Aix connections

In 1969, Richard Nixon became president, I turned twenty (on n'a pas tous les jours vingt ans !), Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I drew a high number in the draft lottery, and I flew on an airplane for the first time in my short life. The flight I took brought me to France, also for the first time in my short life. If I hadn't drawn a high number in the draft lottery, I might have ended up in Vietnam instead, in a uniform.

Why am I thinking about this? It's partly because a woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who with her husband and daughter has been spending a lot of time in Provence over the past few years and writing about it, recently took an intensive three-week French language course in Aix and blogged about it here. My first stay in France was spring semester 1970, in Aix.

I followed along as Kaydee from Knoxville blogged about her experiences at the language school and described what it was like to live with a French family for those three weeks. As so often happens, the "French family" turned out not to be a family of the kind she had imagined, but at the end, after a period of adaptation, she judged it to be a good experience. It was fun to read about her adventures and encounters in Aix.

For me to say I came to France for the first time in 1969 is a little bit of an exaggeration. We flew out of JFK airport on December 29 in the evening. I remember it was snowing and windy. We were a group of about 30 students, and I knew only one other participant in the program the day we left. Eleanor and I had taken some classes together and realized we had mutual friends who owned a beach house in my home town. I saw Eleanor in Washington DC last fall for the first time in many years.

We arrived in Paris and the director of the study abroad program put us on a chartered bus for the ride into the city from the airport. We stayed at the Hôtel Monge, on the rue Monge, near the Place Monge, in the 5th arrondissement on the edge of the Latin Quarter. We were three students to a room. The other two guys and I in my room carefully examined the bidet, which was out in the middle of the room and not in a bathroom, and determined that it was some kind of fancy urinal.

The director of the program, a francophone Belgian named Jean Leblon, then took us all to dinner in a restaurant somewhere in the Latin Quarter. He had arranged a group dinner of cochon de lait, suckling pig on a platter, probably to shock us into realizing we were in France but also, I'm sure, because it was a very good and succulent dish. The little pig just sat there with an apple in its mouth, all roasted.

We went back to the airport (Le Bourget, I'm sure) the next morning and flew to Marseille, where another bus met us and took us into Aix. I don't remember how I got to the place where I was going to live while there. Maybe the bus dropped each student off at her or his place. Mine was a row house up on the northern fringes of Aix, and the people who lived there were an older couple whose children had grown up and moved out. They rented a room to me and another to a guy my age from Texas, who was on a different study program. Meals other than breakfast were not included in the deal.

We shared a bathroom. The interesting thing about the bathroom was the little wall-mounted gas water heater, which you had to light with a match every time you needed some hot water. It took me a while to get the hang of it. You had to press and hold a button with one hand while you fumbled with a big box of kitchen matches with the other and tried to strike one. And even after you went through all that, all your got was a trickle of hot — scalding, in fact — water that you had to carefully mix with the cold water so that you didn't get burned or frozen.

That first afternoon, the woman in charge (I don't even remember her name; she was just Madame) showed me the room and carefully explained that before going to bed at night I was to take the bedspread off the bed and carefully fold it up and put in on a shelf in the closet. I understood.

I looked out the window and was amazed to be looking out over a big valley with some hills in the distance. « Quel beau vue ! », I said in my best French. Madame corrected me — the word vue is feminine, so it's Quelle belle vue ! — and I felt like a moron.

After she left me alone in the room to rest for a few hours, I decided to stretch out on the bed and take a nap. When she came to wake me up — we students must have had some kind of orientation event to attend down in Aix late in the day — she was very upset that I hadn't taken the bedspread off the bed before lying down. She thought I hadn't understood a word she said, but I had. I had just taken her very literally, and I wasn't "going to bed" so I didn't bother to take the spread off. I had probably wrinkled it. What a moron!

The walk down to the school (the program had its own classrooms and teachers) took me 45 minutes that day and every morning. I think there might have been a bus but I don't remember ever taking it. The walk down in the morning was easy, but the walk home in the evening was brutal. It was uphill and the hill was steep. I lost 10 or 15 lbs. that semester, despite the good food. Because I didn't get dinner with the "family" and because the last bus up the hill was at something like 6:00 p.m., I had to hoof it home every night.

Every morning I would walk through a big outdoor market on the way down to school and get an apple, I remember. Sometimes I had dinner at the restaurant universitaire but it was so crowded and there was always a crush to get in. I mean a literal crush, where you felt like you might be seriously injured by the crowd's pushing and shoving. We thought it was funny but also didn't like it much. And the resto U was on the south side of Aix, so it made my walk home that much longer — more than an hour.

After a while, a group of us students found a little restaurant we really liked and where we could eat a decent meal for a dollar or so -- five or six French francs at the time. It was called Chez Nénette, if I remember correctly, but I couldn't tell you where it was in Aix. In the old town somewhere. I remember that the food was simple and was as good as or better than any I had ever had before.

Pignon cookies ready for the oven...

The other thing I remember about food in Aix is a little cookie that I found in the boulangeries and pâtisseries there and that I think was just called a pignon. It was a little crescent-shaped cookie studded with pine nuts, which are called pignons de pin — thus the name. I loved them. I've never found them anywhere else in France.

...and fresh out of the oven

And that's how this all started. The other day on the Slow Travel forum Kaydee from Knoxville-by-way-of-Provence posted a question asking people what items they most enjoyed buying in French bakeries besides the usual bread and croissants. People came up with a lot of ideas and suggestions, of course.

They seemed to continue browning even after
I took them out of the oven.

I asked Kaydee if they still made and sold pignons in bakeries in Aix and other towns in Provence. She found some and even took a picture of them for me. They were the ones. That made me look for a recipe, and I found one on the Internet here. It turns out that pignons are very simple cookies — just almond powder, sugar, egg whites, and pine nuts. So I made some yesterday afternoon. The recipes call them croissants aux pignons, but they aren't flaky like the classic croissant; they're just crescent-shaped.

Here's the recipe I found in my Provençal cookbook.

Once I knew the cookies were called croissants aux pignons and not just pignons, I looked them up in a cookbook I have called La Cuisine provençale d'aujourd'hui, by Florence de Andreis. It was published in 1980, so I guess that's what the pignon cookies were already called back then. I probably bought the book when Walt and I were in Provence in 1993. Did you see Walt's pictures of Aix that he published on his blog the other day? Oh, and these too.

Eating the pignons wasn't exactly a Proustian experience for me, because I had been thinking about Aix and my days there for a while already. But the ones I made were easy to do and good to eat. They a little crisp on the outside but chewy on the inside. I'll make them again.