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Madeleine was the tigress who taught me to trust my palate, who set my benchmarks. She valued methods, flavour principles, terroir, the ineffable link between place and taste. Her intensive hands-on cooking classes, market tours and restaurant outings in France did more to make a discerning cook out of me than the formal classes and apprenticeship that preceded it. Her seven books, among them The Making of a Cook, occupy prime real estate in my library.
She was a fierce feminist, a historian, Michelin-trained. Her high standards and remarkable palate were prized by her protégés, but viewed warily by some of her male counterparts. Her schools – in France, the Napa Valley, Boston – were attended by chefs looking to benefit from her grad-school-level master classes.
When I was not in class, my then-husband and I wandered the narrow streets in the old quarter, across footbridges, beside canals and creeks. We found the crepe maker’s cart beneath a plane tree.
He ladled a spoonful of batter onto a metal disc and smoothed it, flipped it, then folded the crispy circle in half, then quarters that he secured in a parchment round. From a steaming small pot, he scooped fat apple slices. Another pot held chocolate ganache, and a ceramic bowl was heaped with whipped cream.
In the following years, I made those crepes for friends who visited, and always remembered Annecy and Madeleine. In deep winter, those apple crepes make the most of the slim pickings we have on the fruit shelves in the prairies. I think of the unquenchable Madeleine every time I make them. So first we eat, and then we mourn her passing.
“She was a fierce feminist, a historian, Michelin-trained. Her high standards and remarkable palate were prized by her protégés, but viewed warily by some of her male counterparts.”
DEE HOBSBAWN-SMITH
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