Peta Mathias - Fete Accomplie

Thanks to my mother Ann Mathais for the wonderful cover and artwork throughout the book.

Thanks to my friend Gail Ratcliffe for support and patience above and beyond the call of duty.

Thanks to my brother Jonathan Mathias for free legal services, jokes and encouragement one day Ill pay you.

Thanks to Steve Yeoman for believing in me when I didnt and helping with the manuscript.

Thanks to Harriet, Michael, Anne, Tammy, Graeme and Juliet at Random House for unfailing enthusiasm, support and even looking at me.

Thanks and bouquets of kisses to Linn Lorkin for the French proofreading.

Thanks and love to my family, relatives and friends in New Zealand and France, without whom I would have no stories to tell.

To Edith Piafs immortal words in her song La Goualante de Pauvre Jean quonsoitricheousansunsou,sansamouronnestriendutout, I would like to add whether youre rich or poor, without love AND gastronomy youre nothing. The two have roots locked deep in our collective consciousness.

For a person who ran away from marriage, children, career, staying home and being normal to a life of adventure, excitement and romance, I wasnt quite up to standard in my opinion. Why was a person a nurse in New Zealand for five years if they wanted excitement? Why was a person a counsellor in Canada for six years if they wanted adventure? Why was a person going to England to marry if they wanted romance? Even a person who lives on a Pacific island in the middle of nowhere knows that marriage and romance are two words not normally found in the same sentence. Why did I do all these things when every spare moment was spent reading cookbooks, eating, cooking, thinking of food and fantasising about being a chef?

In 1979 I moved to London to marry the man I had been in love with for eight long years, and to be chef. I didnt marry the man, but I started along the joyous path of killing off the nurse with a missionary complex and releasing the sensuous artist that my parents had unwittingly created.

Neale Street in Covent Garden was fun. In 1979 there were still kitsch little coffee shops, and the cheese shop in Neales Yard was still small and homey. I got a job as chief sandwich maker at Olives Pantry, Olive being a working-class girl done good. She was exquisitely proud of being a true cockney, having been born within hearing distance of the Bow bells in the East End. Blonde and blousey, Olive worked hard and never stopped telling stories about her colourful childhood and wild youth. She was suffused with romantic nostalgia for her large family and gambling father. One of her many sisters once told me their life had been harsh and bittersweet but Olives eyes glistened with relish when she described it.

Olives Aunt Kate, a tiny, aged sparrow-like creature, who went to Stopitam (stop at home) for her holidays, did the dishes. It crossed my mind that I would be better off at the Ritz than at Olives Pantry, but it was a start. As it turned out, I knew more about food than they did, but they taught me cockney rhyming slang and I laughed so much in the year I worked there that my jaw ached constantly. Olive gave it to her obese husband Pat once a week on a Sunday and I got to hear all about it on Monday. What I didnt learn about cooking, I learned about marital sex.

That Christmas I was invited to spend a long weekend in Paris. Dont go, pleaded Olive and Aunt Kate, youll never come back.

I went for three days and stayed for ten years.

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Et quest ce que vous faites la plonge, une femme comme vous?

(And whats a woman like you doing washing dishes?)

I would blink through a wall of sweat, push my long hair back and try to think of something spicy to say. The French restaurant kitchen is unique in its capacity to provide succour to the intellectually and gastronomically curious. Friends and customers wander in in moments of greatest fermentation to engage in conversations ranging from discussing Nietsche to finding out the ingredients of a sauce. Its a challenge maintaining these discussions while slamming plates on the bench in tens to drip dry.

I had decided to do something about my dream of becoming a chef in France, and my friends and betters were touching in their encouragement:

Youre too old

Youre a woman

Youre a foreigner

You dont speak French

I couldnt go by the normal route of apprenticing myself to a big hotel or restaurant because I wasnt thirteen, I was thirty. Cooking in France is still very male controlled, although now there are more and more women chefs. Women have to open their own restaurants to make their reputations, as they would rarely be given a chance to get to the top under a male chef.

MaisMadame,voustestroppetiteetpasassezforte. (But Madame, you are too small and not strong enough.)

I listened to the objections and practised my determined smile. How could I turn back now? I was a New Zealand nurse who had given up a good job and moved to Paris to be a chef.

R OLAND ( ON THE RIGHT ) OUTSIDE HIS RESTAURANT , L E L UTIN DE LA R IVIRE .

I heard about a new restaurant about to open in the 13th arrondissement and presented myself with my determined smile and asked for a job doing anything. I spoke school-girl French distinguished by extraordinary pronunciation and galloping malapropisms. The words for apple turnover and sock are almost the same in French and one can ask for a warm sock in a boulangerie only so often. Announcing that I would do anything got pretty quick results. I was offered the job of dishwasher, accepted it gratefully, and proudly wrote to my parents that I was now a plongeuse.

T ESTING THE PRIMARY PRODUCE

The restaurant was called LeLutindelaRivire (The River Gnome), because there was a river running under the BoulevardArago called the Bivre. There were stained black and white turn-of-the-century photos of the Bivre on the wall behind the bar. They showed men standing by a bridge and proletariat women doing the washing in the river, their enveloping aprons tied in huge knots over their long dresses. When I stared at these photos I thought how unwieldy and binding those heavy full garments must have been to work in. I was transfixed not only did that world not exist anymore but a whole new world had actually been built on top of it, with the impotent river still flowing secretly, submerged from memory.

LeLutin served refined nouvelle cuisine, still fashionable in the early eighties, since fallen into disrepute due to lightweight rations and heavyweight tariffs. LesFranais, it turns out, dont wish to eat art. What made LeLutin different, however, was that it used organic primary produce, which was very unusual outside a vegetarian restaurant. As there was no dishwashing machine, all the filthy dishes, fragile glasses and encrusted pots were washed by my small, soon-to-be-destroyed hands. Roland, the tall handsome chef and owner, was a bon vivant and a bit of an intellectual who didnt believe in wasting his time