My Place At the Table by Alexander Lobrano

Author:Alexander Lobrano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781328585219
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When I went to dinner at La Providence the following Friday, to taste the baeckeoffe, I brought Fiona, the only friend I had at work.

Mr. Schweitzer blushed shyly. “B-b-bonsoir,” he stuttered. The restaurant was busy, and we were served by Ginette, the wisecracking red-haired waitress who’d been out sick the day I’d gone to lunch with Noëlle.

“So you’re the American Antoine was talking about,” she said, after hearing my accent when I ordered. “He said you’re very interested in food.”

I told her I was.

“Then you’re in the right place,” she said with a little chuckle. She put her hand on her hip and cocked her head. “And what else are you interested in, chéri?”

The baeckeoffe came to the table in a pale-blue ceramic casserole, which had been sealed with baked bread dough. After placing the casserole on a trivet, Ginette cut the golden band of bread with a knife and opened the heavy lid with a potholder. The comforting shawl of steam that rose from the bubbling vault was scented by wine, bay leaves, and something resinous I couldn’t immediately identify. Ginette insisted on serving us and pointed out the small black berries, which turned out to be the source of the elusive aroma. “Baies de genièvre,” she said, adding that Mr. Schweitzer had gathered the juniper berries himself on the farm he owned in Alsace. The berries embroidered the soothing casserole, a sort of French version of shepherd’s pie, with invigorating gastronomic pointillism that gave the dish some dash.

When Mr. Schweitzer stopped by our table at the end of our meal, I thanked him.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it, because there’s nothing more Alsatian,” he said, adding, “You know, in France, our cooking is our history. It dates back to a time when our country was rural and people mostly ate only the foods they could grow themselves.”

As I dined at La Providence with friends, one boyfriend after another, and sometimes on my own, it became my haven. I loved Mr. Schweitzer’s food, and I felt comfortable there because, despite the polite awkwardness between us, there was an inchoate intimacy that I was in no hurry to verbalize. I sensed he probably wasn’t either. We’d recognized something in each other and that was enough. So we talked mostly about food, and Antoine Schweitzer became my eager tutor.

I never left a meal there without a new restaurant address or a casual lesson in the cooking from a part of France I’d never been to. I learned about piperade, the Basque specialty of soft scrambled eggs with peppers and onions, and aligot, fresh Tomme cheese curds whipped into mashed potato and garlic from the Auvergne in central France. Other dishes, such as kig ha farz from Brittany, a pot-au-feu cooked in a fabric sleeve with a crumbly garnish of buckwheat-flour porridge, were less urgently enticing to me. But I was game for anything. Mr. Schweitzer’s goal was to arouse my curiosity, and mine was to be his student.

Ginette thought we were crazy.

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