Clark - In the kitchen with a good appetite: 150 recipes and stories about the food you love

Driving around and around the traffic circle in southern France, my mother attempted to give my father directions.

Eleven oclock, direction Les Baux, eleven oclock, go, now! she said, her voice tight and emphatic. She was indicating the turn, not the time. It was nearing 1:00 P.M. , and we were late for lunch at Beaumaniere in Provence.

My sister and I, ages nine and eleven, were immersed in our comic books and completely ignoring the magnificent mountain view outside the car window. We were inured to the buzzing front seat tension; wed heard it before, the familiar prelunch panic of locating the restaurant, or at least trying to find a person out at lunchtime in rural France to ask directions.

On our summer vacations, we were always late for lunch.

My father turned the car as commanded. Finally on the right road, my mother relaxed.

Girls, she said, peering at us in the rearview mirror while she combed her hair, this is a very famous restaurant.

Uh-huh, we replied, eyes glued to Betty and Veronica.

Missy, you were here before, she added slyly.

Um, I said.

You were conceived at the inn. Dad and I stayed here after a dinner of langoustines with Pernod and this wonderful pt. Our room had an artichoke-shaped shower...

How many forks? I yelped, desperate to change the subject. Even though I was curious about how the langoustines were prepared, the idea of my own conception, possibly in an artichoke-shaped shower, was just too noisome to contemplate.

Plus, the number of forks mattered to me. The more forks, the fancier the restaurant (according to our foodie bible, the Michelin Guide Rouge ), and the fancier the restaurant, the more desserts they usually servedpredessert, dessert, petit fours. I loved a multifork restaurant.

Two stars, four or five forks, my mother said, much to my delight.

IT WAS MY PARENTS DREAM to eat at every Michelin-starred restaurant in France. Auguststhe traditional month of vacation for psychiatrists (their shared profession)were spent in this happy pursuit with my sister and me in tow. Fancy restaurants like Beaumaniere were an integral part of the experience. We kids might have missed out on appreciating the more epicurean aspects of such a meal, but there was usually something pretty good to eat.

At Beaumaniere, I had a tentative nibble of tender, gamy veal kidney coated in a creamy mustard saucenot so bad. And my first ever bite of summer truffle shaved tableside into delicate petals over a fingerling potato tart. Now, that was heaven. I even found out how good eggplant and zucchini could be when braised in olive oil and rosemary until soft and bursting from their skins, served with rare lamb.

We had a family tradition when it came to eating out, whether we were at the most elegant restaurant in France or a diner in Brooklyn. We all ordered different dishes (duplicates were a no-no), ate a precise quarter of what was on our plates, then passed them, Clark-wise, we joked, to our left. That way we each got to taste everything the table had ordered.

Back home in the United States, our odd behavior warranted a quick shrug from waiters. But in France, they were truly flummoxed and a little horrified (and this was before we even asked for the doggie bag). Crazy Americans, they sniffed behind our backs.

This meant that tasting menus for the whole table were off-limits. Why sample only five or six of the chefs creations when, with all four of us ordering three courses, we could taste twelve?

This doesnt even count the cheese course, like the one at Beaumaniere, where, I happily learned, fromage blanc might be accompanied by lots of sugar for topping, but it still didnt count as dessert.

After the last chocolate truffle was devoured by the kids and espresso sipped by the parents, we all climbed back into the steaming car to reverse the journey to the tiny house we had rented. It was just past 4:00 P.M. Wed left the house at 11:00 A.M.

So, my mother said, checking her teeth in the mirror, what shall we have for dinner tonight?

AND SO IT WENT FROM MORNING TILL NIGHT , with one meal flowing into the next. At breakfast my parents cross-referenced Michelin with another guide called Gault Millau, choosing a place for lunch. Then into the car we piled, driving up to two hours to the restaurant of choice. Sometimes we stopped at a town on the way with a pretty church or museum. But the pretty church and museum were beside the point. It was all about lunchuntil dinnertime, that is.

Our trips revolved around food: reading about it, buying it, cooking it, ordering it in restaurants. There was one time we even scavenged for itplucking snails from the garden of our Burgundy house rentalsnails that my parents purged, starved, and cooked a few days later. While my sister and I didnt care much for the gritty gastropods, the garlic herb butter surrounding them was magical.

So it was no wonder that when I was a kid, the words vacation and cuisine were inseparable from my image of France, the idyllic country where even desserts were followed by desserttrays of colorful macaroons and crumbly sable cookies that were brought to the table after the mousse au chocolat was devoured. France was a country where parents were never on diets and schoolchildren ate chocolate sandwiches instead of tuna fish. I could even have chocolate for breakfastmelted bittersweet bars layered into flaky croissant dough.

Back in Brooklyn, it was cereal for breakfast, egg salad sandwiches for school lunch, and fish sticks and flank steak on most nights for dinner. But my culinary education forged on nonetheless.

In Chinatown at dim sum, I learned about chewy, succulent pork tripe and pale dumplings filled with bright green chives. In Little Italy, Id plead for escarole and spumoni, and Sheepshead Bay meant creamy chowder and biscuits at Lundys. My favorite uncle, Danny, for whom my daughter Dahlia is named, initiated my love of sushi when I was twelve, teaching me to slurp the raw quail egg off the sea urchin so it wouldnt drip down my chin. Perhaps more traditionally for a Jewish Brooklynite, for Sunday brunch there were bagels and lox, taut sour pickles, and crumbly babka. And once a week on Thursday, my dad cooked something special for the familyperfecting his version of shrimp in lobster sauce or veal scaloppine with wild mushrooms he picked up at Balduccisback when it was in the Village.

WHETHER EATING AT A RESTAURANT OR AT HOME , my parents had a rule that my sister and I actually followed: Try everything once and if you dont like it, you dont have to try it again. If we refused, punishment was subtle but palpable parental disappointment.

My sister, less susceptible to that kind of guilt trip, was a pickier eater and all-around more normal child when it came to food.

Eww! shed exclaim over a piece of stinky vacherin.

I was more afraid of losing my parents esteem than slipping down a raw oyster or licking a wobbly cube of foie gras aspic. The upside was that most of those things actually tasted good, and it was thrilling, even at age nine, to suck the unctuous marrow prize out of a craggy veal bone.

FLASH FORWARD to my putative adulthood.

Those summer vacations may have gone the way of the French franc, but when it comes to home cooking, I am just as intrepid.