Farinette

Jeanne Chabut was proud of her farinettes to the point of proselytism. When I had friends to stay, she was keen for them all to sample what she called ‘l’omelette du pauvre’ (the poor man’s omelette). Summoned to her house - which she and her husband built after they had given up running their café (now my house) - for a kind of Auvergnat high tea at 5 p.m., we would troop into her cavernous ‘kitchen’ and sit down on benches at a long chestnut-wood table. The ‘kitchen’, as its rough concrete floor betrayed, had been designed as a garage for her husband’s bus, which he continued to operate after they had moved. When he died, Jeanne, who had been used to spacious working conditions in her café, moved operations out of her tiny kitchen proper into the garage, a room the size and almost the height of a squash court that accommodated, with plenty of space to spare, a kitchen dresser, fridge, freezer, stove, boiler and various more decorative items such as the family’s set of copper pans, a copper bed-warmer, a copper fontaine (a wash-basin topped by a small reservoir with a tap), and some potted plants. This arrangement was endearingly eccentric - Jeanne told me with relish how her bourgeoisified Paris cousins, who had made a fortune in the restaurant trade, reacted with a mixture of condescension and shock when they first set foot in her new ‘kitchen’.