Sunday: Blueberry
Ingredients
- Butter for pan
- 1¼ cups milk
- ⅔ cup sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- Pinch of salt
- 1 cup flour
- 2 overflowing cups of fruit, especially berries
- Powdered sugar
— Adapted from Mom, adapted from Julia Moskin, adapted from Julia Child
Spongy and solid, clafoutis exists somewhere between a pancake and a flan. A quick measuring of ingredients and a whiz around the blender, and it’s into the oven. Whether I feel like a degenerate or a failure, clafoutis transforms me.
I can be any type of woman when I cook clafoutis: city, layering the batter and fruit in a scallop-edged ramekin; prairie, pouring the ingredients into a casserole dish; minimalist, sprinkling the traditional black cherries into a cast-iron. In other words, I can be a woman who is neither heartbroken nor unemployed. A woman who can nourish and clean up after herself.
We took Grandma to a lakeside house in southwestern New York to calm her down. (Typical of Mom and Dad to think nature could tranquilize. If anything, nature ignites.) Grandpa had spent the summer in and out of hospitals with heart troubles, an occurrence that constantly irritated her. Where’s that stupid man? Where am I? What am I doing here? Her tornado of questions mirrored the ones circling my own head. Even if I could answer them, I was just as likely to ask them again five seconds later.
We learned about clafoutis on Sunday. By Tuesday, we’d memorized the recipe.
On Thursday, we had cake, but we all secretly wished for clafoutis.
Blueberry, raspberry, pear, cherry. Summer’s best, at the height of its season. We transformed the offerings into gooey, sugary, simple goodness.
It’s not a recipe, it’s a miracle.
It’s not a dessert, it’s a lifeline.
By the weekend, an assemblage of eggs, flour, and fruit had become a reason for living.
Monday: Raspberry
Step 1: Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a cast-iron pan.
WiscoCooks
6 years ago
I checked the original recipe, the one referenced in the article, and it’s substantially different from this one (more berries, less sugar…) so don’t blame Julia Child if it doesn’t work for you. This isn’t her recipe.
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Clafoutis originated in France’s Limousin region. The name comes from the antiquated Occitan verb clafir—to fill—and speaks to the cool low-maintenance je ne sais quoi of the dessert. Just whisk together pantry ingredients, invoke the heavens, and stuff it with fruit. (But stuff it only in the understated way the Parisian stuffs flower vases or pain au chocolats or Levi’s 501 jeans.)
“The clafoutis is only as good as the fruit,” Mom told me. (Zero people found this helpful.) She dropped roadside raspberries one by one into the eggy mixture—with a little extra flair, for Grandma’s spectatorial amusement.
A fly followed Grandma around that Monday. I sat on the top of the stairs and watched her play cat and mouse with the insect. She’d curse out the “bloody buzzer” and swat at anything near her in an attempt to end its life. She recruited our dog, Maple, for help. “Dog, are you my dog?” she whispered, thinking no one was watching her. “We’re going to have to get rid of you, dog. No one knows who you are. There, behind you!” It was much more entertaining than watching my inbox fill with rejections and my voicemail remain empty. As I saw the fly quite literally slip through her middle finger and thumb, I wondered whether my life might be easier if I didn’t have my own army of flies, always on my perimeter, threatening to take me away.
Tuesday: Cherry
Step 2: Blend milk, 1/3 cup sugar, eggs, vanilla, salt, and flour until airy.
I had to cover the community writing contests, as a favor, without compensation, for the local paper. This involved one long afternoon chasing down teens in the neighborhood to discuss their victories and budding literary careers, a difficult task for someone struggling to live one’s own writing life. I asked kids between the ages of three and sixteen what the “esteemed award” meant to them and if they’d be so generous as to explain the “deeper meaning” behind their work. What inspires you? From where do you get your ideas? Nature! The lake! Everywhere! My family! And, I dunno, they just, like, come to me! What do you hope to inspire in the people reading your work? That life is full of possibility! That all you need is love! That nature has all the answers! I offered joyless congratulations to the six-year-old whose poem about protecting the lake from algae blooms won a $100 gift card, more money than my creative writing had ever earned. I wondered what had broken inside of me, and why the clafoutis hadn’t fixed it.
EB
6 years ago
The negative comments are quite overblown and questionable. This recipe works fine as it is written here. If you want to reduce sugar, obviously that’s fine too.
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Gina invited me to go boating. She was the only friend I knew who lived in the state. Gina was also newly divorced—she’d secretly married two years earlier but had to break it off when she accidentally implicated her parents in tax fraud—and I missed her “divorce party” two nights prior. (Apparently, there was a shark piñata.)
Day-drinking is a special kind of marathon. This was no civilized debauchery, this was day-drinking with summer lifeguards. With twenty-year-old’s and not-quite-twenty-year-old’s. With young, slim, tan, fit bodies. With fresh livers, more prepped and primed to the effects of alcohol. With athletic, enduring souls more open to love than mine.
And this was not day-drinking on land. This was day-drinking on water. On boats. A “flotilla,” Gina called it.
I said yes.
In memory care, there is one approach inspired by improvisation, the idea being that advanced dementia patients are constantly responding to new truths about their surroundings, constantly adapting to new information about the realities of their situations. Unfamiliar backstories must be accepted as fact, and strange—even otherworldly—ideas must be incorporated into what you know with speed and generosity. People often describe dementia like living in the dark, senseless. In some ways, I think Grandma would find darkness easier to manage. It’s the chaos, the unpredictability, that requires her greatest imaginative efforts. I try to adopt the same flexibility of mind and spirit in conversations with her, and sometimes, in stressful situations in life. Which is why I helped load up two jet skis with a trove of pretzels and trash bags and mounted the aquatic vehicle with someone I couldn’t remember but who definitely remembered me.
We were off. I kept my gaze on the sight of my hands, rouged from pressure, clenched to the yellow straps.
The flotilla consisted of ten boats, floats, yachts, and seaplanes tied to each other. I watched a few men (boys) sauntering through the ropes and sails, checking the tightness of the knots, over and over, one after the other. Sip, check. Sip, check. Slap. Bodies hopped in and out of the lake, somersaulting and sashaying from boat to boat, water to boat, boat to water. It felt like Cirque du Soleil, magic trick after magic trick. People took turns back-flipping onto jet skis and vrooming around the flotilla, splashing the perimeter in lake water, causing everyone to scream and shout. I was much less flexible than these people—who I overheard discussing such trivial pursuits like what to major in and the best bikini-waxer north of the Pennsylvania border—and paler and older and even, somehow, despite the jet skis, drier. Their swimsuits were neon and jeweled; my sun-faded one-piece was bought for me by Mom seven years ago. I sought out Gina (and her cooler of liquor). We kissed hello. I poured plastic-bottle gin into a red cup, stabbing a lime in the bottom and licking my fingers with the bitter-sour juices.
Verbocity
6 years ago
IS IT FLAN?
Joan
5 years ago
Please stop calling this, and confusing it, with flan. Flan is cooked in a water bath and has a coating of liquid caramel. Flan is like custard. Clafouti[s] is similar in batter and cooked form to a very dense cake.
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Wednesday: Leftovers
Step 3: Pour a thin layer of batter into the pan.
On a small burner, cook until a film of batter has set in the bottom. Remove from heat.
In her semi-autobiographical novel The War: A Memoir, French Resistance writer Marguerite Duras describes a woman carefully assembling the remaining food rations to cook her husband a clafoutis upon his return from the war. When he arrives, she discovers he is too weak, too malnourished and exposed, to eat it.
I spent the day in bed. I’m told a team of young men carried me to my house, where my sisters undressed me, washed me, tucked me in. Counted my breaths. I’m told my sisters switched between undressing me, undressing Grandma. Washing me, washing Grandma.
My appetite, completely gone, did not allow me to partake in leftover clafoutis. I licked the salt off a few Goldfish. The room spun. Maybe from the boat, maybe from the gin. Maybe from the dizzying sense of emptiness.
From my darkened bedroom, I overheard Grandma present Linnea with a simple question.
“Who is that girl?” she asked, referring to Natalie.
“That’s your granddaughter, Natalie,” Linnea said. “She’s my sister.”
“So that’s not the girl with the problems.”
The clafoutis had failed. The reliability, the consistency, the stability. Everything generations of French grandmas promised me about the peace I could find from beating eggs and flour in the comforts of the kitchen were lies.
I felt the outlines of panic all around me.
Thursday: Birthday Cake
Bonne note: clafoutis sinks as it cools.
Do not be alarmed – learn to expect some deflation in life.
Historically, 19th century French cooks folded whole cherries into the clafoutis—peels, pits, and all. The stone hearts contain benzaldehyde, the chemical responsible for flavoring almond extract. They also contain traceable amounts of the cyanogenic glycoside known as amygdalin, which releases cyanide that can be toxic if consumed in large quantities.
I woke up Thursday morning, heart racing, head spinning, thoughts already spiraling, like there was no moment of waiting in-between inhale and exhale, in-between the waking mind and the sleeping brain. I couldn’t move. Natalie, Linnea, and Mom crowded around me as I clamped up, frozen like a dead fly. They massaged my hands as I lay, stuck, steeped in sweat. Dad stayed downstairs with Grandma.
Mom’s solution in times of crisis has always been domesticity. Natalie and Linnea spread newspapers across the kitchen table so we could paint used yogurt cups, transforming recycled glass into votives. Mom threw on her apron and helped me change into new clothes, just as she helped Grandma dress that morning. She washed my hair in the sink, massaging my scalp. “I ruined your birthday,” I said to her while she combed back my wet hair, layer by layer, taking as long as possible to finish her task.
“I’d wash your hair every day,” she said, “if you’d let me.”
Friday: Pear with Raisin
Step 4: Sprinkle fruit over the batter, along with the remaining 1/3 cup sugar.
Pour the rest of the batter over top. Smooth edges.
Bake in oven for ~50 minutes, until top is springy and golden.
Mom set me up at the kitchen counter with a cutting board, knife, peeler, and four pears.
Grandma, having one of her better days, asked us what we were making. She complimented “my daughter” on her measuring skills as Mom tapped the cup with flour against the granite. Then, pointing to me, said, “You must be so proud of her. She looks just like you.” I fit each pear strip into the clafoutis like it was a game, making sure no raisin or pear touched, making sure every bite bore fruit.
Saturday: Onion
Step 5: Dust with powdered sugar. Serve lukewarm.
The plumpest flora could not save me from my wreckage. But the process of making the clafoutis still felt sweet. I diced the onions for this experimental side dish. Once we were home, I would try therapy. And later, antidepressants. Grandma would see “my husband,” although sometimes she called him “my father” or “my boy.” The family would try clafoutis of zucchini, butternut squash, rhubarb, cauliflower, potato. Summer would turn to fall. Berries would turn to root vegetables. Dry, hard, crinkled orbs that would remind me of my grandma’s mind.
I whisk, with the meditation: one day, I’ll eat clafoutis and only taste the sweetness.
*Bold text are comments from New York Times Cooking’s online recipe “Julia Child’s Berry Clafoutis”
Emma Francois teaches first-year and fashion writing at George Washington University and American University where she also earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Her journalism, fiction, and essays—about art, the environment, and love—have appeared in numerous publications including The Citron Review, Golf Digest, Washington City Paper, USA Today, and The Chautauquan Daily.
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