Allumettes, escargots and violettes de Toulouse

Being a single mother could not have been easy for any woman in the Fifties. For my mother, whose intellectual brilliance was matched only by her thorough lack of practicality, it was especially difficult. She was not, among other things, very good at looking after two energetic, impetuous little boys.

My mother’s intellect was not free of pretension and so, if she surrounded us with snatches of French, it may be because she wanted us to have some knowledge of our father’s culture; but I can’t discount her simple desire to flaunt her sophisticated European experience, even as we lived in near poverty. Among other things, she hung an enameled metal box labeled Allumettes above the stove, reasonably thinking it out of the reach of two toddlers. But one day when she was either asleep or possibly even out, my brother and I worked out how to climb the stove and reach those lovely wooden matches which lit so easily.

As it happened, she had just bought several bent iron chairs with red vinyl seats. We quickly discovered that a wooden allumette, easily lit, would leave a gratifying trail in the red vinyl and so spent a happy half hour decorating our mother’s new chairs.

Not all her attempts to teach us French turned out so disastrously. I learned early that snails were escargots; I may even have eaten some in garlic butter. Some time after she remarried and we moved to the Upper East Side, she took me down to the Village to a place called Papier Malcé [sic] and I had my first croissant (then a rarity in New York); nothing suggested for decades that I would end up writing a history of that pastry.

While we were still a small family on Jones Street, a visitor brought us candied violets from France. As a little boy, I thought these absolutely wonderful. When I went to study in Paris and bought colorful candies from vending machines on the Metro platforms, I was disappointed to find that the only thing similar was simply a raspberry candy shaped like a raspberry; I decided I’d enhanced my earlier memory. It wasn’t until business took me, years later, to Toulouse that I discovered yes, there were candies made from violet buds; I hadn’t imagined that part of my French-inflected childhood.