Over a bubbling pan of guanciale fat, my 16-year-old cousin lets me in on a secret: “France is all about the sauce,” he says. “Once the bits of pig fat become translucent, that’s when you throw in the minced garlic cloves.” As you can probably guess, Frank whipped up a classic rendition of spaghetti alla carbonara. Dinner is served over the kitchen island of my aunt’s truffle-invested property in Aix-en-Provence, France.
I’m served this steaming bowl of carbs as if it’s a door prize. I wolf it down maliciously. The secret to its richness — I later learned — is the egg yolks planted under the cooked spaghetti, which are cooked immediately by the sizzling pork-garlic-cream sauce. The bowls cleaned by our tongues and followed by sponges, Frank and I then scour the pantries for other munchies. I feel like a sophisticated rodent, with the privilege of not fearing for my life.
Morning comes, and Aunt Rosie departs before the sun heats the sky. She drops off my 9-year-old cousin, Olympia, at Saturday morning art class, and then heads to the market to find food for her soon-to-be famished children and nephew.
My day begins with a pain au chocolat smeared in french butter. A victim of morning-cobwebs, Frank stumbles up the stairs, beelining to the woven basket bearing Rosie’s market findings to unsheathe a seeded baguette and a block of brie. In a combo-bite, this simple charcuterie adds a savory component to my gustatory cells and helps them digest the preliminary croissant.
After not seeing Frank for three formative years, I learned the most noteworthy thing about him: his appetite is a force. Frank eats copious amounts of food — imagine the parent-to-pig gluttony scene from “Spirited Away” — without showing any indication of slowing down, and like clockwork he tucks into his alcove for a two-hour hibernation, only to eat a three-course meal after his haze.
The Friday itinerary is a walking-tour through Marseille. Rosie leads me up staircases, past grand churches and through steep alleyways to a neighborhood known as “The Basket.” Our first stop is a cafe that transmutes into a multifaceted clothing store; singed potato wedges and a basket of figs sit atop the dining room table. The oven is still cooling down. Weaving my hand through cashmere sweaters, I hear a suspended droning noise. I look up the spiral staircase and realize that the transmutation isn’t complete; there’s also a tattoo parlor.
Chilly Russian-bred winds stab at my fingertips on the way to the local farmers’ market. Our bike ride cuts through the vineyards of Château La Coste, past chicken pens that provide eggs to the Michelin star restaurant, Hélène Darroze à Villa La Coste, and by cafes where towners sip their espressos.
The town square is alive and moving. Pastry stands showcase praline- and pistachio-flavored brioches and flaky, twice-baked croissants. Further down, a woman of Senegalese descent drowns pumpkin and shrimp accras in a tub of oil. Rosie and I fan-girl over the subtle essences of ginger we notice.
Back home, my aunt and I pluck figs from a tree guarding the guest house. We avoid the cracked-open ones; their guts displayed for all the wasps to feast on. I climb on a clay-shingle roof for the hard-to-reach ones.
The figs are then washed and sliced into quarters. Rosie combines flour and butter into a mixer to produce the dough. She then lathers a surprise ingredient of marmalade on the bed of dough. While she does that, I churn the one-part mascarpone, three-parts heavy whipping cream mixture until it gets billowy.
With a knife, I scrape out the innards of two vanilla pods to sweeten things up. Once the dough is floured and rolled out to an even thickness, we methodically assemble the fig quarters in a circle, leaving two inches of space for the edges to be wrapped over. Our fig galette now looking like an actual galette, I slide it into the oven after dousing it handsomely in sugar.
We taste our creation around the oven, barely leaving time for it to cool down. The filling is tart and lucious. I slice off chunks of it intermittently throughout the day and in between meals, until it is gone.
That night, the weekend over, I reflect on my newly gained 0.357 stones. They may be the most valuable 0.357 stones of my life. There is no other pastime I enjoy more than cooking and eating beautiful ingredients with family.
