It made sense to me to go to Vermont after losing my father; the place had always been a sort of security blanket for both of us after my parents’ divorce in the late 1970s. My father would show up at our apartment on Fridays after school, and together, we’d drive up to Burlington where we’d have dinner at a lovely little French bistro on Church Street, maybe see a concert (my father was unaccountably a fierce lover of bluegrass and Appalachian-style string band music, which was and still is very popular in Vermont), stay at a nice inn someplace, and basically forget that we were going through a singularly hellish time in our lives. Vermont was like a lifeline, and so when I lost this man who was like my bedrock, there was a certain symmetry in my wanting to return there for solace.
Long before Carlo Petrini coined the phrase Slow Food, and long before the state would become an eastern pulse point for the Slow Food movement in America, my father and I spent our weekends away dining on things that you just didn’t get much of in New York at the time: it was at that little Church Street bistro that I was introduced to Carbonnade, to rabbit, and to Bouef Bourguignon. Because I spent my summers working in upstate New York, our visits to Vermont usually took place in the fall and winter, so our meals tended to be hearty affairs; my father believed that all young people should understand the place of wine with food, and so my bowls of steaming stew were often bolstered by a shot glass of red wine poured from the half bottle of Bordeaux he’d inevitably order with his meal. We would walk back to our inn, and my father, ever the Naval aviator, would point out the constellations in the cold Vermont sky; we would consider the meal we’d just eaten, and he would talk about how much he loved French food, and how very rarely he ate it at home. Ten years and two heart by-passes later, it was off limits to him completely, and he missed it.
I suppose that it’s no wonder, then, that after a year of cooking almost exclusively Asian and Indian food at home, I nearly always regroup at the lodge we now rent, which has a spectacular kitchen. (How many rental houses have Aleppo pepper tucked in their spice drawers?) The wok and the kaddai get left in Connecticut, and instead, I make rustic French-style dishes that I would absolutely never, ever prepare at home: panades, savory pastries, Navarin, crepinettes. When we arrive back home after a week, the ginger and lemongrass and Thai basil take center stage again. But for that blissful and chilly time up north, where we have nothing to do but watch the dog swim, listen to the radio, and read, my cooking turns to France and my thoughts, to my father.
