When the countess greeted us, she apologized for the luggage strewn in mid-pack in the halls. She had been preparing for departure to their château, but she hardly looked flustered. A woman in her sixties, with hair restored to a jet-black hue, she looked ready for Hello magazine in a red sundress and matching pumps, with a cigarette trailing smoke in her wake.
She led us into the sunroom, followed by Lulu, the terrier. A small but princely creature, he gave me a cursory sniff before curling up at the Countess’s feet. Then the Count marched in, a stocky, white-haired man clad in his favorite olive silk suit, singing a Breton folk tune. “Chant, Lulu, chant,” he called. Lulu scrambled to his haunches and began to howl along with his master.
The concert completed, Lulu settled back in and the Count got down to business. He listened attentively as our mutual friend Judy aggrandized my CV. Then his round blue eyes lit up and his face broke into a wide grin. He almost shouted, “Does she know how to make an omelette baveuse?”
I mustered a shy “Oui,” and the Count shook my hand. I was hired. “Elle est très jolie, oui, ça marche très bien.”
I was 22, a month out of college, with a degree in American history. Beyond omelette and oui, I spoke no French. Though I was interviewing for the post of summer cook, I’d cooked professionally for only six months, if I rounded up generously: one month flipping flapjacks at a sleepaway camp, three making Shabbat dinners for a family in New York, and two as a commis in a London restaurant. But I’d fallen in love with the métier and I was determined to learn cooking at the source. A few days after graduation, I’d flown to France with the secret wish that I might find an apprenticeship.
Grace à Dieu, I had been given the phone number of a woman who might be able to help. The afternoon I arrived at Judy Boullet’s apartment, she prepared a sumptuous lunch and teased out of me the extent of my hope. By coffee she’d mapped out my cooking career, starting with a summer as a private chef. Her friends Monsieur le Comte and Madame la Comtesse were kind and good-humored, and had reassured her that they did not need someone with much experience. They had just hosted a wedding for their son, with 900 guests, and were looking forward to a modest summer.
At their Paris apartment, the Count and Countess had a guest room where I stayed for the two weeks until we departed for Brittany. I divided my time between cooking classes in the morning, French classes in the afternoon, and evenings watching the Coupe du Monde with the housekeeper, Najiyah.
Najiyah was a Moroccan woman in her forties who had worked for the Count and Countess for nearly a decade and whose quiet manner belied her influence over the household. She knew their tastes and habits, and would watch me carefully to see that I understood them, too. Whatever I could not comprehend, Najiyah would show me by gesture. The day after Bastille Day, the two of us boarded the TGV to prepare the château for their arrival.
From the train station, we zipped along twisting roads past clusters of stumpy houses cobbled from brown Brittany stone. Long open fields of grass and wheat lined the roads, with occasional signs for moules and cidre, Muscadet, crêpes, and coquilles St.-Jacques. The Breton air was clean, and gusts blew clouds across the wide blue sky. We turned off the road at a rusty gate, crunched along a gravel drive surrounded by trees—and out popped a magnificent redbrick castle. The estate came complete with field, forest, pond, vegetable garden, chapel, and small barn; the main house had turrets and dungeonlike cellars.
The servants’ rooms were on the top floor of the west wing. I took the one in the south turret, round and snug with bright blue and yellow wallpaper, a soft double bed, and a door that led straight to a spiral staircase down to the cavernous kitchen.
There, Najiyah walked me through the daily routine. Pointing to the hours on the kitchen clock, she explained that breakfast would be served every day at 8:30. Pointing to twelve, she said we would eat lunch at noon, followed by their lunch at one. We would eat dinner at seven, and they would eat at eight. For them (“pour eux” was a frequent phrase between us), and for us (“pour nous”), lunch and dinner consisted of an appetizer, a main course, salad and cheese, and dessert.
Najiyah moved over to the coffee machine. Each morning, I was to start two pots: one for us, extra strong, and one for them, milder but with fancier beans. She extended her hands long for the three baguettes that would arrive: one for us, two for them. At 7:30 Najiyah and I would prepare the breakfast trays. If there were guests, we would serve them in shifts. I would follow her with any additional trays, and then circle back to meet with the Countess in her chambre to plan the day’s menu.
Next, Najiyah led me outside, where the gardener, Monsieur Madiot, had started radishes, lettuce, chives, onions, garlic, shallots, green beans, beets, and turnips. Now he was planting squash, pumpkins, and potatoes. For Madame, who was a talented flower arranger, he provided a range of blossoms. Najiyah showed me where to find the artichoke plants, the blackberry bushes, and the strawberry patch. It would be my responsibility to make sure we used as much as possible, reminding the Countess of what was ripest when we planned the menus. The three of us then packed off to the supermarket to get our sundries. The Count and Countess were to arrive later that night.
The next morning, the summer began in earnest. At seven, I let in the gardener, and together we enjoyed strong coffee and fresh baguette. We then set off, he to the garden, I to visit Madame and Monsieur in their room.
When I came in, Najiyah was raising the curtains, while the Count and Countess nibbled on breakfast in their pajamas. I had stayed awake late coming up with dishes for their approval, but I quickly discovered that when the Countess asked what they were going to eat today, she was speaking rhetorically. She and the Count knew well what they wanted. My suggestions were politely dispatched. Coq au vin? “Peasant food!” the Count chirped. Green beans with veal scallops? “You serve spinach with veal scallops, my dear,” he said, shaking his head at my American ignorance. “I’d like a steak for lunch. Did my wife tell you? We have guests coming!”
The Count had already called a local fisherman to come to the house with his catch. “The sea is full of sea bass!” he laughed. If the fisherman arrived, dinner would be poached sea bass with hollandaise and boiled potatoes. Carrot soup to start, lemon tart for dessert. For lunch, veal scallops with spinach. A platter of crudités to start, and perhaps a fruit salad for dessert.
And for tomorrow? Well, come back tomorrow morning and we’ll plan tomorrow, they said. It was time to get dressed.
Najiyah walked out with me to make sure I understood everything. “Four today,” she said. Their son and daughter-in-law would arrive that morning. “Get the potatoes from the garden, and get a beef tenderloin for dinner—that fisherman might not come,” she said.
When I returned from the supermarket, I found the Count with the fisherman in the kitchen, surveying a large bucket of flopping sea bass. The fisherman was tall, profoundly sunburned, and had wide blue eyes that seemed permanently focused on a distant horizon. He’d brought three dozen, and was smiling softly at his catch. Najiyah came in and started to gesture that I should begin skinning and gutting them, to prepare them for freezing. But lunch was in two hours, and I didn’t see how I could fit it in. I thought I might throw up.
As she walked out, I ran to the garden to get the potatoes, along with beets, radishes, and lettuce. Monsieur Madiot chastised me for not taking enough beans: there were thousands, and they would go bad if I left them too long. I’d read Alice Waters; I knew I was supposed to love this garden. But that morning I silently cursed it. “Tomorrow!” I promised, as I raced back with arms fully loaded.
Back in the scullery, I hid the fish in the refrigerator to be dealt with after lunch. I tossed the beets in a pressure cooker and filled the sink with water to clean the mud-coated greens. After what felt like a half day of washing, I was ready to start chopping. Najiyah stopped by to tell me the Countess liked hard-boiled eggs with her crudités, so I set those to boiling. The gardener came in to ask when his lunch would be ready, and he suggested I watch Joël Robuchon’s noon cooking show to help me with my knife skills. Even he could see I was slow.
At noon he came in and I was still chopping, though now finally just the shallots and chives for the salad dressing. Salad done, I set out ham, cornichons, Brie, and a bowl of beets left over from the crudité platter. He looked pleased. He clicked on the Tour de France and I started in on dessert.
I’d bought peaches and apricots for the fruit salad, so I pitted them and tossed them with sugar and some mint the gardener had brought from home. Najiyah said she was not hungry, but noticed that the fruit hadn’t been peeled, and clicked her tongue. No peel pour eux. I set to work peeling the halves. I wanted to serve the veal Italian-style, with butter and lemon. The pan was too hot and the butter scorched. I started over and remembered they wanted plenty of parsley, too. I hadn’t gotten enough from the garden, so I started digging some out from the salad. The veal started to curl in the pan. Najiyah sounded the buzzer. The gardener had stopped watching the television and was now watching me with his mouth slightly open.
I spoke aloud in English, slowly, to get it all straight: veal on platter, butter, lemon, parsley. The platter was warming in the oven. I burned my wet fingertips taking it out, then burned the other hand scooping the veal out bare-handed. I squeezed the lemon over it and fished out the seeds. I tried to spread out the scant parsley. The veal had not browned, so the scallops looked like pale, green-flecked shoe inserts. I averted my eyes as the platter rose up the dumbwaiter.
The next two weeks i did not improve. More guests arrived, so for a week I made similarly botched meals for six and eight instead of two and four. My mistakes doubled and trebled. The Countess started to notice unusually high bills from the Super U, for the extra eggs, butter, and olive oil needed to mend my mistakes. Najiyah came in four and five times before each meal to make sure everything was covered. The guests, other aristocrats, were charmed by the idea of “une jeune américaine” working in the castle. But I was afraid to ask what they thought of the food.
Gradually, though, I came to see that I was more nervous than I needed to be. My food was not great, but it was good enough. Even when it wasn’t, help appeared. For the first leg of lamb I roasted, Julia Child’s timing actually worked, and a dinner guest who had come to the kitchen to practice his English insisted on demonstrating the proper way to slice it. Another night, when I mistook green peppercorns for capers and served a tremendously spicy beef tongue, the Count laughed it off, saying that the men all loved it, it was just the ladies who found it “trop piquante.”
My hollandaise started to improve. I realized if I whisked it twice as fast, in a container twice as large, I ended up with twice as much. Even the Count was impressed. “Very nice and lemony,” he remarked.
I actually started to enjoy the daily treks out to the garden, and though I couldn’t find time to make jams as the Countess had requested, I was able to make vats of pumpkin soup for the fall, and introduced them to zucchini bread with the excess squash. I didn’t even panic when I found my first feathered ducks in the refrigerator’s crisper drawer.
Every night, the Count took Lulu and his hunting dog, Olga, on a stroll by the duck pond, bringing with him an antique pistol in case any fur or fowl crossed his path. He’d bagged a rabbit but hadn’t been able to get any ducks for weeks. Finally, he got two, and tucked them into the fridge for supper. I figured they were awaiting the taxidermist, until Najiyah informed me of his expectations.
Since I didn’t know that the wings should be cut off, not plucked, and they take the longest, it took about an hour and a half. But I got all the feathers off in time, and roasted the birds in butter with thyme and turnips from the garden.
Every day, I found myself thinking more with my hands than with my head. Instead of having to write out each meal in 15-minute increments of prep time, I could feel in my fingers what work needed to be done. I still didn’t know to judge doneness by touch, but I could now hear when the roast beef sizzled just so, indicating that it was near medium-rare. I could see what a well-roasted chicken looks like. I started to improve on little things: adding garlic cloves to the french fries, caramelizing the boiled turnips, peeling the baked apples halfway since the skin was so troublesome to eat. No longer in a state of steady panic, I had time to think things through.
My last week, the Count and Countess arrived home from a wedding hungry. I offered to make them an omelet.
“Une omelette baveuse?!” the Count roared, smiling, as he removed his coat.
“But of course!” I teased.
While browning the lardons of bacon, I whisked the eggs vigorously and heated the skillet. I knew to get it plenty hot to keep the omelet from sticking. In went the eggs. Before the inside had a chance to finish cooking, I scattered the bacon over it. Then I ran a fork along the edge, and the omelet’s outside rim peeled off like it wanted to come out on its own. I folded it over and slid it onto a plate. I cleaned up and went to bed, not waiting for their response. After eight weeks of cooking, I knew myself that it was good.