Not the least of the attractions of M. Farges’s board was the grace with which his Arlesienne wife presided over the good things of the casserole and the spit, that long skewer which, when loaded with a chicken, or a duck, or a dozen small birds, turned slowly by clockwork before a fire of olive-tree roots on the open hearth, or rather, on top of the fourneau, which was only used itself for certain operations. Baked meats and rôti are two vastly different things in France.
“Marcel, he bakes the bread, and I cook for him,” says the jauntily coiffed, buxom little lady, whose partner Marcel had been for some thirty years. In spite of the passing of time, both were still young, or looked it, though they were of that ample girth which betokens good living, and, what is quite as important, good cooking; and madame’s taste in cookery was as “pretty” as her husband’s for bread-making and wine.
Given a casserole half-full of boiling oil (also a product of St. Rémy’s; real olive-oil, with no dilution of cottonseed to flatten out the taste) and anything whatever eatable to drop in it, and Madame Farges will work wonders with her deftness and skill, and, like all good cooks, do it, apparently, by guesswork.
It is a marvel to the writer that some one has not written a book devoted to the little every-day happenings of the French middle classes. Manifestly the trades of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker have the same ends in view in France as elsewhere, but their procedure is so different, so very different.
It strikes the foreigner as strange that your baker here gives you a tally-stick, even to-day, when pass-books and all sorts of automatic calculators are everywhere to be found. It is a fact, however, that your baker does this at St. Rémy; and regulates the length of your credit by the length of the stick, a plan which has many advantages for all concerned over other methods.
You arrange as to what your daily loaf shall be, and for every one delivered a notch is cut in the stick, which you guard as you would your purse; that is, you guard your half of it, for it has been split down the middle, and the worthy baker has a whole battery of these split sticks strung along the dashboard of his cart. The two separate halves are put together when the notch is cut across the joint, and there you have undisputable evidence of delivery. It’s very much simpler than the old backwoods system of keeping accounts on a slate, and wiping off the slate when they were paid, and it’s safer for all concerned. When you pay your baker at St. Rémy, he steps inside your kitchen and puts the two sticks on the fire, and together you see them go up in smoke.
Baker’s Tally-sticks