Nathalie Bouffe

Soundtrack to a Million Miles

My last six months have been set to music.  Whether you’d call them self-employment or unemployment, the truth is I was often my own boss and only company, and it meant I chose the soundtrack, or it chose me.

The beginning, after I’d just left London, was heavy on the pretentiously indie electronica.  Still in a strung-out state of mind, not really, in my head, having left yet, I listened to Aavikko and Emir Kusturica and chain-smoked the toxins out of my system.  A few weeks later, I’d mellowed.  Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin had rolled by, green, robust and wholesome, and mostly I listened to the folksy twanging of Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, indulged in a little Matchbox 20 even.  I was thinking about a lot of things. 

In France my cousins uploaded me a bunch of French music.  But once they’d left there were weeks I wouldn’t see a single person I knew other than the grocer, and the music was constantly, continuously on.  The soothing invariability of noise was like having another person there, I guess.  I ate lentils, leeks, poached eggs, baguettes and nutella every day, in some new configuration—it became like a game to figure out new relationships for them.  Those days I’d just press ‘random’ and a thousand songs could defile between tea or bathroom breaks without my ever focusing on one.  Once, I listed to the first four hundred or so, in alphabetical order.  A lot of work got done. 

After a brief and perplexing, acid-house pop back into London, I got to Cork, where there was too much to do for music to play constantly.  When the day ended, though, I’d retreat into a world of headphones, rizla paper and literature.  It was the first occasion I’d had in years to read as much as I wanted to, and it lasted for weeks.  The music became backdrop then.  Baroque, acoustic, ambient, world.  It didn’t really matter; I wasn’t really listening.

Vickie doesn’t drive, so she DJed instead, and I discovered music I owned that I’d never paid attention to before: Röyksopp, Tricycle, Lemon Jelly.  The accordion in the music of La Rue Kétanou made us manic; we swerved in hilarity, circumventing sheep and old men. 

O Glorious Procrastination!

Well, I'm getting there, but my concentration is failing me bit by bit, and I've devolved into a metaphorical equivalent of an amputee crawling on stubs towards the holy grail, only......forty more pages away!

On a positive note, I am getting to know my new computer better.  Can you tell "Photo Booth" is my new favorite program??  Hey, I'm all by myself here, sometimes a girl needs to have a little fun. 

Favorite paragaph written today:
It’s hard to imagine today’s European nations as anything but—though the seemingly inflexible boundaries we take for granted have been mutable for centuries.  Monpellier, for instance, belonged at one time to the kings of Aragon, which is logical considering its proximity to Spain.  Want a lesson in complicated family dynamics?  Pay close attention: Marie of Montpellier (1182-1213) was all set to inherit the lordship after her father, William VIII died, but the first man she married, Raymond of Marseille, died too quickly.  She then married Bernard IV of Comminges, but he had two other living wives, so that got annulled lickety-split.  In the meantime, her half-brother had taken control of Montpellier, but Marie wouldn’t have that, so she married Peter II of Aragon, which gave her the “Lady of Montpellier” title back—although it made Monpellier Aragonian.  But once married, Peter tried to divorce her (in order to marry the Queen of Jerusalem) and still keep Montpellier for himself.  It didn’t work, and eventually Marie’s son by Peter inherited Montpellier—and Aragon.  Yeah, and you thought your family fights were hard-scrabble?
[more glossed-over history that takes us into the twentieth century]
Oh, P.S., Montpellier is twinned with Louisville, Heidelberg and Chengdu.  God, we love Wikipedia.

I really hope that last sentence makes it past my editors. 

Monkey Gland tagged me for a meme I like but that sort of procrastination is taking it a little too far.  I think I'm best off limiting myself to taking bored and stupid pictures of myself. 

wee hours

It's countdown time for MTV France, and I am scrambling to finish.   I managed to get on French time again during my brief gallivant to the Cote d'Azur, but once back in Annecy, my body switched right back to what it likes best: living by night. 

These days, I wake up at around five p.m., do about ten pathetic minutes of yoga, and pussyfoot around, checking emails and cleaning the house, until to my surprise, darkness has fallen.  Even though I've continued sitting at my laptop for the next few hours, it isn't really until about one a.m. that I start getting serious, and I don't hit my stride until three or so.  The moon sets over the mountains across the lake at around four, and I'm on roll until about eight, when I take a break to wander into the village for some fresh baguettes, still warm, which I slather with nutella and devour (this is, without a doubt, the absolute nexus of my day).  Then, ravaged, I go to bed, but the caffeination and focus has gotten me so worked up that it takes me an hour or two to fall asleep, the refrain from the last song I was listening to repeating itself irrepressibly in my head.  Thank God for my UK Vanity Fair subscription, which now gets forwarded here.  I'm a long way from Dominick Dunne, but he's the only companion for yonks.  It's a matter of hours, I think, before I start talking to myself like a crazy lady.

Unbelievable!!

"Nobody is going to feel sorry for you getting six weeks of free travel in Europe," he said.

A Job with Travel but no Vacation, from the New York Times

Making Mont d'Or

Every affineur and cheesemaker in France, it seemed, was in Paris on Monday for the Salon d’Agriculture. All except Monsieur Rousselet, president of the Longueville-Mont d’Or cheese cooperative. His wife was cadgy about why, and wheedled about before giving us an appointment in the afternoon. “It all depends how he’s feeling,” she said finally. “You see, he’s just had another round of chemo.”

We pulled up to the cooperative, blaring the Dead, stretched our legs and breathed in the sunshine glinting off the vast expanse of snow. Tiny skiers in one-piece quilted suits lobbed across the Mont d’Or like bright, slow-motion ping-pong balls on a massive white table.  It was a few minutes before M. Rousselet hobbled briskly up to us, a daft giant of a man with a fat, smooth head under a porkpie hat. He accepted Mateo’s cheese with amiable surprise—“Américain? Vraiment?”—and invited us in.

Mont d’Or production is exclusively cooperative-based; farmhouse production no longer exists and is in fact forbidden. “Except one renegade,” winked M. Rousselet. “My brother-in-law. Morbier man by trade. Makes Mont d’Or sometimes too. Sells it all on markets. How long are you staying? Hm, too bad…”  

What followed was the cleverest, most technically apt display of resourcefulness we’d witness all trip. The man and his brain trust had rigged up four tipping vats that spilled curd onto a table packed tight with forms. Men holding spade-like tools raked the curd over until the surface became level, which meant the forms were all equally full. Grouped in packs of sixteen so they could all be picked up at once, the forms were then racked and left to drain. Made-to-order trolleys and dollies askew littered the vast, deserted tile like android soldiers waiting idly for battle.

Let Loose in Paris

Trade shows, man. Whack. My first was the SIAL in Paris in October 2004, one of the world’s biggest annual agro-industrial conferences. Everyone who’s anyone in Big Food is there, wheeling and dealing, drinking espressos and madeira, signing contracts over sake and scotch.  Monsanto reps, Cargill people, Unilever cronies, Kraft works. There are merchants of Cretan olive oil cookies, floppy milk chocolate ‘slices’ to slip between slabs of bread, drinkable ice cream, look-alike bacon made of New Zealand chicken, Norwegian ‘penis pizza,’ zero-trans-fat Canadian cookies, pancake batter in a shake-and-squeeze bottle—which, you should know, sold 4.6 million units in nine months and was the number-one-selling food product in Austria for six weeks—Saudi Arabian candies, Hungarian fruit liquor known as ‘Zwack,’ a product labeled “Nature…in a can!,” and Dutch cholesterol-lowering yogurt made with something called ‘vegetable stanioles’: one of the top fifteen products launched in 2003.

There’s a water tasting bar and TV-dinner vending machines on offer and grenadine-menthol chewable frogs. A product that combines fruit juice from concentrate, ‘distilled aromas’ and pasteurized milk, which Danone has the rights to bottle, call ‘all-natural,’ and aim at children. Dance music, techno, salsa, pop.

Twelve men, smoking, in suits, seriously discuss frozen ground beef; they are, apparently, dealers in offal. Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, Muslims mill about. Miss Chiquita Banana 2005 twirls brightly, posing for pictures with Asian businessmen, flirtatious and wholesome, exotic and sweet. Massive, brightly-lit glass fridges hang with cold cow carcasses and floral arrangements. Walking through an exposition titled ‘The future of food’ reveals a vacuum-pack salad that releases, when opened for use, gelled vinaigrette pearls. There are potato chips shaped like thimbles to stick on one’s finger and dip in sauce, and a credit-card-sized cookie to keep in one’s wallet for emergencies. There’s grated ketchup called Ketcho-Rap.  Classical music booms out of great vibrating speakers, signs revolve and twinkle and flash.  

Moseying over to the US stand reveals gets me samples of beef jerky, soy products, fake champagne, and microwaveable popcorn. Awesome, guys. But it’s when I get to the magazine section that I really start enjoying myself.

Eating, Drinking, Smoking, Snoring, Singing

It’s a revolving door of opportunities, that Neal’s Yard Dairy.  So said Mateo Kehler to me in Chicago what seems a very long time ago.  Quite apropos, then, that the best break to come round in ages arrived straight from the horse’s mouth: an all-expenses offer to accompany him through France for a week visiting affineurs and cheesemakers, my only contribution being logistics, translation and company.  For the record, anyone interested in the same services is quite welcome to email me, immediately.

So we went, and now we’re back, ten pounds fatter with cheese and wine and pig parts and ten pounds lighter in cares and city-weight and time spent in snow and golden sun.

So, Internet, what did we eat?  Well, we met Valérie at the Halles in Lyon to savor pig face salad, pig’s ear, blood sausage, andouillette (intestines), and batter-fried tripe—this, our equivalent of breakfast after a six a.m. flight.  We met Hervé at the Troisgros brothers’ bistro in Roanne for Charollais beef so pillowy we could have cut it with spoons and one of the best wines I’ve ever tasted, a chocolatey 2004 Chateauneuf-du-Pape.  The next day, at his caves in Roanne, Hervé offered us his opinion of what was ‘good at the moment,’ a cheese board that tragically spoilt us for the rest of the trip: highlights included St.-Marcellin, Bleu d’Auvergne, Picodon Fermier, Tommette des Alpes, and Fromage du Maquis, which we washed down with Eric Bordelet’s Normandy Sydre.  Then we nibbled Pralus mini-chocolates in the car down the A43.

Nathalie On Vacation

The past week has caught me sleeping in a rather phenomenally diverse range of situations: atop a pile of dirty laundry on the dairy’s cold, damp basement floor; on an inflatable mattress in Maisie’s rooftop flat in Paris; with Amélie in a Belgian bedroom droopy with photo albums of us as children; in an Istanbul hostel bunk-bed listening to seven synchronized snorers (where I got bitten by bedbugs AGAIN, on my fucking FACE this time); on an overnight bus heading to Bodrum; and, tonight, in the luxurious vacation home of a woman I met two days in Istanbul.

It’s Nathalie On Vacation, which means crippling indecision, an utter lack of foresight, the unnecessary desire to complicate things, and (so far, anyway) a healthy helping of undeserved good luck.

First stop: Paris, a city that endears itself to me more with every visit.  Maisie and I dined on snails in mustard sauce, dove and doe at Chez Michel near the Gare du Nord and spoke until the crepuscular hours of the morning. The next day we pressed forth with our agenda: to tour the crème de la crème of Paris’ crèmeries.

1.  Wee Fromagerie Barthélémy, where we nabbed a glimpse of Mme Barthélémy selling Paris’ twee-est customers their cheese:

2.  Quatrehomme, a bustling deli-style enterprise clogged with shoppers, many of them obviously habitués (“Mme Clément, no need to stop in—your husband’s already been through this morning and bought half a kilo of Cantal and a few goat’s cheeses!”).  Marie Quatrehomme is charming, but she's also France's first female MOF.  Not fucking bad.

3.  At Laurent Dubois, charming monger Theo gave me a tour of the caves downstairs, where pyramids of beautifully putrefying Vacherins languished before their turn on the shelves.  Dubois received his MOF award at the same time as our good friend Hervé Mons.

4.   Finally, Pascal Trotté showed me around his tiny shop and generously plied me with gorgeous cheeses to take to Belgium.

 

Master Craftsman Francois Pralus, And A Whole Load Of Nathalie's Bullshit

To be honest, I don’t really have much recollection of my visit to Francois Pralus'. I was so overcome with appetite and awe and desire the whole time I was there that I took no notes and paid little attention to anything other than what I was looking at, listening to, or, mainly, tasting at any particular moment. When I call my time there to mind, fragments of sweet-smelling, over-bubbling machines swim blurrily into place, but mainly what drifts through my memory is my mind-state throughout the visit— breathless, transfixed, thoroughly mesmerized, and ravenously hungry..

The first thing that happened was Valérie from Hervé Mons (another tremendous visionary of a craftsman that I won’t even try to cubby into place by writing down) taking us to a dingy post-war cube of a building that exuded such a riveting smell that Katie and I clutched at each other desperately.

Inside, I remember a quiet whirring of old machines, the sound dough makes when one punches it, the noise of a knife mashing butter in a metal bowl and the gentle trickle of crushed cocoa beans falling through spread fingers. A tall man with curly white hair and architect’s glasses coming forward to shake our hands and take us through his chocolate factory: the rooms in which the canvas sacks of cocoa he selects from single estates all over the world are stored, roasted, ground, and conched for three days until they morph into chocolate.

Neither book nor movie Wonka, actually, accurately represents the work of today’s chocolatier. Oompa-Loompas and facetiousness aside, what I mean is that most famous artisans du chocolat do not make chocolate. They are called fondeurs and they buy raw product, usually from Valrhona, and melt it (fondre is the verb for melt) to use as their base for whipping up whatever confections we celebrate them for. Because it is difficult and time-consuming and one needs special equipment and know-how and it’s fucking hard enough just to confection chocolate, most people leave it to experts like Valrhona to roast the beans and conch the cocoa, then buy the raw product from them and go on from there.

Not Francois. Frustrated at the lack of options for fondeurs, fueled by a hunger for travel and a bit of an iconoclast to boot, he decided to give roasting a go. His father’s candy factory in Roanne made (and still makes) the town’s classic Praluline, a divine butter brioche studded and spangled with almonds and hazelnuts that’ve bubbled awhile in boiled pink sugar. He had a base from which to work, then, and wasted no time in sourcing the best beans from around the world and sending them to France. The chocolate world is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to professional secrets, but trial and error led him to his own methods. He only ever uses criollo and trinitario strains of cocoa (the best for chocolate-making, even if they are rare and much harder to grow), chosen from small plantations in places like Venezuela and the Ivory Coast and Madagascar, where he has now set up his own plot of cocoa-been trees.

Comté Country: Part II

A drawbridge leads into a mountain.  But the mountain is hollowed out.  And in it live 65,000 wheels of Comté with their keeper, Claude.

The fort is a veritable library, filled with cheese rather than books.  Row after row, impossibly stacked, perpetually regular, teeming with mold, a cache, a vault, a catacomb.  It’s musty and cold and damp; spiderwebs hang off shelves; stalactites dangle from the blasted stone ceiling. 

Whistling, officious machines turn the cheeses electronically and dry-salt them; every cheese is turned, brushed and salted every week.  Every board (over 100,000) is changed every year by the fifteen workers that spend their time in the fort.  Only twelve cheesemakers in the region store cheese there; Bobillé makes up about ten percent of its stock.

The Fort is Marcel Petite’s.  The man after which it is named started out as a Comté cheesemaker who then turned to affinage, and before he died he penned some memoirs through which I flipped before lunch.  In them he recounts that one day when he was small, a vagrant came to the house pleading dinner.  His mother fed the man, who thanked her and said he’d come back a year later.  He did.  But this time he laid down the equivalent of 30 years of Marcel’s father’s salary down on the kitchen table and told the family he was a distant relative, lacking kin, who wanted to bequeath his money to the family members most deserving.

Petite’s first caves were in Pontarlier, but he acquired the Fort St-Antoine, an old stone garrison built a century and a half ago, in 1966.