Food
Michele Roberts - savours the taste of friendship
Published 09 May 2005
Food - Friends in kitchens invent new forms of communion - and confession
The school for widows is a punitive place. When I dropped in, Gisele burst out with her worries. Claude has not yet been dead a year. What will people say if she wears her pink suit when she goes to a village do on Saturday night, if she dances, if she plays Lotto? Will they disapprove and whisper behind their hands? She was preparing the chickens she had just killed, gutting them, pulling off wing-tips and feet. Oh, these can wait, she said: would you like an apero? We sat in the kitchen, as we always do, and sipped our vin doux next to the corpses, laid out on newspaper thick with globs of greenery-yallery goo. I had to kill them, Gisele explained, because they were eating their eggs. What's the use of keeping chickens if they don't give me eggs? She took me outside to see her big fat mama rabbits and their huddled babies, packed into cramped hutches. Not dead yet. She'll eat them later this year.
All my neighbours have identical aperitif trays: large wheels of white plastic, divided into compartments filled with little cheesy whatsits. Yvette goes one better and includes pistachio nuts. She gives me pastis now, for my apero, though she used to frown and say it was a drink for men. She lets me off certain feminine accomplishments: loving polishing the stairs, taking dainty sips of sickly porto, never having more than one glass of wine. I may not clean the stove often, but at least I love to cook.
The day before I left, Yvette turned up with a bag of chitted potatoes for me to plant. Luckily, the beloved niece was to
hand, and took on the job. She had come to stay with her writers'
group. To welcome them, I cooked a proper country meal.
We started with kirs scented with home-made creme de cassis, and fat white cloves of pickled garlic that my friend Stephen had given me. Next came potage bonne femme, made with leeks from the garden, then omelettes aux fines herbes, scattered with the new tips of thyme, chives and tarragon I'd just picked. We ate a local Mayenne version of Camembert and finished with apricot tart, spreading the pate sablee with the wonderful apricot jam made by my friend Hilary. Included in this celebration of friendship were Yvette, who had taught me how to plant and harvest vegetables, and Gisele, who had introduced me to the delicious pain au levain in the new baker's.
I remembered the young female vicar who'd blessed the beloved
niece and me one Christmas Eve at St Paul's. With golden hair flowing down her back, she was more like a goddess than a
priest. Friends in kitchens certainly invent new holy communions,
and a new form of confession, too, that involves dawdling, glass
in hand, and gradually feeling loved enough to open up, say what's
in our hearts. Gisele said she kisses Claude's photo every night.
"Wear the pink suit," I cried: "he'd want you to!"
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