Visionary Women by Andrea Barnet

Author:Andrea Barnet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Alice Waters

Alice Waters stepped into the little stone house in Brittany, trailed by her friend Sara Flanders. It was the spring of 1965 and she was just twenty-one, a footloose Berkeley student on a semester abroad in France. An elfin creature with expressive gray eyes, she was small boned and slender, barely five two in height, and there was a faint air of dreaminess about her. She wore a little antique hat that lay close to her head and a delicate flea market dress. But her gaze was intent, keenly focused on every detail: the ancient stone house, the stairs leading up to the dining room, the pink cloth-covered tables—there were no more than twelve in the entire room. The décor was rustic and unassuming, the plaster walls a soft ivory hue, the floors old and planked, yet the room still felt elegant, generous. The cutlery gleamed; the chairs seemed to invite sitting, lingering and talking, losing track of time. For all its simplicity, there was a sense of occasion about the place, an understated beauty. Alice noted the breeze wafting in through the windows as they sat, the burbling stream just outside, the emerald green garden in the back. Most of all she noted the menu—or the lack of one. She’d never experienced this before. The chef, a woman, stepped out from the kitchen and announced the night’s fare: cured ham and melon, trout with almonds, raspberry tart. The meal was simple and exquisite, wondrously fresh. The trout had just been pulled from the stream, the raspberries picked in the garden. It epitomized everything Alice was coming to feel a meal should be: down-to-earth, straightforward, steeped in the perfume of its place. “Elsewhere, even when I found the food to be wonderful,” she would write years later, the French “would say only that it was ‘all right.’ But after the meal in this tiny restaurant, they applauded the chef and cried, ‘C’est fantastique!’ I’ve remembered this dinner a thousand times.”

For three months now, Alice and Sara had been eating: in tiny corner bistros with lace curtains and blackboard menus outside; in bustling cafés, where the air smelled of licorice and green bottles gleamed from behind the bar; in brasseries on grand boulevards; in antique dining rooms with high ceilings and gilt mirrors and long, luxurious banquets; in patisseries with little marble tables.

Alice was especially partial to the simple, working-class places—storied haunts like Au Pied de Cochon, where one stood at the bar, and had oysters out front, and then moved on to the “downstairs part,” where for four francs fifty, “you could eat at the bar and have a blanquette de veau and a glass of wine and a basket of great bread.”

She already loved the classics: coq au vin, cassoulet, steak frites, pot-au-feu, lentils and salmon, hard-boiled eggs and homemade mayonnaise. There was something about the rituals of French dining, the timeworn traditions, the care taken over every detail of the table, that moved and thrilled her:

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