Kitchen Diary - Brioche & Tapenade

"Philippe, don't do it that way, do it, so!" the fifty something five foot nothing Parisian pushed her thirty something six foot plus son out of the way.  "See? so simple."

"Look at Ree'chard, he is so natural."

I remember being very embarrassed but this woman was formidable and this was my first time in her kitchen with a third party, never mind her son, who was more than ten years my senior (it was, after all, the eighties).  I had been here more than a dozen times before, but it had just been the two of us.

We were making brioche, my fourth time now and I had been very nervous to start with anyway, having never met her son before, never mind share a kitchen with him.  Philippe was head chef (according to Colette) at a leading Paris hotel.  You wouldn't have thought it the way he cringed.

"Mama, I have not baked brioche in ten years, and I will not be …" the conversation carried on in rapid French and I was left to finish off my project in relative quiet.  I could still hear them in two rooms down the hall but with both the Kitchen door closed and a number of walls between us, I was glad of the peace.

They came back only ten minutes later, having made up like quarrelling school children.   All smiles.  If I remember rightly, the dough was a few hours away from being ready so I had made some almond short cakes to go with our mid-morning tea. 

I was also pleased that Philippe was leaving before the brioche was ready, so far I hadn't made it "light enough".

Colette was a very lively lady, she had caught me sketching her in Battersea Park and had sat for me a number of times before inviting me to her flat overlooking the park.  I had shared my experience of my food experiments with her.  I had even brought homemade tapenade to the home of a French woman born just a few miles east of Marseille and I was never allowed to forget it. 

"After all my dear, do you not know that in the South of France we make the best tapenade?"

Funny, but she never made it for me, but would remind me on a weekly basis (after a few months of being friends that is) that I should bring some round as it was a superior imitation and she didn't have time to make her own.

We would drink tea and eat a lot of cake, and she could be very crude but most of the time Colette would play the "sophisticated" French woman and would love surprising everyone around her by her anecdotes. 

Colette moved back to Paris a few years later and we kept in touch until she passed away just after the millennium reminded us that two thousand years was a wonderful excuse to throw a party.  Unfortunately, I wasn't there with her, but I still have some wonderful memories and my diary entries to remind me of what a wonderful woman she was.