The French for Christmas Read Online Free Page B

throbbing elbow is already turning a deep purple-black), no babies in strollers, and—most importantly of all—categorically no Christmas.
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    I ’ve never been to the Sud-Ouest before, which is a pretty big omission given that one-quarter of my roots extend into the bedrock of this particular corner of France.
    Mamie Lucie used to tell me stories of her childhood in the Périgord, the region which lies just to the east of Rose and Max’s holiday home, as we cooked together in her kitchen. As I stood on a chair at the kitchen table, an oversized apron tied around my middle to prevent too much flour getting onto my clothes while I rolled out a ball of sweet shortcrust pastry, she would reminisce about the rich farmland that surrounded her parents’ home, the fields of sunflowers turning their obedient faces to follow the summer sun; orchards where red-black cherries and dark purple plums ripened, each in their own season; plantations of walnut and hazel trees, as old as her own grandparents, whose rich brown kernels were gathered each fall; vineyards where trellised vines spread their arms wide in the sunshine, drinking it in to sweeten their clusters of ripening grapes in time for the wine harvest. It was from her that I learned about the importance of cooking with the best seasonal produce. In the depths of the New England winter, my mother, rebelling no doubt, would casually throw green beans from Kenya and raspberries from Chile into her basket at Shaw’s, with little regard for either flavour or cost. And Mamie Lucie would tut and shake her head, and produce a pumpkin pie, or a Tarte Tatin made with crisp McIntosh apples from Vermont, or a dish of roasted root vegetables infused with garlic and rosemary that would make our taste buds perform cartwheels of joy, the ingredients bought from the local farmers’ market.
    In the first few days of December each year—so right about now in fact—there’d be a special cookery session. ‘Evie, Tess, allons-y ! It’s time to do our baking for Saint Nicolas.’ We’d get out the big cream mixing bowl, its glaze crackled with age, and our rolling pins (an old, heavy oak one for Mamie Lucie and smaller, more manageable beech-wood ones that she’d bought for my sister and me), and mix together the butter, sugar and spices to make the cookies for the saint’s feast day on the sixth of the month. First we’d make the star-shaped bredeles and Tess and I would decorate them with brown hazelnuts and sugared orange peel, and then we’d prepare the dough for the gingerbread men. Mamie Lucie’s special recipe, which was passed down to her by her own mother—who was originally from Alsace in the north of France, where celebrating the feast of Saint Nicolas is almost a bigger deal than Christmas itself—included adding little nuggets of succulent crystallised ginger which exploded with flavour as we bit into the finished cookies that had been drizzled with white sugar frosting.
    ‘Tell us about the Bad Butcher again,’ we’d implore as we cut the shapes from the cookie dough, nibbling on the raw scraps until our grandmother stopped us, saying we’d get a stomach ache.
    ‘Well, my darlings, a very, very long time ago and a very, very long way away, there lived a very, very bad butcher. One day, three little children wandered away from their mothers and got lost. Cold and hungry, they came to a butcher’s shop where they begged for shelter. But the bad butcher took them— un, deux, trois —and cut them up with his big, sharp knife and popped them into his brine pot.’ Our eyes would grow as big as saucers at this point in the story and Tess and I would shiver with delighted horror at the gruesome tale, safe in the knowledge of a happy ending.
    ‘But then, one winter’s day, seven long years later, Saint Nicolas came to the butcher’s shop and, in his turn, asked the man for shelter. “But of course; do come in,” said the butcher. “May I have something to eat as