Salty, page 5
5. When the dough is finished rising, pull the pan out of the oven and put it on the stovetop for a moment. Carefully pick up the dough with your hands and flip it into the pan, seam side up. It will sizzle just a little as the dough makes contact with the hot pan. With a potholder, grab the pan, and shake it once or twice to get the dough well-distributed.
6. Put the top on the pan and return it to the oven for 30 minutes. Then take the lid off and let it bake for an additional 15–30 minutes. (I usually err on the lower side, as I like to be able to bite through the bread with ease, but crust enthusiasts may feel differently.) The crust will look beautifully browned. When you take it out, slide a fork or a spatula underneath the loaf to loosen it and turn it out onto a cooling rack. If you don’t have a cooling rack—like me, a person who has never managed to remember to buy a cooling rack in her life—you can put it on a plate and it should be fine.
7. When it’s cooled off a little, slice it up and serve it with room-temperature butter or cheese, and a bowl of delicious lentil soup.
More Salt with Laurie Colwin
Home Cooking and More Home Cooking: The seminal texts for Colwin’s food-loving readers, each chock-full of wonderful stories, recipes, and notes that are at times of questionable quality but always a delight to read.
Happy All the Time: One of Colwin’s most famous and representative novels, focusing on two childhood friends who end up married to two young women and go through the various cheerful foibles of early married life.
Family Happiness: The novel about Polly, who must learn to give herself a break before she can grow.
A Big Storm Knocked It Over: The novel Colwin had just completed when she passed away, and which contains the marvelous passage about Christmas Eve in Vermont.
Chapter Three
Agnès Varda
Seeing Faces in the Scraps
In 2003, the filmmaker and artist Agnès Varda, who was then seventy-five years old, arrived at the Venice Biennale—perhaps the most prestigious art exhibition in the world—dressed as a potato.
After decades as one of France’s most venerated filmmakers, or at least venerated by those in the know, Varda was at the Biennale to make her grand entry into the world of mixed-media visual art. She came with a three-screen video installation called Patatutopia, a play on words (typical of Varda): patate is French slang for potato—the proper term is pomme de terre, or earth-apple—and utopia is what you think it is. (One of the best reasons to learn even halting French as an English-speaking cinephile is to pick up on the puns and wordplay sprinkled liberally throughout Varda’s films.)
When the viewer of Patatutopia enters the room, they are presented with an overwhelming quantity of potatoes—thirteen hundred pounds of them, in fact, arranged in a single layer on the floor of a white room. You can imagine the smell in that room: earthy, fresh, a bit like dirt. Above the patates towers the video triptych, each of the three screens featuring close-up, lovingly shot footage of heart-shaped potatoes in various stages of sprouting and shriveling. The potatoes experiencing an on-screen starring role were collected by Varda during the making of her celebrated 2000 documentary, The Gleaners and I.
Loving the anomalous heart formation of the spuds, Varda saved the potatoes for over two years, and she watched with curiosity and delight as their lives continued past the edible stage. If you’ve ever unearthed a potato from the back of a cabinet where it’s accidentally fallen behind some stack of pasta boxes, you know what that looks like.
For most of us, a sprouting, wrinkly potato begs a wrinkled nose and a thud in the trash. But for Varda, it was an invitation to make art. And more than art, too; for Varda, the potato was a life lesson. It was a metaphor, because those overripe potatoes were not past their prime at all—they were simply moving into a new and productive phase. After all, the sprouts were a movement toward more life. The changing colors indicated all that was going on below the skin. And the heart shape became even more pronounced as the potato shrank into itself.
Years after the Biennale, in 2017, Varda would compare herself to the rangy spuds. “I see myself as a heart-shaped potato, growing again,” she told a crowd in New York. She was referring to the trajectory of her film career, beginning with La Pointe Courte, which debuted in 1955. La Pointe Courte set the pace for the still-nascent French New Wave, the film movement that would change the way filmmakers all over the world thought about their own work in the future, a movement often associated with men like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Varda spent much of her career being ignored by the critics who celebrated her male peers, even though she was ahead of them. And she kept innovating her whole life, even though investors were far more reticent to give her money than to fund her male counterparts. Always curious, always playful, Varda was undeterred.
A curious mix of highly self-conscious and frequently self-referential, she made work that was completely original. It would not be strictly accurate to say that Varda never seemed to care what people thought of her. In her later films, she reads notes received from both fans and detractors, and sometimes converses with them in person. She is interested in what they have to say, and why they say it, while remaining secure in her own opinions.
But then, this is a woman who showed up to the Biennale in a potato costume. Who made work following her own interests rather than commercial tastes for sixty-five years. Who was willing to forgo trends to forge her own. And boy, did she love potatoes.
A free spirit from the start, Varda was born in Belgium in 1928, and back then was named Arlette. Her parents, a French woman and her Greek refugee husband, relocated when she was eleven to Sète, her mother’s hometown on the Mediterranean. During World War II, they lived on a boat in the village. Eventually, the family moved to Paris.
At eighteen, she changed her name to Agnès, ran away for a summer, and worked briefly on a fishing boat before returning to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, where she studied psychology and literature. Even before she graduated, she started working as a photographer, a profession she’d return to over her lifetime. For a decade she was the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire, a leftist theater group in Paris.
Then she combined those interests and in 1954 made the film La Pointe Courte, set in a neighborhood of Sète. It mixed a stylized fiction story of a couple in the process of breaking up with documentary-style conversations between the village’s fishermen. Well received when it played in theaters, it still had a limited release and for decades was difficult to see.
During this period, Varda moved to a small house situated on a courtyard on Paris’s Rue Daguerre, in Montparnasse, on the southwest side of one of Paris’s largest cemeteries. She would live there for the rest of her life. Within a few months of her daughter Rosalie’s birth in 1958, she met the filmmaker Jacques Demy at a short film festival in Tours. They married in 1962, and Demy became Rosalie’s adoptive father. In 1972 their son Mathieu was born. Both of Varda’s children would be active participants in their mother’s work, appearing in her films. And Rosalie helped support her aging mother during the making of her later work, eventually producing Varda’s Oscar-nominated 2017 documentary, Faces Places, as well as her final film, Varda by Agnès, an essay film surveying Varda’s vast oeuvre. It premiered in February 2019 at the Berlin Film Festival. Just a few weeks later, Varda passed away.
A trip through her filmography is eclectic and delightful, and also a semi-accidental guide to late twentieth-century politics. Varda was an outspoken feminist who signed manifestos and marched in the streets for women’s rights in the 1960s and ’70s; her films Cléo from 5 to 7 (which anticipated Laura Mulvey’s pioneering essay about the “male gaze” in cinema by more than a decade) and One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (about female friendship and reproductive rights in France) are bedrocks of the feminist film canon.
In the late 1960s, Varda relocated with Demy to Los Angeles for a while. There she made Black Panthers, a documentary short about the Black Panther Party that gave an uncommon glimpse into the burgeoning movement, including interviews with the imprisoned Huey P. Newton, one of the party’s cofounders. Then came her wild tragicomical 1969 film, Lions Love (. . . and Lies), starring Warhol muse Viva, along with the lyricists and lead performers from Hair, in an exploration of the brain-bending combination of free love, malaise, and terror that marked late-1960s Hollywood. Her movies always revealed an insatiably curious mind. She leaned into seeing—really seeing—the world as it was, or could be.
And her subjects felt seen, and loved, by Varda. Her 2017 film, Faces Places, which came near the end of her life, richly illustrates this. She collaborated with the thirty-five-year-old street artist JR for the film; his work often consists of pasting large-scale black-and-white photographic images in public spaces. In the movie, they travel to villages around France, talking to locals, hearing their stories, taking their pictures, and printing them in a van, their mobile studio. The prints are massive, and they paste them on the sides of buildings, shipping crates, walls, and even an old bunker, which once belonged to the Nazis, that has tumbled off a seaside cliff and now perches on the beach. The pair’s unlikely friendship grows as the film progresses.
Faces Places captures all kinds of people all over rural France, but the film is primarily about how we see one another’s faces. Throughout the movie, Varda ribs JR about his signature sunglasses, which he refuses to take off; in this way, he reminds her of her old friend Jean-Luc Godard, who sports a similar affectation but once took off his glasses to star in a short film Varda directed in 1961. (It later appeared as a film-within-a-film in Cléo from 5 to 7.) At the climax of the film, she takes JR to meet Godard, but Godard stands her up, reducing Varda to tears. Trying to comfort her, JR agrees to let her see his face, but Varda’s eyesight is waning, so when he takes off his shades, all she can see is a blur. The film ends with the pair sitting companionably on a bench, gazing out at the ocean together.
Seeing people is what she always wanted to do, to see and to document. “I never wanted to say anything,” she told an interviewer late in her life. “I just wanted to look at people and share.”
But not only people. Potatoes, too. It makes sense that Varda’s patate-philia came through her love of watching people. In 2000, forty years into her career, she made a film titled Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, for Anglophone audiences). As in many of her documentaries, she does the narration. In the film’s early moments, Varda explains that she started to notice the bending and stooping posture of “gleaners,” people who bend over to pick up discarded items on the street—food, clothing, knickknacks, whatever they can save from the trash.
Varda had long been in the habit of watching people on the street, thinking about them, and seeing them. In 1958, with La Pointe Courte under her belt but little funding to make another feature-length film, she made several short films instead. Among them was a short called L'Opéra Mouffe (in English titled Diary of a Pregnant Woman), a favorite of mine. Varda was pregnant with Rosalie at the time and living on the Rue Mouffetard, which today is a beloved street full of shops and restaurants that attracts both locals and tourists, but back then was a bit more sordid and run down.
In the film, Varda intersperses images of shops and shoppers with drunks and derelicts and, perhaps surprisingly, close-ups of naked bodies, those of a pregnant woman and of a man and woman in love. The curves, dips, and textures of bodies mix together with the almost palpable smells and sights of the storefronts and food in the stalls. An opera, if you will.
She’d later say it was her favorite of her early films. “I enjoyed capturing in the middle of the Mouffetard markets the confusion between a stomach heavy with child and one of food,” Varda told an interviewer in 1965. (Sometimes her English needs a little extra parsing.)
“And so many contradictions!” she continued. “A pregnant woman watches the waves of people, especially older people, on a steep incline and she thinks: ‘They were all newborns once; someone sprinkled fresh talcum powder on them and then kissed their little behinds.’ That’s the kind of thought that pushes our gaze to the fine line that separates cruelty from tenderness.”
Varda often spoke in interviews over the years of this revelation she had as a young, pregnant woman—that every person you see was once a baby, beloved by someone, helpless and in need of a diaper change. The stories we carry around with us mattered to her. “What interests me is precisely the silent, secret, inexpressible things that are in people. There are as many things in the domain of the instincts as in the domain of feelings,” she said in another interview.
The Rue Mouffetard of L'Opéra Mouffe is different from the one I’ve strolled down a dozen times in recent years. After a few long sojourns in Paris, the city feels like my second home, the place I’m most comfortable in the world that isn’t New York. So whenever I’m in Europe for work, I always make a point of returning home through Paris. I usually stay in Montparnasse. Both Rue Mouffetard and Varda’s eventual home on Rue Daguerre are within a stone’s throw of the flat where I usually stay, and both are market streets.
Rue Mouffetard hasn’t been paved over, so it’s still cobblestone, and walking down the street, you can buy some of the finest cheese, seafood, wine, vegetables, and, especially, rotisserie chickens with the accompanying roasted potatoes, which have cooked to creamy perfection in the fat dripping from the slowly spinning chickens. It’s extraordinary, and it’s impossible to smell without wanting some immediately. L'Opéra Mouffe shows a less Instagram-ready version of the street, but as with many streets in Paris, it’s still recognizable well over half a century later.
Nearly two decades after L’Opera Mouffe, Varda echoed the short in another project—a documentary about the shopkeepers on her new street, Rue Daguerre. Now with a toddler running around her home, she couldn’t roam very far. So she plugged in her camera to an electrical outlet, and with a ninety- meter power cable, she took to the street. She named the film Daguerrotypes, for the early photographic process, and created small, moving portraits of her neighbors: the baker and his wife, the man who fixes clocks, the butcher, the accordion store owner, and other shop owners, like the couple who owns The Blue Thistle.
“It’s my neighborhood,” she told an interviewer. “These are my shops and I’ve always been interested in them. Especially one of them, The Blue Thistle, a sort of dressmaker's, bazaar, and perfume shop all in one. It’s the only place I know where you can get twenty grams of rice-powder or thirty centiliters of eau de Cologne.”
Varda imbues the film with a magic that comes from just watching ordinary people at work. The baker’s wife takes orders for baguettes and makes change. The baker weighs dough, shapes it, and slides it into the giant oven. The butcher slices steaks and pork chops for customers. The grocer explains to a woman, with immense patience, that he doesn’t have any canned full-fat milk; he only has sterilized full-fat milk in bottles or canned skim milk. We listen to Varda ask the shopkeepers about where they were born, how they met their spouses, what they dream about. And while they’re shy at first, it’s clear they’re proud of their work.
It’s a mesmerizing portrait of a neighborhood, and it makes me think of the wine shop, the cheese and pâté shop, the fishmonger, and the boulangerie where I get my daily bread when I’m in Paris. The courteous dance of bonjour and merci and au revoir that you learn to interact with shopkeepers there—a far more polite experience than I have shopping at home. And the delight of weak ties, of interacting with acquaintances—the same cheesemonger, the same waiter, the same wine store owner each time I go in, something distinctly Parisian that I miss when I’m “home” far more than I ever expected.
I suspect Varda always harbored fond feelings for the humble potato, a splendid staple in butter-rich French cooking. But when she was making her 2000 film, The Gleaners and I, she took that love to a whole new level.
In the film, Varda trains her camera on people in both the city and the countryside who gather the discards of others. Varda became interested, she said, in “who eats my leftovers,” and was arrested by the bearing of the gleaners, the hunched, humbling posture of rummaging through what’s on the street. They reminded her of Jean-François Millet’s painting Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), in which women stoop to gather the leftovers from an already-harvested wheat field.
But as the film progresses, her perspective on gleaning expands, and so does ours. Some of the gleaners, of course, collect discards and leftovers because they are poor. But others are primarily concerned with waste. In one place, she discovers that after the potato harvest, the potatoes that are rejected because they’re too big or too small or too misshapen to sell get dumped in a field, forming small mountains. Those in the know can come pick through the mounds and collect buckets full to carry home or bring to a food bank. And that field is where Varda discovers her beloved heart-shaped potatoes, which she takes home to observe.
She also talks with gleaners who glean all kinds of stuff. There are those who practice what Americans call “dumpster diving,” rescuing food discarded by grocers for passing its sell-by date but perfectly fine to eat. She talks to people who harvest oysters that have washed out of oyster farms and onto the public beach, as well as to the oyster farmers who watch tolerantly when the gleaners technically cross their property line. Others collect olives left on the branches after the harvest, or grapes that are discarded by wineries in order to ensure their wines’ “reserve” status. All of the gleaners have different reasons for gleaning, but listening to Varda talk with them changes the act of gleaning into participation in a noble fight against the tyrannies of overweening capitalism.
