Nathalie Bouffe

No one's ever described the place where I’ve just arrived

Despite the fact that I’ve now moved out of my car and into a bedroom, I still can’t seem to stop driving.  Miami’s temperatures have glided gracefully down to where we like them best: the sun keeps us ever so slightly salty, and the gentle breezes of the moon wick off the sweat, blowing at once coolness and warmth, like a lover's whisper.  Outside at midnight, in shirtsleeves and sundresses, we count ourselves lucky to live in the tropics in November.

I drove up to Ft. Lauderdale to meet my friend Tom for a drink tonight and then followed him to Plantation’s only authentic Irish pub (!), where Fire in the Kitchen was playing.  The band consists of a Chinese fiddler called ShaSha, an Irish keyboardist previously of Dexy’s Midnight Runners (“Come on Eileen”), and a fat man who, throughout the course of the evening, put on and took off a little Irish mandolin, a fiddle, a drum, an Elvis mask, a knit Rasta cap with attached dreads, and a plaid Fat Bastard beret.  The less-than-likely trio serenaded and whiplashed, mulled and marched, all to Celtic melodies.   They were remarkably...effective.  Affective.

Who says I’ve stopped traveling?  The Paul Theroux quote above underscores how adventure will only be defined by state of mind; an odyssey can self-contain itself inside one's own backyard. 

11,000 miles since we left Rhode Island.

Nathalie's Famous!

Check me out in Mississippi...

I take exception to the first sentence, though.  OF COURSE I came to enjoy the Southern cuisine!  I ate fried catfish that very night....

Unfortunately, it gave me food poisoning.

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. 

Meeting Heroes: Madness and Cheese

Irish cheesemakers are a funny, gnarled breed of fighters.  Those who’ve made West Cork their home have chosen an area of undeniable beauty; rolling green hills that tumble into a lapping, tender sea.  The rough-cut landscape of westernmost West Cork carves peninsulas that stretch out of Ireland like fingers, and these cheesemakers live on the green and rocky tassels of what is already the fringe, making cheeses that taste incontestably of the sea.  They have banded together to fight any adversity that dares head their way: funky bacteria, unreasonable laws, ignorant auditors.  Over the thirty years of their struggle, they have become some of the most well-informed, highly organized, voluble, eloquent and compelling of the cheesemakers in the British Isles. 

Because West Cork is wet, most of them make washed-rind cheeses.  Washed-rinds are generally recognizable as pinky-brown, sticky, squidgy, stinky wheels covered more in moist bacteria than dry, powdery mold (like a Camembert or Brie might), although if it’s been a while since its last washing, the cheese might feel dry to the touch and look brown, like an Appenzeller or Comte (both of which are technically washed-rind cheeses that just don’t get washed very often—towards the end of their maturation they are dry-salted instead, so the outside gets crusty and hard).  The bacteria known as B. linens (the name we’ve given to the sticky pink stuff) thrives in humid environments and by the sea, which explains the prevalence—and excellence—of the many West Cork washed-rinds.  Indeed, Veronica Steele of Milleens, one of the first cheesemakers in this area of then-undiscovered terroir, tried at first to make a hard, cheddar-style cheese, but as it kept being colonized by B. linens, she eventually gave in to the stuff and ever since has been proud to make some of the loveliest, pinkest, stinkiest literalizations of West Cork’s terrain and sea air. 

Despite Adversity She Continues To Bouffe

Since the blog has been hijacked, there seems to be little point in carrying on, as I’d been pretty shit about updating in the past several months anyway, and the bastard pirates who pulled the rug out from under me won’t listen to offers under, like, a thousand dollars for nathaliebouffe.com.  But tonight’s manifested itself as a chance, quiet pause in my Irish saga—literally the first moment in two weeks I’ve even had a computer to look at—and I thought, because I certainly wouldn’t want to use it to do anything even mildly productive, that I might tell you what I’ve been cooking and eating this month. 

American Update

Forgive me for being such a fair-weather blogger, but every sentence I am capable of stringing together this summer belongs to MTV France, a circumstance unlikely to change until the beginning of September, unless I get my hands on some really strong alpine crack (anyone have a reputable source?).  But I still feel compelled to make a few comments about my recent dip back into the American food panorama, where I found the water warm, lightly salted, and very, very appealing.

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

I Heart Switzerland

So the other day we took my ninety-two-year grandmother out to lunch.  She lives in a nursing home in Gossau with her best friend, Fides, who is ninety-three, and a passel of other ancients in states of decrepitude ranging from the mild to the absolutely horrific.  Grandma Switzerland raised four boys on my grandpa’s cheesemaking farm while she ran the popular restaurant on the same premises, whose Tuesday Night Cheese Nights became such a sensation that reservations were needed several months ahead.  The cheese was only part of what people from all over Switzerland came back for.  More notable was the way she’d recognize by name tourists who’d last passed through on their way between Basel and Austria—three or seven or ten years before.

She’s in a wheelchair now, so it took us some time to get from the car to Bad Horn, the restaurant in Rorschach she’d picked for lunch. 

America the Beautiful: More Wal-Mart Trucks and...Mennonites?

Despite having fed my Wal-Mart yen, once I got back on the highway I kept on noticing Wal-Mart trucks.  And other trucks:

A Municipal Solid Residual Waste truck
A truck pulling four truck cabs
A truck pulling a bulldozer
A truck pulling a gas tanker
A truck pulling a Wal-Mart truck
A truck pulling a crane
A truck pulling two bulldozers
A truck pulling nine new cars.

That was fun for a while, and then I sang out loud to bad Bruce Springsteen tunes, and after that, I amused myself by taking notes. Hey, whatever it takes to stay awake!

America the Beautiful: Wal-Mart

What, you’re wondering, are you most likely to pass on your drive between Philadelphia and Ann Arbor?  Wal-Mart trucks.  Wal-Marts themselves are a close second--and I’m sure my drive probably ranked low on the scale of national Wal-Mart density. 

It seeps into your unconscious.  On my way west I made a list of all the things I needed, and veered across three lanes when the Belle Vernon Wal-Mart in western Pennsylvania shook its boxy redheaded curls at me from across the median.  On my list were a compass, safety pins, fountain pen cartridges, and gum.  Wal-Mart, I was sure, would accommodate me largely.

The Belle Vernon Wal-Mart has a hair salon, photo studio where a prune-faced purple newborn was having its first portrait taken, bank complete with surly, long-nailed tellers, food court that smells of buttered popcorn, game room, video store, and alleys of toilets scribbled with lots of local phone numbers and what you can expect to find if you dial them.  Syncopated beeping from the scan guns of the sixty cashiers peppers the air immediately inside, but hiking purposefully out to a corner takes you to a place where you can be alone with floor-to-ceiling camo pants maturing under a humming fluorescence.  Really, you could spend decades at Wal-Mart without ever strictly needing anything from the outside, except, obviously, the will to live. Were you to atrophy, someone could request for you a motorized wheelchair equipped with an enormous shopping basket, into which you could certainly fit at least several of the following: deluxe rattan creel, E-Z Feet slippers, paintball rifles, a light blue “speaker pillow” for your ipod with glow-in-the-dark icons, electric dulcimer, candle creater, sno-cone-maker, or kilo bag of sunflower seeds. 

I left with everything but the fountain pen ink, which, I was told, was ‘yonder down in Crafts’ when I asked Stationery and ‘on the other side in Stationery’ when I asked Crafts.  By the time I left, I was also carrying silk flowers, a disposable camera and fishing hooks.  Why?  Why??  BECAUSE IT WAS THERE.  And the prices!!

Eventually I left, partly panicked because I couldn’t find my car key.  I found it in the keyhole of my car door.  Obviously I’d been a little overexcited about my Wal-Mart shopping experience.  Clearly, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, unless they want their car stolen and metaphors mixed.