Moulle Denise Lurton - French roots: two cooks, two countries, & the beautiful food along the way

Copyright 2014 by Jean Pierre Moull and Denise Lurton Moull

Photographs 2014 by Jan Baldwin

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC

All photographs by Jan Baldwin with the exception of the following: by Dan Hicks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60774-547-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60774-548-8

Food Styling by Alice Hart

v3.1

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

ANAS NIN

to Maud & Elsa

Cree LeFavour has been our guardian angel during the making of this book. David McCormick, our agent, had the good intuition of having us meet, and we are so grateful. Cree guided us through the process of writing a cookbook, was patient reading our stories, and thoughtful when correcting our nonnative English. She understood our bicultural lives and helped us share the things we sometimes take for granted. We have become close friends and look forward to other projects together.

Jan Baldwin came from London and visited us for a week to capture our home and lives in Bordeaux. Jans photographs represent perfectly the blend of country rustic and sophistication we strive to maintain, in our food, and in our everyday life. She always shot with curiosity, good spirits, and impeccable taste. Stylist Alice Hart, along with our daughter Elsa were very helpful that week, as many pictures needed to be taken in so little time. We are also grateful to Don Hicks for contributing some of the beautiful pictures he has taken of the ranch and garden in Healdsburg.

It was a pleasure working with Jenny Wapner at Ten Speed Press. She subtly found the way to keep us on the right path while letting us explore our diverse ideas. Toni Tajima made it all come together with her creative designs, finding just the right way to combine earthiness with elegance.

We are thankful to our parents, who instilled in us a deep sense of earths preciousness. They taught us how to respect and receive the lands bounties, and how grateful we should be of it. We took these lessons for granted, but after having put them down in a book, it is very clear they are responsible for our bon sens which is to be down to earth and unpretentious.

Friends shared their recipes with us: Evan Shively, Natasha Landau, and Sybille de Brosses.

My sister, Christine Bazin de Caix, as well as Helen Calen and Bernadette Donascimento are to thank for the beautifully decorated tables at Chateau Bonnet.

Our dear daughters were fantastic helpers. Maud took care of our ranch and its abundant vegetable garden during our months away in France. Elsa helped us tremendously with recipes and much of the cooking while in Bordeaux. Alban, Elsas husband, as a gourmet, was the perfect critic for his wifes testing recipes. Maud and Elsa are both excellent cooks and an inspiration.

We thank all of you who entice us to put these words down. We hope it will bring more conviviality to all of our lives, as well as respect for the beautiful planet earth we all share.

We can be contacted at: www.twobordelais.com

Alors , we are having our picnic now, announced Denise.

She unfurled a tablecloth over some wet logs in the middle of a meadow in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Jean-Pierre pulled bread, charcuterie, cheese and fruit from a wicker basket. The Americans, kids and adults in sweatshirts and jackets, actually thought it was raining. The French, in shirt sleeves and shorts, sipped wine from tumblers and admired the scenery. We picque-niqued for exactly forty-five minutes and damply piled back on the tour van, which headed straight up the mountain to an encampment of Basque shepherds in their late spring stage of transhumance, the annual migration of pastoral animals with their human and canine caretakers.

The mountain pastures dotted with tiny yellow wild flowers looked like psychedelic green velvet. Misty bare peaks and forested slopes enveloped us. Our French-American contingent set up tents amidst outcrops of rock. We shared the meadow with woolly white sheep on impossibly skinny legs and monolithic reclining dun cows in leather necklaces strung with tin bells. The ruddy shepherds in serge jackets and black berets lived in a crumbling stone building with a tiny stove. There Jean-Pierre heated up his garbure a thick soup of ham, cabbage and vegetables enriched with stale bread and mountain cheeseour dinner.

I had never been anyplace as profoundly beautiful as this, and I have never spent a more miserable night. At dawn we watched the sheepdogs corral ewes for milking, guiding them one by one into the hull of a gutted car, its open doors creating a stall. The cheesemaker, in white coat and hat, heated an aluminum pot of sheeps milk over a burner on the stone floor of the house, added a few drops of rennet, and gently stirred it with his hands until he was able pull out a soft, poofy basketball of curdthe birth of a wheel of tome de pyrenees. Draining the whey, he gave us the warm solids, sheeps milk fromage frais, to eat with wild berry preserves, and cooled the rest in a pail anchored in the icy stream that meandered through the pasture. I have never tasted anything more delicious, or more intimate with nature. Jean-Pierre and Denise had taken us Americans by the hand and dragged us to experience the wonder of the traditional food they grew up eating. We would never be the same.

This happened twenty years ago. As I read French Roots , more memories flooded backbeing with Jean-Pierre and Denise in Peyraud and Arcachon, and in Berkeley and Healdsburg. The two of them taught me, and a whole generation of northern Californians, how to eat and drink and cook and live.

Now, reading this evocative joint autobiography, I discover what great storytellers they are. They describe the evolution of their unique, multi-cultural sensibility in a moving coming-of-age story with benefits: it includes an inside look at the Chez Panisse kitchen, a wonderfully personal collection of recipes (some so simple and homey I started cooking them for dinner; others Im aspiring to take on) and a lifestyle primer. Most of all, theyve written a love storytheir ownrooted in provincial France and nurtured by the social freedom of America.