A Pig in Provence Read Online Free Page B

outside Aix-en-Provence.
    Over the next few years as I came to know various farmhouse and modest village kitchens, I would find most of them very much like this one. Many had been modernized during the 1950s or 1960s, with some indoor plumbing and electricity installed, and a small, tubular white enamel water heater hanging over a utilitarian white sink set in faux granite or tiled cement. The walls of these kitchens were painted with multiple layers of pale green or cream-colored enamel, and the floors were red tiles if old, or tiles of inexpensive granite composite if new. An oil- or wood-burning stove both for cooking and for heat was set where a fireplace had once reigned, with the stove’s pipe cut into the chimney flue. Sometimes the mantel was still there, with the pipe stretching beneath it. Somewhere, there would bea propane-fueled, two-burner stove top or perhaps a modest new stove as well as the oil- or wood-burning one. Often, an overstuffed chair was in a corner and a small canapé, or couch, against a wall.
    It was early winter, and Mme. Rillier’s kitchen was warm. Something that smelled of onions and garlic was cooking in a hissing pressure cooker on the back of the stove. A stew maybe, or dried beans, I thought. Greens freshly cut from the garden lay on the sink, along with the bucket of onions she had just brought in. A collection of succulents sat in small pots on the windowsill. On the wall, above an overstuffed brown chair covered with a crocheted afghan in shades of orange, blue, and brown, hung a shotgun.
    “Here,” Mme. Rillier said, reaching into a cupboard. “This is a cheese mold.” She held a cuplike ceramic object, glazed ocher on the inside, the terra-cotta of the outside unglazed. It was perforated with a regular pattern of small round holes. She reached deeper into the cupboard and brought out several more molds in various sizes.
    “These are what I used. I think they might come in plastic now. Used to be someone in the village who made all the clay things we needed—
daubières, tians,
casseroles, bowls, and these cheese molds. He died during the war.”
    The war again. It was still close to these people’s lives, I realized. She would have been about twenty-five when the war ended, and her daughter was born during the war. I wondered again about the Germans. What was it like to live in this isolated place, Germans billeted in your house, your men gone to war or with la Résistance?
    “You make your cheese right after milking, while the milk is warm. Don’t let it cool off. Pour the milk into a big bowl or bucket and add the rennet.”
    This was the key moment for me. I quickly abandoned my imaginings about the war.
    “How much rennet?”
    “Just a tiny drop for, say, five liters. Not much. If you add too much, the cheese will be like rubber, full of holes and bitter.”
    “And then what?” I asked, afraid that she had finished.
    “Then you cover the milk up and by morning it will be curdled. Or, if morning milk, curdled by dinner. Scoop the curd into the molds and set them out to drain. That’s what the holes are for. The next day, salt the cheeses, turn them over, and let them drain another day. That’s it.”
    “That’s it? What about aging? Isn’t the cheese awfully soft?”
    “Of course it’s soft. It’s a fresh cheese. Every day you keep it, it gets older. Cheese is a living thing, you know, like wine. It changes, just like us, as it gets older. If you want an aged cheese, you keep it longer.”
    This didn’t exactly correspond to the USDA guidance about aging cheeses.
    “But if your cheeses are good, you won’t have any to age. People will buy them right away. It’s hard to get fresh cheese anymore. And we all remember it, right, Marie-Pierre?” She turned to her daughter, who agreed.
    “Well, that’s it.” Mme. Rillier put the cheese molds back into her cupboard.
    I thanked her very much, and told Mme. Lacroste I could return on my own if she wanted to