“Sorry, I just don’t like it. I’ve never liked goat cheese.”
She turned away and I couldn’t persuade her to enjoy the only good goat cheese she’d never have. In her I saw my own food prejudices reflected—although I count among her favorites some things I now dislike: raw green bell peppers, undercooked green beans, and, yes, even our family’s beloved American cheese. I vowed someday to strike them all down.
We made our pilgrimage to Normandy, to the small town of Mortagne-au-Perche from which her Dion ancestors had migrated so long ago, and scaled a tiny turret inside a historical museum devoted to the horde of North American tourists tracing their roots to Canada. Jean Guyon (Dion) arrived in what became Montreal in the seventeenth century, making ours one of the first French families to settle in Canada. On the walls hung grainy black-and-white photos of the short, round, dark-haired men and women who had immigrated to Montreal. That round belly, which occasioned the men to belt their pants around the middle like an equator, I recognize as belonging to my grandfather and his father before him. Had my mom’s dad lived long enough, he would certainly have grown the same midsection magnificence. Yes, these were our people. We were French, but more specifically, we were les Canadiens. Voyageurs. Northern people, going back many generations.
My mom asked the director of the museum the question that visitors must have asked, oh, just a few times a day: Could we be related to Céline Dion, the singer? Of the ten CDs my mom owned, Céline Dion’s was the one she liked to play at top volume in her sporty sedan, the operatic high notes booming out the moon-roof blowhole.
Oh, yes, very probably, most certainly yes, the director said, nodding vigorously. My mom’s face glowed with a rapturous inner light.
“Je t’aime Céline Dion!” she boomed, getting it mostly right.
Our mission here was done.
—
On the second day of the trek toward Laguiole, a dot of a town smack in the middle of the map of France, the road began to narrow and wind around the hills even more tightly than the day before. My mom was starting to sigh about this ever-lengthening side trip and even I was beginning to think, This had better be mind-blowingly good. I hadn’t been keeping track, but it seemed that she had already spent a ridiculous amount of money. We nearly drove right by the innocuous sign: MICHEL BRAS was printed in light type on a whiteboard, announcing the entrance to a thin black asphalt trail. Looking up, I could see the restaurant, a glass-walled building perched on the hill, as flat as the horizon itself.
This is the working French countryside, where men in dusty overalls drink beer (not wine) in the tabac in the morning. We had just stopped at one, looking to buy some water, which cracked up the crowd standing at the bar. Their big cheeks shook and one of the guys walked around the bar to get me an empty container, indicating that I should fill it with tap water. I couldn’t make out anything he said but “l’eau,” so the bartender translated. “Best water you’ll ever drink, he’s saying, comes from right here.” I felt sheepish, as if I had just walked into the Two Inlets Country Store back home and asked the crew sitting at the horseshoe bar where I could buy some nice imported New Zealand venison. They would have laughed and the owner would have slipped into his apartment in the back, grabbed a white package from his deep freezer, lobbed it to me, and said, “Take some of mine! We have plenty.” It occurred to me that we’d been driving for days, straight into the midwestern heart of France, a place where common sense ruled.
Any rural posturing stopped at the door of Michel Bras. The building was striking and yet unobtrusive, a contemporary jetty cantilevered gracefully out from the tallest plateau. It had a helipad on its roof.
They seated us in front of the enormous picture window that seemed to slice off one side of the restaurant, looking out onto a grassy meadow stuck with little daisies. One of them was in a vase on the table next to a dish of yellow butter and a bowl of homemade crackers as brittle as old paper. All of the butter in France was richer than any I’ve ever known, but this one tasted of sunburned grass and of time left to sit out and absorb the local humors and moods. Real cultured butter tastes like culture.
Every dish seemed to have a clarity to it, a message: “This is the spring day we took a picnic on the hill.” “This is a gray day’s supper in front of an open fire.” “This is the melt and the high water and the first green chives.” “This makes up for the week of relentless freaking winds.”
The cooking at Michel Bras wrestled with place in a way that I’d never known possible, somehow conveying the range of emotions that belonged to those who live all their lives in one spot and see their childhood refracted through the lens of their adulthood. This is the middle of nowhere and the center of the universe. It contained the hometown struggle set against the backdrop of the landscape. I had been wrong: The local pride did not end at the entrance to Bras; this was where it bloomed open.
The fourth course was a flat puddle of fawn-colored sauce encircled with a fairy ring of mushrooms, small ones I’d never seen before. I ate it slowly, looking for the fireworks I’d found in everything we’d had up to that point, but couldn’t find them. My mom seemed to read my mind.
“See, I love this one. Everything doesn’t have to change you. Sometimes things can just taste of what they are.”
And that’s what mothers are for, to remind their children of the simple things, of their particular, unspectacular, indelible histories.
“Oh, look at that.” She nodded toward the table next to ours, where an older woman in a long skirt, not dressed as a waiter or a cook, was ladling a creamy puree high into the air from a copper pot, stretching it like taffy. It was aligot, a regional specialty, smooth ivory potatoes stringy with masses of local tomme fra?che de l’Aubrac cheese. The waiter assisted her, scooping out pillows of the potatoes and making quenelles of them with two spoons. “I think the chef has his mother making the potatoes!”
Indeed, he did.
The family devotion to this hill in the middle of France was palpable. And a gust of bittersweet homesickness for my own small house in the hill in the middle of nowhere arrived with the dessert.
—