Little Culinary Triumphs by Pascale Pujol

Author:Pascale Pujol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

YOGURT AND DETOX TEA

Granted, Annabelle Villemin-Dubreuil did look like a reformed porn star. Curvy (very), with an alluring gaze, and a mouth like ripe fruit waiting to be eaten. Granted, her resume, with its mention of some diploma from an obscure Belgian institute of psychology, smelled of pure fabrication a mile off. Granted, her very popular advice column in Convictions suggested that she had fully mastered the sixty-four positions of the Kama Sutra and a certain number of regional variations. But appearances can be deceiving. For a start, Annabelle Villemin-Dubreuil was not her real name, either. Her other name was nowhere near as smart, and was much better suited to the pudgy little provincial lump she had been for so long. Véronique Lamoul.1

Her parents, though they were full of love and care when it came to their little princess, who had shown up totally unexpectedly and quite late in their lives, had really done her no favors when it came to her name . . . But that was before, a year ago, in her previous life. Rapid rewind: before she became the psychosex ambassador for Convictions, Véronique Lamoul had been acquiring experience at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, commonly known as “Langues O,” for over twelve years. Initially as a student, the most brilliant in the Southeast Asia department, then as assistant, then lecturer, and finally adjunct to the head of the department. For she spoke Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali (and a few very glorified rudiments of Urdu, Sinhalese, and Telugu) and the Mahabharata in the original held no secrets for her. So, for her the Kama Sutra was a piece of cake, small beer . . .

Growing up in her sous-prefecture in the Massif central, she had been an endearing only child. On the playground during recess, she added one unforgivable failing to another: tall and plump, awkward, shy, a star pupil, bad at sports and teacher’s pet. She had no real friends but she was always ready to help out, to let others copy from her page or to straight-out write their compositions for them. In a region where the smell of brine rarely meant the proximity of ocean spray and the wide open sea, her unfortunate name earned her every mocking phrase imaginable.

“Hey, smell that, Lamoul?”

“No, what?”

“Smells like mussels, that’s what! Ha ha ha ha!”

Anyway.

Things calmed down somewhat in the upscale boarding school where she continued her studies from the age of thirteen until she got her baccalaureate degree. Upscale did not mean that her parents, who ran a small but prosperous hardware store, had delusions of grandeur. It was the only place where she could take the various options she’d chosen. Moreover, she had been granted a generous scholarship thanks to her exceptional grades. Les Bleuets was for girls only, a place for the offspring of the well-heeled local bourgeoisie to encounter the haughty daughters of expatriate executives. You had to put yourself in those little foreigners’ shoes: they’d been promised

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