blended, the little cooked disks lose their vibrant orange color and become this mellow creamy puree.  In the blender, the soup froths in a way that reminds me of steaming milk.  First, the stuff rises and puffs and thickens, and then as the scum from the top is sucked down in a steep wall, the whole thing acquires this glossy sheen.  Yup, glossy Moroccan Carrot soup.  It’s so creamy it doesn’t even need the addition of yogurt, although that never hurts, ever.

Well, like an old lady I’ve rambled off before delivering any sort of message or coherent thread.  I care surprisingly little.  I’ve got leftover carrot soup, and a Netflix movie I’ve been saving.

Instead, though, I want to talk about how impossible it is to start a blog.  First off, there were the technical difficulties:  last night, my computer charger, who has had a faltering, failing red light for the past few months, finally melted in half.  I went to tug the cord, to cajole it into its gritty old slot, and the cord detached from the charger head in an oddly soft parting of plastic.  There was this little bundle of silver fibers bunching out of the cord, looking like electronic neurons, and I felt briefly like a mad scientist angrily waving my bare wires about.  The charger head was still affixed to my computer, looking rather decapitated, like those big tractor trailers missing their cargos you see on the highway.

Then, of course, the toilet broke.  My roommate was on her way out to work, as I called down the hall to her, “Ummmm?  I think I broke the toilet?”

“Text me if you need anything!  Bye!”  and she ran out the door.  I felt like a naughty child, but the break was just a clean white snap of the handle, and luckily there was nothing to be embarrassed about.  When bathroom gadgets break, you always feel ashamedly responsible, like somehow the plumbing can’t handle you and that’s usually a bad thing.

And those are nature’s signals telling me not to start a blog.  I won’t get into everything about blogs being self-centered, pretty useless, and unless you have a fascinating life, good photos, or good recipes, nobody in their right mind should be interested in what you have to say.  My What’s-Appropriate meter is all out of wack, and I’m going to keep spinning dizzily in circles until the hand gets permanently stuck at Self Justification.

Anyways speaking of broken gadgets and widgets, I will say that the Apple Store is a beautiful thing, and as I unwrapped my shiny new white chocolate charger from its candy wrapper, even I (a non-believer) felt the thrill of technology.  I mean, any store that has opaque stairways like digitally frozen waterfalls, or an entire outlet situated beneath a square glass pyramid, I.M. Pei-like, is going to charm the pants off even the most digitally incapable.

Foodstuffs

Yesterday I made a pretty good version of Epicurious’s Spanish White Beans with Spinach last night for my vegetarian and microwave-dinner-eating friends.  Sometimes I worry that my cooking borders on too wholesome.  Don’t get me wrong–I used 3 sticks of butter the other day in some jam thumbprint cookies, and I’ll be the first one to fry my potatoes in duck fat–but there’s something so satisfying in wilting an exuberant pot of fresh spinach into floppy green tendrils.  When a recipe begins with sautéing an onion or two and half a clove of garlic in the oil of sun-dried tomatoes, you can’t really go wrong.  Actually, I added the part about the sun-dried tomato oil, but now you know to do it.  That oozy, seed-littered stuff is like liquid gold, and I liberally souse all my pasta with it, unless it means leaving the remaining sun-dried tomatoes high and parched in their jar.  This Epicurious recipe is otherwise good, although I added much more water, a pinch of curry powder and cinnamon, and let the covered beans stew for a good half hour.  I really don’t like that starchy, beany white taste of beans fresh out of the can, and by cooking them longer, they get nice and tender.  Also, my dinner guests were working women and don’t get home until late.

I suppose I should put pictures up, since who reads content anymore if there is food pornography?  Well, shoot.  Next time.

August in Maryland is pleasurably ripe.  The grass in our lawn has faded from the fertility weeds of Tess of D’Urbervilles to a more jaundiced yellow—to my great regret, as I am the family lawn-mower.  Our lone peach tree has long since drooped heavy with beautiful but watery fruit, whose flushed skins have been quartered, peeled, and frozen for future pies.  Right now I’ve got my eye on the duo of pear trees, both loaded with knobbly pears that refuse to soften.  We have kept a few on our windowsill for the past few weeks under the concept that pears must be plucked from the tree while still hard, but they remain stubbornly unyielding to my inquisitive thumbs.

Whenever I mow the lawn, I try to get as close as possible to those trees.  I stop the red tractor inches from the tree trunk, and with my head in its branches I search for the plumpest-looking pear.  So far it has only been disappointment, and I continue on past the maples, leaving a trail of cut grass and sour pears in my wake.

Even before the summer started, I worried about working the cash register.  Math has never been my thing, ever since second grade when we learned addition by counting dots that had been drawn on each number. For example, the number 3 has three dots on its points.  Now this works for 1, 2, and 3, but you can draw 4 in two ways, and I never agreed with the dot placement on 6 and 9.  It was a newfangled system, a sort of ill-fated Phonics or Suzuki method that is catchy but only gets you so far.  But maybe I shouldn’t blame my abysmal math skills on school, since ultimately my brain refuses to grope its way around numbers.

At the farmer’s market everything is about change.  The euro is a beautiful currency, with colorful bills that are all, well, relatively new.  The one and two euro coins are satisfyingly thick, and can add up to a lovely surprise in your change purse.  Smaller than that, and things get messy—for a while I missed the quarter, but when you have 2 cent pieces somehow 25 cents seems unnecessary.

In addition to my acquired or inherited (thanks Mom) ineptitude for numbers and the somewhat foreign currency, there is the French way of counting.  After sixty—soixante–someone get tired.  Or, more likely, the poor guy realized that septsante sounded too much like sept cent (700) and that septante was just ugly.  So, there is soixante-dix up through soixante dix neuf (60 +19).  Then, to have a little more fun, we switch to multiplication: eighty is quatre-vingt (4 times 20).  That of course makes the nineties into something ridiculous: ninety-seven becomes quatre-vingt dix sept, or in other words, 4 times 20 plus seventeen.

Regine who works the Wednesday market has never been one to mince words.  “This one,” she says, grabbing my arm after I’ve just given a customer back the wrong change, “is a bit special.”  She taps her forehead.  “Americaine.”  They both laugh.  “Oh why yes!  McDonalds.”  says the customer in English.  When I was still in Paris, the first word associated with American was Barack Obama.  Now it is usually Michael Jackson.  Either way, I’m glad I wasn’t here when it was surely Bush (“Boosh”).

Apart from the math problem, and the fact that I probably deserve all the concerned looks the customers give me, the markets are fun.  There is a sort of motherly pride that comes when you box up a tartelette that you yourself made the night before.  The mint in the tabbouleh was my idea! I want to shout when I hand over a box.  Cheese cutting is especially fun.  We have the moderately sized cheeses they make at the farm (au naturel, pimento, pepper, cumin, and a garlic basil that smells abominably), a few gooey ewe’s milk cheeses, and some very large tomes of Comté and Cantal.

First, you have to answer the questions about the cheese.  Is it dry?  Do you know how long it has aged?  Then, you plunk the cheese on the cutting board and take hold of the long knife with handles on both ends. You place the knife on the crust to cut a wedge, and then you must always show the placement of your knife to the customer.  You learn to offer smaller wedges to the men, who seem to relish telling me to go bigger, while most women take an odd pleasure in shuddering in horror and asking for a piece much smaller.  With the huge Cantal, I have to stand on my tiptoes and use my weight to cut through to the bottom of the cheese.  I like to think of it as my weekly musculation.

“Oh la, I’ve got to clean my nails tonight,” Claudette said the day before my first market.  We were planting beans in her immense, extremely tidy garden.  “When you go to cut the cheese and the customer is watching, it’s not so good to have all this dirt under your nails.  Tuesday nights I always use a little lemon juice in the shower.”

I’ve never had a manicure and don’t give much thought to fancy nails, but it’s true that I notice when someone has dirty hands.  I used to automatically pre-judge it as bad hygiene.  Now I really understand why women wanted pretty nails to show they did not do manual work.  Nail polish chips when you’re washing dishes all day.

After the market peters out around one, Vincent sets up a table in the shade with the leftover cheeses and breads.  There is always a small crowd at the Bordeaux lunches, whether it’s Vincent’s old rugby friends or the prim ladies who sell honey next door.  Once I sat next to a slick wine vendor who never took off his sunglasses.  He told me that in a good Bordeaux, you can always find notes of chocolate and Cuban cigars.  Another day I sat next to a bitter British expatriate, who (if I can believe him) spent his youth in Morocco trafficking weed.

A word about English-speaking expatriates.  Those that I have encountered have been extremely friendly, eager for my attention in an almost desperate way.  When you live in a country where you don’t really know the language, I suppose you are happy to talk to just about anyone. At first, I was always excited to talk to a fellow English speaker, if only to prove to myself that I could still be sarcastic (something that has not produced successful in French).  But talking in English amidst all the French can be hard.  Somehow, the words seem mushy in my mouth, and I can’t stop saying oui instead of yes.

There is a brash feeling of privacy that comes from speaking a different language amidst a crowd of people whom you suppose cannot understand.  This may explain the annoying loudness of American tourists in the Paris metro.  As a result of this shaky security, my expatriate conversations tend to become extremely personal.  The British ex-pothead wanted very much for me to believe that Bordeaux was built from the blood money from slave trading, and that the British were mainly responsible for the glory of French wine.

Another old Welsh man once told me his scarily extremist views on immigration: they should all be sent back to Africa.  At the time, we were walking literally through fields of gold during a particularly splendid sunset.  Every Friday at eight, Claudette and her band of sprightly villagers take a two hour ramble through the neighboring fields.  The eighty year-olds and I walk through fields of wheat at a brisk pace, “Are we going too fast for you?” Claudette asked me when I lagged behind to take a photo.  We stop occasionally to discuss odd-looking weeds or steal plums from the neighbors’ trees.   Until then, I had much enjoyed listening to this Welsh gentleman, his accent reminding me of some quaint character in Hobbitville.  Behind us, one adorable grandmother had stopped to “faire pipi” in the woods.  I watched her run (73 years old) towards us in the lavish light of the sunset as the Welsh man explained his political views to me, and it all felt ridiculously disconnected.  This last week he was not there, and even though it rained on us twice during the walk, I enjoyed it much more.

My only problem with this overwhelming manliness is that it leaves almost no room for the girls.  Sure, there are intelligent women, but the strong characters are square and old and about as manly as possible.  Pilar has a deep booming voice and seems to have renounced her sexuality for power.  The attractive ones are always standing behind their man, one hesitant and caring hand on his shoulder while he thinks of more important things.  Maybe I’m taking his writing too personally, but I don’t know any girl would like to be admired and then sent back to tend to the fire while the adults discuss around the table.

It may be true also that the condescension of these old farmers can get my shrill little feminist bee a-buzzing.  I think it has a lot to do with my accent, which becomes a comprehension barrier when one is deaf–and that’s basically every man over the age of 60.  The fault of tractors, I think.  It also is the age difference, since obviously young folks know nothing.  Everyone knows that humanity crumbles a bit with each new generation infinitely less polite than the previous.

It’s true to a great extent, I suppose, that the farms were much better off in the good old days.  The farm here at Crozefond was one of the first biological farms in the region, but that doesn’t stop the neighboring tobacco farmer from spraying his pesticides from a helicopter.  They can’t even wash the cows with their well water, since it is contaminated with nitrates from another neighbor’s manure which he leaves too close to the river.  It’s hard sometimes to really understand the helpless anger of some farmers, but when the problem is as specific and solvable as the neighbor moving his poop pile, I get mad too.

We have a new face at the table, an old messieur that everyone calls TinTin because he resembles the Belgian cartoon character.  That is, if TinTin aged fifty years and went completely to seed—lost his tuft of orange hair, got thick round glasses, and took to the bottle like Captain Haddock and grew an impressive potbelly.  Tin Tin is always right.  I don’t mind when he is telling me something I don’t know (the difference, say, between royal jelly and honey).  But when he explains to me how piano is good for the hand muscles, it can get tiring.  Also, he insulted my cooking.  Since we eat what the garden produces, this means zucchinis and tomatoes every day, twice a day.  I tried to get creative and put a bit of pesto in with our usual stew, and he complained it had a peculiar taste.  Certainly he does not help to clear the table.  Now, TinTin is as much a guest as I am.  He has come for two weeks to fix some bicycles and help kill some chickens.  I get annoyed when Claudette and I are washing dishes while he remains seated commandingly at the table. )

Anyways, excuse the ranting.  It is true that he and Claudette work off each other to tell the most amazing stories.  When they were kids, they lugged the pails of cream to the creek where the cold water served in place of a refrigerator.  Their parents used horses instead of tractors, and I learned that the common Laguiole pocket knife has a grip on the blade made especially for when farmers needed to quickly cut the reins if the horses bolted.

Today is Sunday, which means we had meat for lunch.  This is a rare enough occasion since it’s not every day that they kill a cow or chicken around here.  The day we had veal I found I didn’t have too much appetite.  Rihanna and Mad-Eye have both disappeared and I don’t dare inquire where.  Speaking of gaminess, which seems to be the word of the day, you wouldn’t think that beef could be so pungent.  The steak is darker all over—after a few minutes in the pan it changes from ruby raw to a dark brown that looks seared but isn’t, and even the pink inside is well, bloodier.  And somehow, there remains that faint cow odor, almost like manure, in the back of your mouth.  It sounds gross but it isn’t, and now I understand when TinTin and Claudette agree (a rare thing) that beef should taste like beef and that there’s no need for other seasonings.

Anyways, lunch today was chicken.  Chicken in France has much less white meat and, if I can say without snobbery, it is much better.  After spending a year with my bourgeois Paris host family futzing with the proper way to hold a knife and fork, I was admittedly surprised when Gilbert picked up his chicken in his hands and crunched away.  He also peeled a clove of raw garlic and ate that too.

I was proud that, when fishing around in the pot, I was able to recognize and avoid the veal liver (tastes like blood).  It was only later, when I had given up poking at my chicken piece that I realized what it was.  Gazing absentmindedly at the plate, I suddenly recognized the shape of the cock’s comb.   I stopped mopping up with my bread and stared in horror at the shaved away part of the head where the beak was previously.

“Well,” I said later when the dishes were safely cleared, “I wasn’t aware that one could eat the chicken head.”  Claudette must have noticed my reaction earlier.  “Oh yes,” she said, “what is really good are the eyes.  And the brain.  Oh those little blue chicken eyes.”  I was in the middle of trying to remember if it was possible for chickens to have blue eyes when she couldn’t keep her straight face any longer.

“But,” she said seriously after her and TinTin had a good laugh, “my father really loved the feet.  It’s a nitpicky job taking the nails off the toes, but he’d go at a good ten feet at a time with gusto.”

And I need to say a thing or two about stinging nettles.  Before this summer, to me stinging nettles were like some sort of antiquated poison ivy only found in tall tales—like the briar patch that Brer rabbit was always getting thrown into for punishment.  Stinging nettles are the plant that stings at first contact, itches like a mosquito bite after, and then a few hours later, the tingling prickly sensation starts.  It feels vaguely like pins and needles, but with no numbness. Apparently, stinging nettles are good for circulation.

On Monday, I went down to the pond with gloves and a big pail to pick les orties.  The gloves are cute, ending neatly at my wrists where they basically provide no protection.  Also, it was probably a bad idea to wear shorts.  All that afternoon I had the cold crawling sensation around my ankles and kept thinking it was the ants again.  We did have quite a population that showed up when we made apricot jam.  The jam is the same color as the setting sun if such a thing could be bottled.  Definitely worth the ant trouble.

In France, they eat stinging nettles.  To be more exact, we put them in quiches.  I had a hilarious time telling a few Australian tourists at the market last week that la quiche aux orties was, well, stinging nettles.  They decided to take the pizza.

I don’t mean to complain, exactly.  Claudette, who I live with, is 71 and won’t let me carry the ice cream bucket, since she says it is too heavy for me.  As I stumble out of the patisserie at 8 pm, she jogs off (a sprightly jog at that) to water her massive garden before dinner.  She never complains, but coos contentedly every time she sits down, “Oh, but that does me good.”  Today I caught her saying it while we were still setting the lunch table.

“But you’re still standing,” I had to point out.

“I’m already imagining it in my head,” she said.  Never have I seen such optimism.  I would consider her a throwback to nature, but her husband Gilbert is 74 and I believe he still has a six-pack.  He is deaf and extremely grumpy, and comes in from the fields sometimes at midnight to bang around in the kitchen—a habit that I can’t decide to attribute to the deafness or the grumpiness.  He is devoted to the cultivation of ancient seed varieties, and cooks himself vile-smelling herb stews that I suspect may be the key to perpetual youth.  Sometimes he shouts at me that three years in a Kibbutz would whip me into shape.  I’d say four weeks here on the farm should do it pretty well.

            Rihanna was born the day before I got here.  I call her Rihanna because she has beautiful black eyes that are just slightly spaced too far apart.  Also, a white star on her forehead.  Then there is Mad-Eye with a spot over one eye, and Rambo, who is hard headed and often runs himself into things.  Dollface has long white eyelashes and likes to lick, while Hennie is undeniably boring so I couldn’t help but name her similarly.  The day we went to Bordeaux for the market, another calf was born.  This one is all fuzzy grey, and wobbles around on legs that can’t quite straighten yet.  I’m waiting for inspiration before I name him, but he spends most of his time curled up in the corner, blinking surprisedly at the flies.

            Every day around 6:30 in the evening, Nicolas the middle brother whistles for Vicky the border collie, and together they round the herd into the dairy, where there is a gated cement ramp that leads to two rows of milking machines.  Milking a cow, even with the little sucking machine, seems to my immature mind an inescapably sexual act.  First you hose down the udders–pokey pink dangly things–then dry them thoroughly with a cloth.  I was drying my udders a bit too gingerly since after all this is that in-between-the-legs region, and Luc showed me how do it with an open palm so that you don’t start the milk flowing yet.  Then, you take the sucky machine, which looks like an octopus with four tentacles, and one by one suction the tentacles onto each udder with a little popping noise.  The machine chugs away for a few minutes, then detaches itself and swings free when there is no more milk.  Somehow, perhaps extremely naively, I expected the cow’s udders to deflate when they were empty, but this did not happen. 

            I have always wanted to milk a cow by hand, and Nicolas let me try a few tentative squirts.  I could see how without the machines, it would be a long job to milk all fifty cows.  The farm here at Crozefond is well-equipped, but still with the rotatiller and hay-bale making tractor, things take time.  I can’t even begin to fathom how people did this with scythes and mules and the old warped tools that are nailed up on the walls for decoration in so many of the houses around here.

              Fresh milk, still warm from the cow, is good.  It is not frothy cream of my imagination flecked with fragrant bits of hay, but it is still good.  When I asked for milk at breakfast, we walked over to the dairy where there is a huge metal humming thing.  You open the lid, dip a pitcher in, and there is your untreated milk.  After a few days in the fridge, the cream separates on top.  After a few more days, I stop drinking it.  I’m not particularly squeamish but I do have great fear in the area of creamy things gone bad.  The other room of the dairy, where the cows don’t go, has white shiny tiles on the walls and floor and lots of stainless steel piping.  Here they make butter, big rounds of raw milk cheese, yogurt in little glass pots, and ice cream.  Also, the most amazing rice pudding that has a golden layer of caramel on the bottom. 

            The secrets of the dairy remain undiscovered–I’ve spent all my time (and I mean almost every waking hour) in the patisserie with Vincent, the youngest brother.  He is a former rugby player who likes to shout English phrases at me “where is ze knife?” (pronounced ck-neef) while slapping around the dough for the apple turnovers. Last night he hosted a huge bonfire at his house for La Fête de Saint Jean.  Apparently, Saint Jean was burned to death and it is an old tradition in every village to have a huge bonfire in remembrance.  It all seemed somewhat morbid to me until I remembered my high school’s Homecoming football game, where we burn a scarecrow-like effigy of our rival the night before and dance around the flames maniacally.

            The wood was piled in a perfect circle about two stories high, and we all stood around drinking boxed wine waiting for the perfect sunset to hurry up and fade so that the fire could be lit.  This was my first French barbeque, and there were long links of wonderful-smelling sausages that people folded into split-open hunks of bread.  None of that perfectly sized hot dog to go with its pre-made bun.  Here it was an old flour sack filled with baguettes that you cut with your neighbor’s pocketknife.  When that was finished, Vincent brought out a wedge of Cantal cheese about the same size as a watermelon, and neatly cut it with a wire that seemed to be made for that purpose. 

            I talked with a few khaki-clad Brits, who had a summer house just up the road.  They thought I was French, and I was so flattered that I kept the conversation going in French until it became too painful.  “Non merci, je suis pleine,” said one very proper and anxious lady when Vincent came by with more cheese.  He just grinned and disappeared into the crowd, leaving me to tell her that literally “I am full” really means “I’m knocked up.”

            The woodpile was so big the fire would have burned all night, but when the boxed wine was finished, people started packing up.  Someone got in the huge tractor that was parked at the corner of the field and doused out the fire in huge jets of water.  Then a few of us went back to Vincent’s house, where we sat in his wine cellar and ate rum-soaked prunes.  Prunes, les pruneaux d’Agen, are a specialty of the region.  I have an old-lady-like obsession with dried fruits, but these things were as strong as an orange wedge that has been soaking in Sangria for a week. 

            As the night wore on, Vincent continued to circulate dusty bottles from the shelves.  There was prune eau de vie, apple Calva, and a glass bottle of clear liquid with a whole pear floating inside like some sort of pickled specimen.  This drink is apparently very rare, since you must slip the pear into the bottle when the pear is still a tiny bud on the tree.  The bottle stays on the tree while the pear grows, and it is very difficult to get the conditions just right: it can’t get too much or too little sun, and it must be tilted so that the rainwater doesn’t collect inside.  The old guy next to me tried to convince me that they fused together two halves of the bottle around each pear, but he had eaten quite a lot of prunes and was not altogether coherent.  And even if everyone else at the table was pulling my leg as well, I still hold fast to the image in my mind of a pear tree glimmering with glass bottles like soap bubbles caught between the leaves.