Nothing is more sacred in France than the lunch hour. Whether you are sitting in a busy cafe in Paris, in a bathing suit at some station balneaire, or quietly in the country somewhere. It’s all the same. Missing out on lunch well, it’s like missing out on life. It’s not done.
We would be having lunch, all sitting around the large dining room table, the shutters and windows were all open, the curtains swaying ever so gently with the occasional ocean summer breeze. It was quite outside, even the cars filled with packed tourists on as summer outing had found a little place to stop for lunch. It was a sacred moment in the day. People stopped what they were doing, gathered around and broke bread. Well almost all.
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There we were all nursing our wine or in my case watered-down wine (injustice), Mom and Dad making small talk about the weather (warm for this early in the season), the unusual amount of tourists, the markets (I don’t mean the capital markets) and Monsieur le Facteur doing his share in a very heavy Breton patoit (local accent – which I am proud to say I have been know to mimic quite well (beinn oui,dame). A second round was offered but respectfully declined by Monsieur le Facteur who collected his bicycle and walked out the gate. Until the next time when a letter or a postcard was to be delivered. I don’t know if any of us every knew his name. As far as I know he was always Mister Mailman, Monsieur le Facteur. That was it.
At long last, the second course was presented and Simone would place in front of my father, with much flourish and a corresponding “ooo–la-la” on our part. This time the piece de resistance was a colin en sauce blanche (hake fish) with head still firmly attached in a delicious cream sauce with capers and boiled potatoes from the vegetable garden. The colin and I had a staring contest going on and I believe I blinked first. When the colin was a mere shadow of its former self, dinner plates were removed and replaced with a third round for the cheeses and the tossed green salad -home grown, of course, salade verte. More bread and more wine please. Finally, it was desert time and a special desert had been prepared just for Simone’s favorite petit chou-chou (that would be me folks). The crepes were proudly presented tableside and we added sugar or jam or both – if no one was looking. My father would abstain and state matter of factly: “I don’t see how you could possibly eat that sweet stuff after such a delicious meal.” Finally, with our additional poundage, we made our way outside to the courtyard for coffee which meant for the children we would have a “canne a sucre” or a sugar cube dipped in coffee. Our bellies completly full and our system well sugared, maybe it was time for some light reading in the deck chair perhaps or a nap upstairs, or was I going to be shanghaied into making yet another trip to antique stores, another magasin de brochante. Please say no.
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