Road trip with Paula Wolfert

When I moved to Paris, I did so with a bare minimum of possessions. Among the few cookbooks I selected to bring with me were the complete works of Paula Wolfert. I haven't gotten my nose out of Paula's books since I discovered Couscous and other good foods of Morocco decades ago. In fact, the more books Paula wrote, the more time I spent in the kitchen, cooking my way through the wonderland of her recipes. And yet it's a task far from complete! I can still open up any one of her books and be surprised by a recipe I haven't tried yet and that sounds utterly irresistable. Because Paula cooks like I like to cook.

So imagine the thrill at just this time of year back in 2005 when, checking my orders, I saw that Paula Wolfert had ordered a ceramic cooking pot from me. I sent it to her and sort of held my breath, figuratively speaking. Of course I was dying to email her, but I didn't want to abuse her privacy. Lucky for me, after the pot arrived, she emailed me with a question about it. The rest, as they say, is history... Or in our case, the beginning of an intense communication exchange between two women who are obsessed with culinary pottery, authentic ingredients, and cooking. And not just any old cooking, but cooking that digs right down to the roots of a dish with (usually) no short cuts allowed. We like cooking that is time-consuming, minutiae-filled, laborious--in a word: authentic. You know--all those ethnic, old-time ways of doing things. All the parts of cooking that most people call a pain in the ass are the fun of cooking for Paula and me.

Since I've known Paula, she's been working on her latest book: Mediterranean Claypot Cooking. So much of our repartee has been about claypots and recipes to make in them. Paula let me know last spring that she would be coming to Paris as a judge in culinary event in early July, and could we get together. That was the beginning of the road trip.

Paula's one of those people who's a great achiever because she has the ability to focus in one thing to the exclusion of just about everything. Notice I said "just about." The one other thing Paula cares about right now other than clay pots is the presidential campaign in particular and politics in general. But since I couldn't get her a date with Barack Obama, I arranged instead for her to meet some of the potters I know here in France who produce clay cookware.

Paula arrived at the airport with not a hair out of place after her 12-hour flight. To my amazement, instead of toppling directly into bed after a shower, as I do after international travel, she wanted to stay up and talk. And talk we did, aided by some salad, foie gras, and wine. I heard about when she ran away from home as a child, and, well, many other stories from the life of a woman who had lived in Tangier at the same time as Paul Bowles, given birth to her kids in Paris, and who knows just about everyone in the culinary world. I've been trying to get her to let me write her biography, but she pooh-poohs the idea. (Believe me, you would love to read about her life.)

After she'd rested up for a day, we packed up my little Citroën Pluriel, making sure to leave plenty of room for any clay pots we might want to purchase. By 8 in the morning, we were crawling around the traffic-clotted Boulevard Péripherique toward our escape hatch: the A6 or Autoroute du Soleil (Highway of the Sun, so named because it heads south).
Our first stop was to be the Potérie de Sampigny in southern Burgundy, where Sylvie and François Fresnais had invited us to have lunch with them. The Fresnais fire their pottery in one of two different ovens: gas and wood. On this particular day, François was firing the wood oven, a process that takes an entire day of continuous feeding of wood until the inside temperature reaches over 1000 degrees C. Smoke roiled out of the oven's chimney in a thick coil. The Fresnais and their youngest son took turns leaving the lunch table at intervals to feed the oven. We lingered over paupiettes de veau (veal rolls) with garden vegetables and discussed François' upcoming trip to Santa Fe to a pottery festival there. Paula, meanwhile, was a bit cranky (to use her own word); I think the fatigue of the journey hit her that day.

After a restful night in the bourgignon countryside, we headed toward Auvergne. We were on a mission. Paula's husband Bill wanted us to buy a piece of ceramic art from a potter he'd been in contact with in a beautiful village there. She turned out to be a delightful person, and I liked her work too. I bought a couple of lovely vases, which looked as if they were made from lichen-covered stone, from her for Denis. Then, we headed more or less directly east to my pottery hangout at Cliousclat. These potters have become good friends of mine, and the picturesque village has become my favorite overnight stop when I'm traveling to and from Provence. We visited the pottery, of course, and had a convivial dinner that evening with the potters. Paula was the life of the party. Early the next morning, we were sitting outside having breakfast at our hotel when one of the potters (in fact, an owner of the pottery), Nicholas Sourdive, approached us on foot, his arms full of clay pots. (The hotel is only about 50 yards from the pottery, and Nicholas' house is between the two.) Nico had rummaged in his pottery archives to show us two old pots that had belonged to his mother, and which his parents had brought from Spain. In a manner of speaking, we had clay for breakfast (as well as for lunch and dinner)!

We got to our house in Provence the next day (a Saturday), where Denis was expecting us, having arrived on the bullet train the previous evening. We had a simple dinner of grilled lamb chops (from our neighbor's lamb, of course). As Paula became convinced that the beautiful vaulted stone room on the ground floor where I had been planning to house my honored guest was home to scorpions, she opted to sleep in the child's guestroom on the main floor. When I came downstairs the next morning, she was already peering at the latest political analyses on my laptop.  She did break away long enough, of course, to inspect all the pots in my kitchen (only the clay ones, of course; I'm not sure she even saw items not made of clay).

That day we had the good fortune to be able to go to one of my favorite of the many village festivals in our area of Provence: the "Retrosaveurs" celebration in the mountain village of Vachères. This town has a wonderful sense of community spirit, and this was their biggest festival of the year. The focus was on 'old-time flavors', many artisanal producers of juices, tapenades, olive oils, and so forth were on hand to let you taste (and buy) their wares. Among them were our good friends Geraldine and Robert LeBozec (below right) whom we hadn't seen in several months. It was a joyful reunion. Of course there was a big communal lunch featuring local épautre, lamb, and vegetables, and local citizens who sat down at our table to introduce themselves in a most delightful way.












The old-time atmosphere included a horse-drawn carriage and folks dressed in traditional Provençal clothing. And with stands selling fresh produce, local flavor was certainly out in full force, as it always in our part of Haute Provence. It was simply wonderful and we were all feeling pretty boisterous.

Of course, it was over all too quickly. That evening, Denis took off for Paris, and the following morning, Paula and I headed south to meet up with her favorite potter in Aubagne. Then it was the long road back to Paris, with my spirits sinking a bit lower--as they always do--with every kilometer northward.

But one last delight awaited us. On our last evening together, Paula, Denis and I had dinner at a bistro called Le Quincy that I'd long wanted to try. We had a fine dinner of the sort of hearty, traditional fare that Paula has spent her life immortalizing in her books. A delicious leek tart and chicken with crayfish sauce seemed to wipe away the last traces of jet lag and had our favorite author looking simply radiant. In fact, I'd say she looks as if she's ready for another road trip!

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