(not so) easy as pie

Ambivalent. That’s my primary emotion about Thanksgiving.

By most accounts, I should *love* Thanksgiving. After all, it is our one feasting holiday, this country’s only day devoted solely to food.

But it can be hard to get past the cultural politics, the complicated family dynamics, and the compulsory menu that has the culinary breadth of a bowling alley. Sure, you can have some fun with Marsala in the gravy, and maybe you’ll switch to wild rice dressing this year, or go a little crazy with the cranberry sauce. But in the end, you line up and chuck that ball at the same ten pins, year after year. When you consider the days of work that typically go into one afternoon’s meal, does it really pay off?

the smart sister

The first time I had tarte Tatin, Kathy and I were on the coast of France, in a heartbreakingly beautiful fishing village just a scooter ride from Nice. Unlike Nice, whose imported sand beaches are plastered with sun-bathing tourists, we loved Villefranche-sur-Mer because it was beachless, and real.

It was a place where you could jump off a black boulder jetty into the sparkling harbor, and gaze up at the kaleidoscope of houses that are the town’s steep ascent from sea.

You could find a simple hotel room for thirty francs, and fling open its tall shutters to air and sun. And from that window, gaze down at a verdant garden, and follow its lush rows of fat tomatoes and peppers rambling toward a house, to discover it belonged to a neighborhood bistro, La Trinquette. It would have been closed earlier, when you checked in to the friendly hotel, eking out the transaction in painstaking French.

Setting out for dinner, you would walk past its chalkboard announcing grilled sardines, toward the restaurants with a sea view, candles blinking prettily atop tables set in straight rows. Tuxedoed waiters worked in tight formation, attending to a rising tide of diners.

On instinct you would turn away from your guide book and back toward the neighborhood restaurant that does not have a view of the sea. The owners have been cooking there since one of them was thin and both of them were young. Their clientele knew them when they were this way, and will tell you of jolly stories of the old times.