Dirt

by Bill Buford

  * * *

  —

  During the walk, I came upon other reminders, monuments that I hadn’t expected, including a yellow trail sign for a stèle—a marker, in the high altitude of nowhere. I followed it and came upon a French flag, a high white rock, and a stone inscription revealing that, on June 15, 1944, fifteen Resistance fighters were ambushed here by German soldiers and killed. I paused and read each name. They would have been local lads—quite possibly descendants of the voisins around the monastery—and would have known these woods, the ins and outs of them, better than any foreigner.

  I came across another war memory, a mile or two further along, a sign with a simple text: On June 15, one Émile Clayet had been tortured and then shot.

  I contemplated what he had been subjected to and what information the German soldiers were hoping Monsieur Clayet would reveal. I hoped it didn’t relate to the ambush.

  I made other discoveries of a more pedestrian nature: that, for instance, you should never, ever, hike in a pair of boots without first breaking them in. I also learned that you can never have enough water. I had finished my bottle long ago. At the outset there had been waterfalls and a rushing stream, even if a little precarious-making to reach from the trail, and I didn’t try. I was confident I’d find more later; the map told me so. And I did, but here, where the massif flattened, there were pastures, and the water wasn’t moving much, and cows were standing in it, and I decided that, nah, I wasn’t really that thirsty.

  I also learned this about the monastery: It wasn’t there.

  What a curious thing.

  There was a chapel, so I knew I had come to the right place. (It would be Jessica’s first question when I told her: Are you sure you didn’t get lost again?) It may have marked the original entrance to the monastery property—it was dedicated to a Saint Vital—and was unearthed only recently, in the 1970s (and escaped therefore at least a century or two of pillaging). An effort to reconstruct it—a wheelbarrow, a wood plank to push it across, a pile of stones—was very much on display. Yes, I appeared to be in the right place. But where was the monastery hiding?

  There was a dead-end road sign—the only indication of a civil authority—which led up a hill. On my left: a discarded ceramic bathtub, a sink, blue plastic bags. On my right: an electric fence. I then saw it, on the other side of the gate, which not only told you to keep out but promised to electrocute you if you disobeyed.

  Or at least I believe I was seeing it. It (i.e., an oddly raised piece of earth, like a long hill with a dirt roof) was not so much a ruin as a ruin that had been buried. It was a shape, high on what was the highest hill, with jaggedy bits, looking not unlike funeral mounds, and about two hundred feet in length, around fifty across. Historical archaeological digs had also confirmed the structure. But whatever had been uncovered at the time had been covered up since.

  The electric fence was disconcerting. So, too, were the property’s inhabitants: four young bulls. They were in the shade at the top of the hill. They appeared to be guarding the monastery. I really hadn’t expected to find four young bulls.

  They arranged themselves in a row and stared at me. I wasn’t going to be thwarted by the fence or the animals, and I refused to regard the impediment as a big deal. But actually it was a big deal.

  I checked my phone. I had battery but no reception.

  I continued up the dead-end road to the outer perimeter of the property, following the electric fence. I was looking for a place where I might slide under.

  The bulls turned, still in a row, and continued to stare.

  I cut into the woods, still running alongside the fence, where it was steeper and bumpier, and I found a spot. I lay facedown, scooted under, and rolled. I was in the property.

  The bulls, meanwhile, had turned a full 180 degrees, to keep me in view. They were remarkably attentive.

  I was now in the sun, and I was hot. The bulls were on the higher ground, in the shade, standing amid the ruins of the monastery. They were where I wanted to be.

  They were still in a line, but had pressed themselves together more tightly. One bull was now in advance of the others. He fixed on me.

  He stared. I stared back.

  This is ridiculous, I thought. I clapped, loud, and then made a noise, a shout. The bull inched forward. His stare was impressively intense.

  He snorted. No question: That was a snort. He then seemed to paw the ground. He pawed it a second time. He pawed it a third time. He was preparing to charge.

  I thought: This could be a good ending for my book.

  I thought: This could be a rather bad ending for me.

  I changed my plan and slowly, my gaze averted, made my way down the other side of the hill in the direction of the chapel. I made a very big circle, and didn’t look back. On reflection, I decided, those bulls—they can have their monastery.

  Eventually, I reapproached from the other side, where the bulls weren’t facing. By then (it had been a long walk) they were eating grass and had wandered down the hill, ceding their position to me.

  I found the spot where I thought that the church’s altar might have been buried and sat down against a trunk of a tree and, feeling that I’d been holding my breath for a long time, exhaled deeply. When Brillat-Savarin got up here, he had unusually refined thoughts—he describes an evening stroll, between the second and third feast of the day, and breathing “the pure air of those high meadows”—and discovered that it refreshed “a man’s soul and disposed his imagination to quiet thought and to romanticism.” Then again, he probably didn’t have to deal with a bull.

  I calmed down, opened my backpack, and addressed the prospect of my long-overdue lunch. In the circumstances—and possibly owing to the pure air of these high meadows—that chicken sandwich was the best chicken sandwich I have eaten in my life.

  I consulted the map from a nineteenth-century dig and concluded that, yes, I was directly over the altar. I was also near a graveyard housing eight centuries of monks. I thought: That’s a lot of dead monks. I opened my Brillat-Savarin.

  He got a few things wrong. The altitude, for instance, wasn’t five thousand feet but, according to my trail map, more like half that height. (Then again, after my own effort to climb it, I can attest that it felt like five thousand.) Otherwise the basic surroundings haven’t changed much. Brillat-Savarin describes pine trees to the west—the very forest that I’d hiked through to find my way under the electric fence—and how the monastery itself was on a plateau between two mountainlike ridges, with a pasture in between. And it was beautiful—on this crisp autumnal afternoon, it seemed like a natural-world paradise—this wide-open valley, the bright green grass, the forest, the utter isolation. The monastery began with twelve monks. By the time of the Revolution, there were more—two dozen? three?—overseeing ten thousand acres, including vineyards and a man-made lake. Everything they ate, they made—or freshly harvested with their own hands.

  According to Brillat-Savarin, there was a bountiful variety. He describes his first meal (“a truly classic déjeuner”), a banquet of such generous proportions as to resemble the monastery itself: a pâté rising out of the middle of the table like a church, flanked on the north by veal, on the south by pork, on the west by artichokes, and on the east by a monumental ball of butter. (The monks, who were fasting for their saint, had prepared the feast in advance, wholly committed to the high principle of hospitality, even if they couldn’t join.) After the mass—the musicians performing throughout—a dinner was prepared inspired by the taste (le goût) of the 1500s, including various meats done as simple ragoûts (“une bonne cuisine”), local mountain vegetables with more flavor than town-dwellers had tasted before, followed by fourteen platters of roast (“abundance was the rule”). At nine, there was a light supper. The neighbors showed up for a long night of drinking and singing and games that culminated in the last food of the night, hot bread
and butter with a tub of sweetened eau-de-vie that arrived alight.

  The neighbors, from the local villages, returned seven years later. Thézillieu, which I could view from my seat against the tree trunk, was the closest, and I imagined seeing their coming, les foules, the throngs, on a warm night in August 1789, crossing the wide-open pasture, bearing torches and crude weapons. They would have chased the sandaled inhabitants out of the abbey and down the mountain. They then began to take the buildings apart—the demolition appears to have taken many, many years—and carted away the bricks to build their homes and barns with. And they set everything on fire, archives, manuscripts, books, eight centuries of history.

  Brillat-Savarin doesn’t mention that night, nothing to mar the sharp cold clarity of the hike he made to reach a monastery, intact and wholly functioning. Even so, the visit doesn’t seem to be the point that Brillat-Savarin wanted to make. It was that no such visit will recur. That world is gone. In all my imagining of my own visit, I had never thought there would be nothing left.

  * * *

  —

  I put down my volume of Brillat-Savarin and pulled out my handwritten book of recipes. On the cover the author had written Recettes at an angle and underlined it. I’m not sure if it was a title or simply a declaration of purpose.

  I came by it owing to an interest I had developed in old secondhand cookbooks, especially those of the “Mère” variety. It started when Michel Richard told me that one had inspired him to start cooking. When he was ten, while his mother was at work, he read her copy of La Véritable Cuisine de famille by “Tante Marie,” and decided, then and there, that he would hereafter make dinner for the family, then six people. (Or seven? Or maybe nine? It was never clear, not least because at least two of them were “unofficial.”) I found a copy published in 1948, the year of Richard’s birth, and quite possibly the very edition he cooked from, the spine suitably obliterated, with a back cover attached by a strip of brittle yellow tape, for the price of 5 euros. The title translates as “True family cooking,” and the book could be seen as akin, in its idiosyncratic French way, to what Joy of Cooking would become in the United States, a go-to guide for making dinners and holiday meals that many families had to have. But “Tante Marie” was much more casual than her American counterpart and, faced with the challenge of rendering French cuisine for home cooks, rose to it by going light rather than heavy, in short punchy paragraphs, three or four recipes a page, no ingredients list, and not much fuss about measuring them: a glass of this, a coffee cup of that. Her approach was evident on every page: “You can do this!”

  I acquired lots of Mère books. I coveted stained, used, filthy ones, and found an almost addictive pleasure in flipping through pages that had been studied, in some cases, more than a century before. They were a household’s most used volume and seemed to reveal their histories, of people gathered around tables, of celebrations, of children growing up, and the intimacy that food seems to effect. They also had a quality that I want to describe as an “aura.” French cooking, as I knew perfectly well, has to be learned, and it is certainly not hereditary even if it is an important element in one’s French heritage. These books were purposeful. There was urgency between the teachers and the readers, most evident in what was published from around 1890 or so to the 1920s, when French families seemed to believe that their veritable “Frenchness” rested on their being able to make a French meal. There was also a flourishing of how-to magazines, “gazettes,” broadsheets, public lectures. It was a historically unique moment, when cooking, French cooking, was no longer a conversation held among chefs, but also among families.

  The first handwritten family cookbook that I came upon was started during World War I. I was startled to discover that such things existed and that you could actually buy them—again for little money; nobody was interested. The little book—it measured three inches by four—conveyed both mystery and sadness: the mystery of someone, invariably a woman, trying to make a household function and be French, an artifact that was itself stuffed with artifacts, how-to dishes written up on paper scraps from friends, a postcard from a general on the front, a shopping list, the scarcity of butter, of meat, of sugar, a menu plan for Christmas Day. Jessica and I sat at our own kitchen table and examined the pages, and everything else that we found between them, and felt ourselves voyaging via an unexpected vehicle of time-travel into someone else’s cooking space, which wouldn’t have had refrigeration and where a gas-burning oven was a novelty.

  And the sadness? The fact that it was now in my hands. It had been a kitchen tool for at least three generations, beginning around 1915, a seventy-year conversation between a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter, until finally it was swept out in an estate-clearing auction of whatnots and ended up on eBay.

  I collected these home recipe collections—I must have three dozen by now—in the hope that, one day, I would find an unexpected piece of text that might teach me something new about the French kitchen, an insight, a surprise. I may have found it in the handwritten recipe book that I had brought with me.

  The book is inescapably handmade. A thick piece of cardboard was bent in half. Sheets of another era’s very thin paper have been folded and slipped inside, and number sixty-eight pages. Each sheet is lined, perfectly, lightly, on both sides, in pencil. Nothing is revised, no corrections, except for a few words that have been crossed out. I counted five. There isn’t a misspelling or a stray accent. Only one page has fingerprints, from three fingers, that interrupt a densely written account of the Burgundy recipe for poaching eggs in red wine (oeufs en meurette, one of my favorite lunchtime wintry dishes). The effort is meticulous. It is bound by candy-cane-striped string looped through the spine. I brought it with me because it seemed to resonate with Brillat-Savarin’s memoir.

  There are clues as to the book’s origins, all of them frustratingly incomplete, like initials on the front cover, compressed as though the author was experimenting with a logo. They are also smudged, as if he had tried to rub them out, and are hard to read. They might be “MR.” The other side of the cardboard reveals that it was cut from a Red Cross relief box. (“From: American Red Cross—USA. To: International Red Cross Committ”—the last letters sliced off to fashion the cover.) There is an address, “Stalag IX, Ziegenhain,” and an addressee, only the first five letters: “M O I S O.”

  Might this be the name of the author? Possibly so, possibly not. Ziegenhain was a POW camp that filled up mainly with French soldiers captured when Germany entered France in 1940. Inmates who agreed to tend the Nazi vegetable garden were rewarded with a relief box. Was our author among the gardeners? Or just the recipient of the cardboard afterward?

  We can’t know. I didn’t know. I knew nothing, really, except that this handmade book in my own hands seemed to be among the most unique cookbooks I have ever held. I spent nights examining it, smelling it, reading it, feeling the pages for the impressions made by the pencil that wrote the recipes, imagining the circumstances, the concentration, the hunger of its author, his exhaustion, and a fantasy life that consisted of recollecting French dishes in impeccably precise detail.

  I have since discovered there was a context. I read it in a memoir written by a French officer who, captured near the border after Germany invaded France, spent the rest of the war in several camps of this kind, including a six-month stint, mainly in solitary confinement, at Ziegenhain. The book, Les grandes vacances (The Long Vacation), by Francis Ambrière, was published in 1946, won the Goncourt (even though it wasn’t fiction and never purported to be), and became an instant best seller, satisfying the curiosity of a nation that longed to know, and mourned on learning, what happened to their captured fathers and sons and brothers (estimated to be about 1.8 million).

  Ambrière showed me that my anonymous author wasn’t alone. In the first year of captivity, he writes, Frenchmen, starving, were obsessed by memories of their national cuisine. “In the first da
ys of captivity, hundreds of cookbooks were written in vengeful hope of our returning soon to France.” Ambrière had long appreciated French cuisine. But in Germany, in a prison camp at Petrisberg, he discovered its poetry, spoken in the haunted tones of nostalgia and tenderness: “It expressed not just hunger but something deeper: defiance, the revolt of reason, a joy in life.”

  Was my handmade book one of the hundreds? How many have survived? So far, I’ve found no others. And why this one? (I contacted the seller. He didn’t know where the book came from. It was in a box of war memorabilia.)

  There are similarities between Brillat-Savarin’s recollection and the “recettes” of my anonymous author: At the very least, both works might be described as accounts of culinary mourning at a time of terrible upheaval. More profoundly, both books seem to be struggling to articulate how food in France has come to be so much more than food: It has become, on many levels, who you are.

  The differences are as important, including the most basic: Brillat-Savarin wrote on a full stomach; the anonymous chef wrote on the verge of starvation. A hypothesis that I dreamed up—that he may have been made a chef for German officers, and that this volume had been his recipe book—was dashed on my learning the actual eating arrangements, thanks to the documentary efforts of the camp’s last and most robust prisoners, the Americans. No one ate well, including the prison officers, although they did eat. Their leftovers, when there were leftovers, were made into a once-a-day soup that, by the last year of the war, “fed” approximately twenty thousand inmates. The majority of the inmates at Ziegenhain died of starvation.

  Who was the anonymous chef?

  I read and reread looking for more clues. The early pages are devoted to classic dishes—two ways of preparing hare, for instance, one a roast with a chestnut purée, and the other à la royale (a civet de lièvre, the animal cooked slowly in its blood). Many of the preparations are quite discursive. In an unusually long account of how to make puff pastry, the author remarks at the end that, as with all pastries, you should dust your worktop with flour to keep your dough from sticking. (I read this and thought: Really? This is what occurs to you when you are starving in a German camp?) Likewise for a pâté-en-croûte, he reminds us not to forget to make a chimney in your crust, to let the steam escape.