Q: Do you go hunting for truffles and mushrooms?
A: Not on our own. We can go out for four hours and not find a thing. It's so depressing. You've got to know what you're looking for. But we go out for whole mornings with friends and come back with bushels of wild mushrooms. You have to go out with people who know. It's amazing.
Q: So that you know which mushrooms are edible?
A: Which ones are edible and which ones are good edible. For a lot of them they'll say they're edible, but they taste blah. That's what I've learned in France...taste. It's not enough to just have food. To just put something in your mouth. It has to have flavor. Here, we're excited about serving wild mushrooms, but if they're tasteless wild mushrooms, what good is it? We still haven't gotten it in America, and I'm speaking of myself, too. We don't understand the difference between food and good food. No taste and taste.
Q: Do you learn a lot from people in the village?
A: I do. But I learn a lot just by growing things. By trial and error. More than anything, I've learned a respect for agriculture that I never had before. Like trying to grow tomatoes - you think: homegrown tomatoes. Of course, those are the best. Well, guess what? They don't always taste the best if the soil isn't right, if you water them too much. You could end up with tomatoes that are just as lousy as the ones you get in a supermarket. So it's not obvious. I love artichokes, and my dream was to go and pick my own artichokes. They're a bitch to grow in our soil they say: "I don't want to grow here." The plants aren't pretty, and you only get a few, and they taste like dirt! You think, forget it. The plants talk back to you: "uh-uh, I don't want to do this." We had several peach trees. We kept trying to grow peaches. We thought: we're in Provence, we should grow peaches. Then the locals would come and say, "This isn't peach country." I'd say what do you mean, we're in Provence! But peaches grow on the other side of the village, not where we are.
Q: Is there a lot of interchange with your neighbors?
A: Oh, tons! What's sort of fun about being a foreigner is they think you're crazy. But that's okay! We invite country, Provencal people to eat pistou and they see this babe from Wisconsin cooking pistou. They're loving it, but they're thinking, "What's wrong with this picture?" It would be like the guy down the street who's French inviting you over for the best hamburger you've ever eaten. or chili, and he's wacko for chili and you're wondering why is he wacko for chili, he should be making sauce bernaise! So I'm like a mirage for them.
Q: Is your cooking influenced by much Italian cooking as well? I see you have a lot of pasta dishes in the cookbook.
A: In America, we want to compartmentalize everything. Pasta is Italian, cream is French. We forget that the Mediterranean area, where we live, was part of the Roman Empire in the year Zero!
There was no Italy and there was no France, it was the Roman Empire. We've come a long way since then. Certainly pasta is more Italian than anything else, but what we now know as Provence and what we now know as Italy has been linked for a very long time. I think we make a mistake by trying to put everything in its little place.
Q: After years of living in France, do you still feel American when you're over there?
A: Totally! More and more. The more I'm there the more American I feel. In a way, you become... grateful. Really, because I would never want to be French. In a way I feel I've benefitted from the best of both. There's the American spirit of freedom and energy and creativity - make yourself up... and then there's the French discipline and rigidity and conservativeness - which is very good for working. In America, we have no rules, so you can be anything, which is fine. But the nice thing about France is there's a rule for everything. And if you play by the rules, you're fine. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for yukking it up and having fun, but you know when you go to someone's house or go into a restaurant, you know what you're supposed to do. Whereas here, we don't have a rule. Still, France is becoming more and more casual.
Q: Tell us about your cooking classes at Chanteduc.
A: We start on Sunday night with dinner and go through to lunch on Friday. It's all hands on in the kitchen at Chanteduc - cooking with herbs from the garden, grapes from the vineyard, olives from the groves. We visit vineyards, markets, local restaurants, and shops. Our butcher gives a class. The cheese makers come to dinner one night with an assortment of cheeses, aged at different times, so people can see what one cheese looks like one week old, two weeks old, three weeks old, four, five. They can see the evolution of the cheese like you would taste the evolution of a wine.
Q: You make your own wines?
A: We allow the winemaker to do what he needs to do. We have discussions about choosing the grape varieties to grow. Our wine is made from three different grape varieties to give it a little more complexity. It's called Clos Chanteduc. In New York it's sold by the glass at E.A.T. or the Vinegar Factory.
Q: Do you spend most of your time at Chanteduc?
A: Not really. Paris is my base. We go to Chanteduc for weekends or for weeks at a time in the summer. That's when I wish the house and the trees could talk back, they experience such splendor! On Tuesday, I think about all the women who lived in Chanteduc, and looked forward to the Tuesday market, and how they felt on Tuesday. I wish I could have a little camera and go back.
