Home Sweet Maison by Danielle Postel-Vinay

Author:Danielle Postel-Vinay
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

After you’ve put your kitchen in order, practice mise en place as a daily ritual, one that is as regular as coffee in the morning or brushing your teeth before bed. When you take out a knife to chop onions, use it for its purpose, and then immediately wash it and put it back in its place. Don’t throw it in the sink or leave it on the chopping board. It has served its purpose. Now reward it and take it back home.

I have watched French families and friends follow this practice meticulously—they will use a kitchen tool, then immediately clean it and put it away. It’s part of the rhythm of cooking. This practice makes the cooking experience much more fluid and efficient. While it may seem a bit obsessive in the beginning, it eventually becomes second nature. Putting things in order as you go keeps your kitchen from getting messy and chaotic while you work. It ensures that you won’t lose track of your tools, or lose time when you find yourself in an overwhelming mess. When this happens, as it will from time to time, stop and return everything to its place. If you find that your system has gone off the rails—you’ve accumulated more kitchen gear or broken some wineglasses—you can always reset. Go back to the beginning: grab your kitchen notebook, assess the objects you own and use, add and subtract items, and give them permanent homes.

Note that the French own stuff, sometimes a lot of it. They do not live in a minimalist environment with no possessions. Theirs is an heirloom culture, one that values the acquisition of beautiful, precious objects and the preservation of them for the next generation. Throwing out grandma’s silver cutlery is not an option. By necessity, they have created a system to keep everything in order. In fact, French children are taught mise en place with their belongings—both at school and at home. When my daughter was five, for example, she learned to put her pencils and pens in a certain order in her desk, and then arrange her paper and scissors in one place, and put her cahiers in the order of that day’s schedule. Finding something out of its place is a very serious issue for French children—they are scolded for being disorganized much more than I was as a child—and so they learn to get things in order pretty fast.

The kitchen is also used for storing food, and the French approach this, and the purchasing of food, very differently than we do. Before the large supermarket chains like Carrefour and Super U and Picard popped up in every town in France, there was no choice but to go food shopping every day. And while it is now possible to stock the pantry full with supplies weekly—buying milk, bottled water, cream, butter, and dry goods in bulk—most French people still prefer to shop the way they have for centuries: buying small amounts of fresh food from locally owned neighborhood stores several times a week, and bread from the bakery every day.

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