The Country Kitchen

There is no recipe in this book that begins with a stopwatch. A country kitchen runs on the clock of the bread, the slow turn of an onion in butter, the patience of a long afternoon.

My grandmother's kitchen, in the village of Saint-Vrain, had two windows, one copper pot, and a wooden table that had been scrubbed so many times the grain stood up like the spine of a small animal. Almost everything in this book began at that table.