Tarte Tatin: More of La Belle Vie on Rue Tatin. Susan Loomis

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       The Kitchen and the Cooking School

      Before Michael started on the kitchen he added a long, narrow room at the back of the house and just off the now-finished dining room. Our friends though he was crazy: he had all this other work to do on the house and now he was adding more? But he knew it made sense, and so did I, for it was a very clever way to get privacy. We weren’t allowed, under the terms of our mortgage, to build any kind of wall between ourselves and the parish house next door, but we were allowed to put an addition onto the house. The addition, then, became our wall.

      I should explain that our property abuts that of the parish meeting hall, an active spot where parishioners came for catechism, communion classes and evening prayer vigils. All too often we found people peering in through our small-paned windows at what we assumed they thought was an abandoned house. We didn’t understand how they could have thought that, since all the windows were clean, the garden was landscaped and the chimney in active use, but it had been empty for a long time, and presumably they just couldn’t resist being nosy. Their surprise when we caught them at it was amusing – they would stare and ogle, not realizing that we were in there, since it was usually early evening when they were there awaiting their classes or vigils, and the light was quite dim. When their eyes adjusted and they realized they were looking right at us, horror and embarrassment would flit across their faces as they abruptly pulled back, and hastily walked away. We would giggle slyly, knowing that they now felt more uncomfortable than we did. Still, it wasn’t the most pleasant of situations – what if we’d been walking around naked? Or eating off the floor? Or …?

      The long room, which Michael put up quickly, consisted of an outer timbered wall, a glass ceiling and a floor of bricks laid in sand rather than on a foundation, a long window at one end and a door at the other. It would ultimately be turned into a passageway to the courtyard and I, dreaming of our own little orangerie, wanted to plant lemon trees along the warmest wall, with the glass ceiling acting as solar heating.

      Home grown citrus fruit would not materialize until years in the future, however. For the duration, this unheated room with its unheated floor would be my temporary kitchen, while Michael socked his way through the building of the permanent kitchen which, we now knew, would be the heart of our cooking school.

      Michael installed a large, shallow ceramic sink around the corner and at one end of the room, lined the walls with shelving, and once my two small gas stoves, the refrigerator and all my kitchen equipment were installed it was cosy and efficient, like a kitchen on a boat. Everything was out where I could see it and within easy reach, the way I like it, and the blue and ochre timbered walls, the old brick floor and my copper pots hanging above the stove gave it a certain style.

      The day Michael began work on the kitchen was one of those red-letter moments. I know he dreaded the job because it was massive and would require not only superhuman strength, but super-human patience as he turned a series of sixteenth-century rooms into one, cohesive kitchen. He carefully sealed off the space with plastic, tape and curtains and proceeded to go at it with satisfying hammer-blows as he bashed down walls and the old, crumbling fireplace, pulled up tiles and generally turned the space into a shambles. A wall with two beautiful long windows that had divided the former kitchen from Michael’s workshop disappeared, as did an angled wall at the back and another one to the side. The result was one huge space that stretched from the street to the back courtyard. Destruction, the easy part, took weeks. Once everything was a mound of rubble the real work began as Michael hauled it out, tons of it, dustbin by huge dustbin. He found someone who needed landfill, which helped enormously, as the city dump allows just one visit per person per day.

      It took months of backbreaking labour to get it all cleaned out. Then Michael ran pipes and wiring through the floor before he poured a concrete pad at the end of the room: this would remain his workshop. With nothing in the space but Michael’s tools it looked large, airy, wonderful. Joe was soon in there on his roller blades, swirling around the obstacles of Michael’s paraphernalia.

      Michael had completed kitchen plans before he began demolition, and he pored over them at night after working in the space all day, tweaking them as it opened up. The planning stage had been a torturous process for me: I don’t have the gift of being able to visualize space. When I look at plans on paper I see flat drawings on paper. When I look at an empty space I see just that – an empty space. But I do know what I need in a kitchen to work well and efficiently: a big centre island with a butcher block and a sink; my knives handy without being in the way or accessible to small fingers; pots and pans and certain utensils hung where I can reach them; lots of full-extension drawers; enough room to accommodate a crowd.

      I have ideas about the way I want a kitchen to look, ideas which have to do with colour and warmth and being able to display some of my favourite things like the gorgeous wedding cookies tied with pale blue ribbon that were a gift when I was in Sardinia, the jar of jewel-like candied fruit from Apt, photographs of the children at work in the kitchen, strands of garlic and Espelette peppers, a frothy bunch of pink peppercorns, bay leaves, shallots. I communicated all of this to Michael, who knew it all already, and beyond that I was pretty hopeless. Oh, I read kitchen design books but found most spaces in them cold and impersonal. Flipping through French magazines I found some design elements I loved, and these went into a file for Michael, along with my ideas and observations. He referred to them all when he drew up the plan, going so far as to making a paper ‘maquette’, or model, so that I could see, in three dimensions, what he was talking about.

      A year of demolition and cleaning up, of concrete-pad pouring and figuring had passed before Michael began the construction phase of the kitchen. He worked on it slowly and steadily, his brow knitted most of the time as he puzzled out the intricate details. It was very slow going, but fortunately one of Michael’s many gifts is persistence. He worked and worked for months, grumbling and cursing, hammering and sawing, measuring and figuring. There was a point where I could see it was getting the better of him and, one night, after Joe was in bed, I suggested we rethink the plans. I’d had my doubts about a bank of cabinets he’d drawn in on each side of the stove in a ziggurat pattern. He was trying to give me maximum storage and light at the same time, but each time I looked at them on paper they seemed top-heavy and complicated.

      I suggested, gently, that I didn’t need the cabinets, knowing that Michael had spent a lot of time figuring, measuring and planning to fit them in. Surprisingly, he agreed easily, and with a swipe of his eraser the cabinets were gone and the kitchen lightened up. It is very hard to work on a project such as the one we had naively embarked upon – and to live in it as well; to have the husband be the contractor and the crew while the wife is the dreamer and the breadwinner. Anyone who has been through a similar situation will sympathize – it is one of the ultimate tests of marriage. Throw in a foreign country, metric measurements, a toddler and my frequent absences for work, and the situation becomes even more like dry tinder.

      Michael and I were managing, but it required extreme delicacy on my side and extreme organization on his. He is a master at keeping construction messes separate from our living area through his system of plastic, tape and curtains, so that as little dust and noise as possible escape into our lives. I have always appreciated this about him. I am very good at keeping out of his way, both when he is designing and when he works, something he appreciates about me. Still, there were times when I wanted to scream at the noise and puffs of dust that inevitably escaped, and there were times when he wanted to, I am certain, walk out and close the door behind him. But each time we lost patience we stepped back, took a deep breath and really looked at what was happening. Progress was being made, spaces were changing, the bones of the kitchen were in place and it was all taking shape. Observation like this gave each of us renewed energy.

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