It was not obvious that I would become a cook.

As a child I was fat at a time when there were no nice words for it, and eating was often embarrassing and sometimes furtive.  As a teen, I thought cooking was for moms and other people I did not want to be.  But, this was the seventies, and France and French cooking were diffusing across the Atlantic. My siblings and I loved Julia Child – the way she swept things off the counter to be disposed of by unseen hands (perhaps they were Paul’s).  And far from home in suburban Massachusetts, Alice Waters had started Chez Panisse in Berkley and Le Cirque debuted in New York. 

France came for me when I fell for my first dish and the idea of that dish.  I was working two summer jobs, so I had some money and an excuse not to go home to eat.  I took myself to dinner at the new restaurant on Main Street – the one we imagined was visited by local stars, and that was filled with people in peasant dresses or faded chinos that stood out against their tans.  The dish I fell for was mussels marinière.  Sweet, winey and full of garlic, the sauce soaked up with bread. The taste, to my imagination, was both delicious and emblematic of the life I could lead if only I wasn’t myself.

Mussels marinière, despite its mellifluous name, is not a complex dish and I learned to make it when I left college. The ingredients are cheap:  mussels, wine, garlic, butter. If you know what you are doing you can add shallot, bay leaf and parsley, some pepper and even a dash of cream.  I did not know what I was doing.  The mussels came from the Portuguese fish store, which smelled of seaweed and salt cod.  I used a giant kettle from the Salvation Army and fed it to everyone, assuming that they would feel the same aura of sophistication and luxury that I did when I made it.  I would guess that few of my friends had ever eaten a mussel, and many may never have wanted to.  This did not occur to me, although I don’t remember revulsion or complaints. I recall the evenings as warm and exciting.  This was my chance to bring people in and give them something of what the fish and the wine and the bread made me feel.