Family holidays during my childhood in Australia always involved two weeks spent by the Pacific in some tiny hamlet – if not one-horse, then certainly one-shop and one-hotel.
So it should be no surprise to find me, decades later, in another seaside village, even if it’s on the far side of the world, on the Atlantic, and during a summer that takes place at a different time of year.
Like those Australian villages, Fouras, in the coastal region of Charente, where we have our summer house, is short on hotels, not being on the railroad or near any freeway. And there is only one store, of the kind known as a superette; albeit augmented by a covered fruit, vegetable, cheese and meat market or les halles, and a fish market – this being a fishing town – that goes back to Napoleonic times.
Memories of those early Australian holidays are sparse, though one is particularly vivid, since it pointed the way to an adult passion, as well as offering, retrospectively, an insight into the concept of existentialism.
I must have been about eight when my parents, arriving in that year’s holiday spot, sent me out with the galvanized one-quart container known as a Billy Can to buy milk at the store. When I didn’t return immediately, they went looking, and found me on the beach, dribbling handfuls of sand into the milk and studying the results.
What has this to do with existentialism? Stay with me.
I didn’t need to go out for milk today, but did walk up to the village, returning with fresh croissants, a brioche, and one of the half-sized baguettes called ficelles – strings. By the time I got back, after stopping by the superette for some of the local black cherry jam, the rest of the family was up. Coffee brewed, we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast chortling over news of Donald Trump being raided by the FBI. As de Rochefoucauld put it, “There is little in the discomfort of others from which it is impossible to derive some satisfaction.”
Later in the morning, Marie Dominique and I walked up to the fish market and, after reviewing the night’s catch, bought a large sole for dinner. Almost no Paris restaurants offer sole any more, but here, without the need to factor in the cost of rent, staff and taxes, they are almost affordable.
FOURAS FISH MARKET.
Because of the unseasonal heat, fruit and vegetables are ripening early – how long before there are strawberries for Christmas? - so prices were low in les halles, and we loaded up with nectarines, cherries and the little green plums called Reine Claude – Queen Claudes.
At one end of the stall, the vendor, obviously caught by the rise in temperature, had created a heap of the enormous local tomatoes, topped with the sign “Tomates mure pour coulis – 2 kilos pour 1 euro.” Ripe tomatoes for sauce. Four pounds for a dollar.
I stared at them. I must have looked stricken, since Marie Dominique asked “Are you ok?”
There was no point in trying to explain. She was an eater, not a cook, and would never understand the urge I felt to buy the whole heap. I could feel my knife slicing into these knobbly crimson fruit, quartering them by the kilo before dumping them into our largest pot with garlic, basil, oil and salt, filling the house with that distinctive sharp/sweet perfume…. I could smell it: taste it…
“I’m fine,” I said, a little shakily. “Let’s get some cheese.”
These are not feelings that affect me in Paris, at least with the same intensity, but down here, in la France profonde, one is subject to a new scale of priorities. Free of the pressures of city life, more fundamental matters intrude. When it rains here, streets flood. When the wind blows, trees topple. Since Fouras is tidal, one can only swim twice a day, when the tide is high, so meal times depend, bizarrely, on the phases of the moon.
I couldn’t live like this all through the year, but it helps, occasionally, to be reminded that nature has the last word – increasingly so, as we begin to pay the price for having once too often poked her in the eye.
But what has this to do with me at eight years old, pouring sand into milk? And is there actually a connection to existentialism?
I remember very clearly why I did it. I’d often watched my father, a pastrycook, as he poured sugar and salt with liquid as part of preparing cakes. And I’d observed with surprise that, when he stirred the liquid, both salt and sugar disappeared.
Where did they go?
And since the sand in this beach was as white and pourable as sugar and salt, would it also disappear when mixed with milk? There was only one way to find out….
From there, it was a short step to establishing empirically why egg whites, whipped, lightened a souffle, and a yolk, added to oil, vinegar and a little mustard, created a vinaigrette. To know why flour thickened liquids and heat browned meat. To discover, in fact, the whole world of food – its preparation, consumption and history. And beyond that, perhaps, all that the world had to offer.
I could have read about it, but part of me wanted to do it, and see what happened.
Sartre, it seemed, was right – experience really did precede essence.
Nice one, Jean-Paul.
Next time, Henri Matisse and the sardine.