Friendships

The spring after our apartment purchase, I was on my way back to our little apartment in the Roussillon, stopping in Iceland along the way. I had written to the hardware store in Banyuls, telling the woman there that I was stopping in Reykjavik on my way to Banyuls and asking if I could give her family any sort of message from her. To my delight, I received a letter from her with address and phone number of her family, and she said they were prepared to receive me! I still didn’t know her name, for sure, but that didn’t seem to matter when I went to lunch at my hotel’s restaurant and found a dish on the menu, cooked in the Roussillon style! Within minutes of my inquiry of the waiter as to why a Roussillon recipe was on their menu, the chef was rushing to my table with a big smile of welcome. He was a friend of the family I was to visit, and, like his compatriot, was a chef from the Roussillon! At that time, he was splitting his year between working as a chef at his home in Iceland and running his own restaurant in Argeles-Plage. I finished my delicious lunch and when I asked for the check, found that the chef had paid my bill! I was not even permitted to leave a generous tip for the waiter!

I spent a wonderful day with that Icelandic-French family, touring around that part of Iceland, stopping for coffee often, then visiting their pate factory. I left for France early the following morning laden with gifts and a letter for my new friend in Banyuls. Over the past 30+ years, my new friend and I have remained fast friends, sharing our love for different cuisines and exploring local wines. All the conversation is always in French and I have learned a lot about French expressions and customs from her and about Catalan culture from her husband.   When my husband and I decided to marry, we were on our way to Banyuls and asked our friend to marry us, as she would have been able to do so through her position in the mairie. Sadly the legal paperwork and long time requirement did not meet with our short Easter vacation that year. But what fun that could have been!

My first meal with this couple was in their apartment above their store. My friend, Judy, had accompanied me to Banyuls that Fall and was with me for this first meal. We had stopped in Iceland on the way over, met with the Icelandic family, and were carrying with us a very large box of pate from their factory to give to the family in Banyuls. We’d had quite a time keeping it cold on the train all the way down from Luxembourg, where our plane landed! Our first meal with my friends was endives stuffed with ham and cheese and covered with béchamel sauce. It was my first taste of endives and I immediately loved this very typical French dish. Judy had spent a year in Salamanca and had a degree in Spanish, so between her Spanish and my high school French, we managed to have a conversation with this delightful couple.

During one of our first years of setting up our apartment, we arrived without luggage.   For some reason (known only to baggage handlers), it had not arrived on the train down from Paris. We’d arranged for someone to come install our shower rod and to put up the overhead lights we’d bought and they did not come when scheduled—typical Catalan schedule of “whenever.” Our mailbox didn’t work when we tried it and when we finally got a key that would work we found mail dating back 3 years in it! It was a frustrating beginning to our “vacation.”

So we went off to our friends’ hotel in Cerbere for a nice meal. But it was a Tuesday and the help’s night off, so no meals were served! But the best part about having such wonderful friends, is that they invited us to stay for a special meal with about 10 of their friends. Someone had been able to smuggle a Spanish ham across the border and that meant a special meal to these Catalans! There were 12 of us around the table First we had apero of Scotch on ice. Then the meal consisted of the ham, sausage, sardines, pate, fish pate with tarragon sauce, salad and premier cru red wine. And of course, pain aux tomate.s This was my first experience with this stable of Catalan cuisine. I went with the patron to the kitchen and watched as he toasted the bread, rubbed it with garlic and oil and then rubbed it with a cut tomato. It is most often served topped with anchovies and pimiento strips, but also, as at Chateau de Jau Winery, served with Serrano ham (in the US we use proscuitto).

The next part of the meal was cheese and bread, with another, better, red wine. Then coupes with Poire William and glasses of champagne, and finally 50-year old cognac (the bottle was very dusty) and café. So there was a lot to drink and a lot of conversation. Several of the men had been in concentration camps during the war and remembered some German songs and the American songs, so there was much singing also. It wasn’t until several glasses of wine had been consumed that anyone even admitted that they knew a few words of English. There was a doctor who worked at a center doing rheumatism research, an architect, who had been in two concentration camps and had composed a song which he sang for us, and two other couples. It was a lively group and after all those different drinks, it was an exciting drive home at 1 a.m. around all the “snake” curves between Cerbere and Banyuls!

The following week, we were once again in Cerbere and the patron invited us to attend the Rotary Club dinner meeting with him and his wife. The meeting was held in the hotel owned by our mayor, so we had our first introduction to our mayor, who served 12 years, then recently returned for another 6 year term. The meal was not very good and the conversation centered around the new road being planned from Perpignan to Spain that would bypass the coastal villages. What I remember most about the evening was our friend, the patron, pacing around and around the room in frustration, as we all contemplated the loss of business as tourists went around the villages and sped on to Barcelona or up to Paris. Yeats later when the by-pass road was finally built, it stopped at Banyuls, so travellers still have to pass through Banyuls and Cerbere when taking the coastal route. There are so many tunnels to cut for the last bit that I doubt they will ever finish it.

The engineering professor and his family, who rented our apartment for five weeks during his sabbatical, discovered that there was someone at one of the boulangeries who spoke English. Not only did this woman speak perfect English, but it was American English! So when we returned to Banyuls the following Fall, we stopped into the boulangerie and found the woman who was to become my very best friend. She was an artist who had been born in France, but brought up in the US, so spoke both languages with perfect ease. When we first had them come to dinner in our apartment, they arrived with their 17-year old son, which I was not expecting, so the step stool was put into use as a chair for me, as we added another place at the table for their very talented son. That was something I had to learn to expect in France: children come with their parents when invited to dinner. I had a lot of questions that first evening together and one was “What the heck is that in my bottle of red wine vinegar?” My dear friend laughed and explained that I had a “mother” growing in the vinegar. With great excitement that one had grown in a plastic bottle, she promised to take it to her grandmother who would trim it and put in glass, so I could continue to feed it with wine and, thus, always have red wine vinegar in my kitchen!

When our daughter was young, we would often take her to La Pardalere, a restaurant with a swimming pool on the hill above our village. By purchasing a drink or a meal, we had the privilege of swimming in this very lovely pool. One year she made the acquaintance of two British children in the pool, while we sat chatting with their parents. The following year, when we returned to La Pardalere for lunch, the same British family was there! So we had lunch together and this is where I learned about “joues de porc.” Not knowing the meaning of the word “joues,” I asked the waiter. He tapped his cheeks and said “joues.” Ohhh! “pork cheeks!” That was my first taste of this delicacy, cooked in a Banyuls wine sauce. Now I find pork cheeks in our southern markets here in the US, where they are quite common cuisine. I also fell in love with their avocado and salmon salad (Salade Tiede), which we have made many times in both of my kitchens.

We have continued our friendship with this British family who divide their time between their home in England and their family village house in one of the hill villages west of Perpignan, sharing tales of our children as they have grown into adults and sharing fabulous meals emanating from both of our kitchens.

One Fall I saw a notice in the local paper advertising English classes in our village. I decided it was time to make some new friends, so I showed up at the English class and offered my services to the teacher. The teacher was a little taken aback at my offer. She thought she spoke English very well and did not require any assistance! Was I just another pushy American? But she let me stay and I showed up every class, helping the students one-on-one (all adult students) with their assignments. The students seemed to appreciate my assistance, and as the weeks passed, the teacher warmed up to me, and she began to ask me to answer some of the students’ questions.   One day there was a reading of a weather report. I offered to read it so the class could hear it read correctly. Then we discussed the difference between British English and American English, and I ended up reading the passage first in a British accent and then in an American accent. They hadn’t understood that there was a difference! Towards the end of our stay that year, I took a batch of thumbprint cookies to share with the class and we translated the recipe for them. By then, mixes for making chocolate chip cookies were appearing in the French supermarkets. So the French thought all cookies were chocolate chip. That precipitated a whole discussion on the English word “biscuit.” An American cookie is a British sweet biscuit (as in “Do you want a bicky with your cuppa?”). An American biscuit is similar to a British scone. A British savory biscuit is an American cracker. A British cracker is that thing we pull open after Christmas dinner and toys and funny paper hats and jokes go flying around the room! I smile to think that some ladies in our village are still enjoying the making of thumbprint cookies in their homes.

I did keep in touch with several of the ladies in the class and the teacher, inviting a couple of them to our apartment one year for an English afternoon cream tea, with British friends and my best friend to help translate. Sadly, when I went to the library to find the teacher last year, I was told she had recently died of cancer.

We have cherished our friendships over the decades. Some friends are our very close friends, like family. Others are the merchants we see and who help us every year.0Yet others are the grown children of our original friends, another generation of our extended family in France. And always, our time together has been spent over a meal, whether in a restaurant or one of our homes, we always discuss the food, try to guess at its recipe, admire its presentation, and then we go home and try to do it ourselves.

I have cooked a Swedish Christmas smorgasbord for my French friends, an American Christmas dinner for our Cerbere family, complete with a small turkey we took from the US, and a 4^th of July picnic for the officers of the USS Avenger when it stopped on its way home from Desert Storm. One evening I prepared a typical American salad bar for our French friends from the village. Piling everything up on one plate was completely unheard of and we had quite a time convincing them that this was the way to do it! In recent years, we have served pork ribs and cole slaw in France, and that was also a difficult experience to teach our friends it was okay to pick up the ribs and eat them with their hands; I had to be prepared with finger bowls.

We have explored unusual seafood (like one that looks like a baked potato) with my best friend, and we have discovered new recipes everywhere we go. We learn so very much from each other and from the chefs we have come to know and admire. And when I arrive home in the US, I prepare French and Catalan meals and tapas evenings for my American friends. I introduce them to crème catalane, pain aux tomates, foie gras with gros sel, moules au saffron, our Spanish friend’s pepper salad, and tarte aux fraises. When I figure out where to find squash flowers here in the South, perhaps I’ll be able to serve my stuffed artichokes with fried squash flower, too!