The Hundred-Foot Journey (9 page)

The old woman staring down at me from the window across the street from so many years ago, that first day we moved into the Dufour estate, that face belonged to Madame Gertrude Mallory. The story I tell is God’s truth, even if I did not witness every event firsthand; the fact is many of the details of my own story were revealed to me only years after the fact, when Mallory and the others at long last told me their version of events.

But this you must know: Madame Mallory, across the street from the Dufour estate, was an innkeeper from a long line of distinguished hoteliers, originally from the Loire. She was also very much the culinary nun, a chef who had lived alone in the attic rooms above Le Saule Pleureur for thirty-four years by the time we arrived in Lumière. Just as the Bach family turned out classical musicians, so, too, the Mallorys had reared generation after generation of great French hoteliers, and Gertrude Mallory was no exception.

At the age of seventeen, Mallory was sent to the best hotel school in Geneva to continue her education, and it was there she acquired a taste for the rugged mountain range along the French and Swiss border. An awkward, sharp-tongued young woman with little talent for making friends, Mallory spent her spare time hiking alone through the Alps and the Jura, until one weekend she discovered Lumière. Shortly after her graduation an aunt died and left Mallory an inheritance, and the young chef promptly converted her windfall into a large house in this mountain outpost, remote Lumière perfectly suiting her taste for the austere life of the kitchen.

And there she went to work. Over the next decades Mallory diligently applied her first-rate education and stamina for long hours in the kitchen, building what cognoscenti eventually considered one of France’s finest small country hotels—Le Saule Pleureur.

She was a classicist by education and instinct. A rare collection of cookbooks consumed her private attic rooms from floor to ceiling, an archive that grew like a fungus above and around her good pieces of furniture, such as the seventeenth-century gueridon
or the Louis XV–style walnut bergère armchair. The book collection was, it must be said, of international renown, built discreetly over thirty years by simply applying her good eye and a modest amount of money to the nation’s book bins and country auctions.

Her most valuable book was an early edition of
De Re Coquinaria
by Apicius, the only surviving cookbook of ancient Rome. On her days off Mallory frequently sipped chamomile tea and sat alone in her attic flat with this rare document on her lap, lost in the past, marveling at the sheer range of the Roman kitchen. She so admired Apicius’s versatility, how he could handle dormice and flamingos and porcupines just as easily as pork and fish.

Of course, even though most of Apicius’s recipes were quite incompatible with modern palates—relying as they did on sickening doses of honey—Mallory did possess an inquisitive mind. And as she also had a taste for testicles, particularly a fighting bull’s
criadillas
prepared Basque-style, Madame Mallory inevitably and most memorably re-created for her guests Apicius’s recipe for
lumbuli
—
lumbuli
being the Latin for the testicles of young bulls that the Roman chef stuffed with pine nuts and powdered fennel seed, then pan-seared in olive oil and fish pickle before roasting in the oven. Well, that was the kind of chef Mallory was. Classical, but challenging, always challenging. Even of her guests.

The
De Re Coquinaria,
of course, was only the oldest cookbook in her library. The collection rolled right through time, documenting century after century of changing culinary tastes and epochs, ending finally with the handwritten 1907 version of
Margaridou: The Journal of an Auvergne Cook,
and that simple countrywoman’s recipe for the classic French onion soup.

But it was precisely this rigorous intellectual approach to cuisine that made Madame Mallory a chef’s chef, a master technician much admired by the other leading chefs of France. And it was this reputation among the cognoscenti that one day prompted a national television station to invite Mallory up to Paris for a studio interview.

Lumière was a rather provincial outpost, so it was not surprising Madame Mallory’s television debut became a local event, villagers all across the valley tuning in to FR3 to watch their very own Madame Mallory rattle off fascinating culinary facts on air. And as the villagers sipped rough marc
in the town’s bars or in the comforts of farmhouse parlors, a flickering Mallory up on the box explained how, during the nineteenth century’s Franco-Prussian War, starving Parisians survived the long Prussian siege of their capital by eating dogs, cats, and rats. There was an amazed roar when Madame Mallory explained that the 1871 edition of
Larousse Gastronomique,
quite simply the text of classic French cuisine, recommended skinning and gutting rats found in wine cellars—so much more flavorful. It further advised, the chef haughtily informed the television audience, rubbing the rat in olive oil and crushed shallots, grilling it over a wood fire made from smashed wine barrels, and serving it with a Bordelaise
sauce, but Curnonsky’s recipe, of course. Well, you can imagine. Instantly Madame Mallory was a minor celebrity across all France, not just in little Lumière.

The point is, Mallory never relied on her family connections but had, in her own right, earned her place among France’s culinary establishment. And she took seriously the responsibility that came with this elite position, tirelessly writing letters to the papers when it was necessary to safeguard France’s culinary traditions from the meddling of the EU bureaucrats in Brussels, so eager to impose their ridiculous standards. In particular it was her
cri du coeur
in defense of French butchering methods—printed in the radical booklet
Vive La Charcuterie Française—
that was so much admired by the nation’s opinion makers.

And that was why the space around Mallory’s priceless collection of antique cookbooks was stuffed with framed awards and letters of appreciation, from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Baron de Rothschild and Bernard Arnault. The flat simply reflected a lifetime of considerable achievement, including a letter from the Élysée Palace on the occasion of her Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

There was, however, still one small bit of unoccupied wall in her crowded top-floor flat, a bald spot just above her favorite red leather armchair. In this corner of her quarters Mallory hung her most prized possessions, two gilt-framed articles, each clipped from
Le Monde.
The article on the left announced her first Michelin star, in May 1979. The article on the right, dated March 1986, announced her second star. Mallory had reserved an empty space on the wall for the third article. It had not come.

And there we are. Madame Mallory reached her sixty-fifth birthday the day before we arrived in Lumière, and that evening her loyal manager, Monsieur Henri Leblanc, along with the rest of Le Saule Pleureur’s staff, gathered in the kitchen at closing to present her with a cake and to sing happy birthday.

Mallory was furious. She sharply told them there was nothing to celebrate and they should stop wasting her time. And before they could grasp what had happened, Mallory was stomping up Le Saule Pleureur’s darkened wooden staircase to her private rooms in the attic.

That night, when she passed through her sitting room on her way to bed, Madame Mallory once again saw the empty space on the wall, and a parallel bit of emptiness opened up in her heart. She took this ache into her room, sat on the bed, and involuntarily gasped at the thought that suddenly thrust itself into her head.

She would never get her third star.

Mallory could not move. Finally, however, she undressed silently in the dark, the stiff girdle peeling off her like an avocado skin. She shrugged on her nightgown and passed through to the bathroom for the usual bedtime rituals. She brushed her teeth violently, gargled, and lathered anti-wrinkle creams into her face.

An elderly woman’s pale face stared back. The digital clock in her bedroom flipped a minute shingle loudly.

The realization came then, so big and ugly and monstrous she closed her eyes and brought a hand to her mouth. But there it was. Unavoidable.

She was a failure.

Never would she rise above her current station in life. Never would she join that pantheon of three-star chefs. Only death awaited her.

Madame Mallory could not sleep that night. She stalked the attic, wrung her hands, muttered bitterly to herself about the injustices of life. Bats flitted through the night outside her window snatching bugs, while a lonely dog on the other side of the church cemetery howled its anguish, and together the beasts seemed to perfectly articulate her lonely torment. But finally, in the early hours, unable to stand the pain any longer, Madame Mallory did something she had not done in many, many years. She got down on her hands and knees. And she prayed.

“What . . .” she whispered into her clasped hands, “what is the reason for my life?”

The only sound was emptiness. Nothing.

Shortly thereafter the exhausted woman crawled into her bed, at long last entering a kind of unconscious state among the tangle of her sheets.

Le Saule Pleureur was closed for lunch the following day, so the exhausted Madame Mallory uncharacteristically allowed herself to stay in bed later than usual. She thought it was the pigeon cooing on her windowsill that woke her. But it fluttered away and she finally heard the yelling, the strange voices, the commotion rising up from the street, and Mallory rose stiffly from her bed and crossed the room to the little attic window.

And there we were: ragged Indian children hanging from the Dufour estate’s windows and turrets.

She couldn’t quite comprehend what was going on. What was this she was seeing? Diesel-belching Mercedes. Yellow and pink saris. A ton of tatty luggage and boxes stacked up in the cobblestone courtyard, Mummy’s gray Storwel closet still tied to the roof of the last car.

And in the middle of this courtyard, my bearlike father raising his arms and yelling.

What blissful early days. Lumière was one big adventure—of unexplored cupboards and attics and stables, of lumberyards and pastry shops and trout streams farther afield—and I remember it as a joyous period that helped us forget our many losses. And Papa, too, was finally restored to himself. For restaurant work was his center, and he immediately commandeered a rickety desk just inside the main doors, burying himself in the details of remaking the Dufour estate in his Bombay image. In no time at all the halls were filled with local craftsmen—plumbers and carpenters—with their tapes and tools and hammering noise, and it was once again the fever of Bombay re-created in this tiny corner of provincial France.

My first real sighting of Madame Mallory was perhaps a week or two after we had moved in. I was strolling through the headstones of the neighboring cemetery, furtively smoking a cigarette, when by chance I glanced over at Le Saule Pleureur. I instantly spotted Madame Mallory on her knees, bent over her rock garden, gloves and spade in hand, humming to herself. The damp stones to her left were warming up under the surprisingly strong morning sun, and trails of steam rose from the rocks, disappearing in the air.

Behind the chef stood the glorious granite slabs of the Alps, bottle green pine forests broken by patches of pasture and hardy cows grazing. Madame Mallory pulled her weeds vigorously, as if it were some satisfying form of therapy, and I could hear, even from where I stood, the violent sound of tearing roots. But I also saw, in the softness of her round face, the woman was calm and at peace tending to her corner of earth.

Right then the stable door across the road slammed open with a mighty bang. Papa and a roofer with a ladder suddenly emerged from the door’s shadows and they hobbled over to the front of the house. The roofer secured the ladder against the guttering while Papa roared, waddled back and forth across the courtyard in his armpit-stained kurta, and by sheer heckling backseat-drove the poor roofer up the ladder.

“No, no,” he yelled. “The gutter over there. Over there. Are you deaf ? Yaaar. That one.”

The tranquillity of the Jura was shattered. Madame Mallory wrenched her head sideways, her eyes rooted on Papa. She was squinting under the straw garden hat, her liver-colored lips pressed tightly together. I could see she was both horrified and strangely mesmerized by Papa’s grotesque size and vulgarity. But the moment passed. Mallory lowered her eyes and pulled off her canvas gloves. Her quiet gardening moment was ruined, and, clutching her basket, she wearily climbed back up the stone steps to the inn.

Her back was to the street when she hesitated after unlocking the front door, just as a particularly virulent burst of Papa’s roars rolled across the forecourt. From where I was standing, off to the side, I saw the look on her face as she paused before her door—the lips pursed in utter disgust, the face a mask of icy disdain. It was a look that I would see many times again as I made my way through France in the coming years—a uniquely Gallic look of nuclear contempt for one’s inferiors—but I will never forget the first time I saw it.

Then, bang, the slam of the door.

The family discovered the local
pain chemin de fer
—rough and gnarled and tasty—and this “railroad” bread immediately became our new sauce-mopping favorite. Papa and Auntie were constantly asking me to pick up “just a few more” loaves at the
boulangerie,
and on one such foray, cutting back from the town center with the crusty bread wrapped in paper under my arm, through the back alleys where the wealthy watch merchants once kept their horses, I casually glanced over a stone-and-stucco wall.

It was, I quickly realized, the back view of Le Saule Pleureur. The small hotel’s garden was quite long and deep, almost a field, and it gently sloped down a hill to where I stood. The verdant property was filled with mature pear and apple trees, and against the far wall there stood a fruit-drying shed made of rough Lumière granite.