All the Time in the World

A day at a French cooking school opens doors to a slower, gentler way of life

by Harry Vandervlist. Photographs by Dianne Bos

Time. That’s the one key ingredient used every day in the French cooking camp run by Calgary’s Gail Norton of the Cookbook Co. Cooks, chef and caterer Judy Wood, and Rosemary Harbrecht of Brulee Bakery. As if to prove they aren’t clock-watchers, the three women and their cooking-camper guests certainly take their time showing up when we drop by for a visit on a mild sunny evening last May.

The wait is just fine, though, as we spend a pleasant hour touring Eloi Merle, the sprawling 100-year-old bed and breakfast where the women, known as “Les Trois Eglantines,” host three week-long camps each year. (“Eglantine” is the nearest French equivalent for “wild rose.”)

The house is easy to find, as its enormous double front doors open right onto the market square in the Minervois town of Olonzac, about a 45-minute drive east of Carcassonne. As we cross the threshold, British proprietor Glyn Evans immediately greets us with a glass of a local red wine and begins a tour. We wander through high-ceilinged rooms, then around the pool and lush garden. Just as we stoop low to poke our noses into the subterranean wine cellar, the Eglantines and their guests arrive from a visit to a local winery.

A dozen cooking-campers scatter to the showers or the poolside for a pre-dinner break. (They may call themselves “campers,” but they’re not exactly roughing it.)

Norton upgrades my wine to a 1999 St. Chinian, and we all sit down on the terrasse where everyone will share the meal they’ll create — in good time, in good time.

“We really do want to take people out of their element as much as we can, and partly that means slowing them down,” Norton says. “So we make sure to have time before dinner.”

It’s an ongoing theme, time. The camp has been offered in spring and fall since 2003, and since they started, the Eglantines have realized “people don’t want to be busy. The first one, we just crammed it full, ’cause we thought ‘you’ve gotta see this, this is so exciting; whaddaya mean you want to sit by the pool?’”

Tonight, though, about half of the campers happily relax poolside, while a few organize themselves in the large kitchen and dining room. To a soundtrack of birdsong, soft bamboo wind chimes and the slowly building crescendo of cooking sounds, Norton explains that “we realized the most important thing we could provide is just to be here.”

Rather than running around and discovering all the region has to offer, guests experience an unhurried, selective immersion in the richness of Languedoc’s food and wine culture.

Any running around takes place before the guests arrive. In 2005, Harbrecht and Wood came over in January: “We put 2,000 kilometres on the car in 10 days, just talking to people.” Here’s another example of the value of time, in this case time spent cultivating local contacts. During their week-long stay, guests visit three local markets and attend four or five classes. Along the way, they stop at the treasured places—a small winery, a goat farm “just up in the hills” — all discovered on those research trips.

By now the sounds and aromas from inside are intolerably tempting, the poolside is abandoned, and the campers are beginning to look to their mentors for more frequent advice. As we go inside to inspect the progress toward dinner, cooking-camper Howard Parsons wants to check with Wood before he places the duck breasts in an electric grilling pan set up in the dining room. The self-employed 59-year-old fills me in on the morning pre-preparation, when the magrets were scored, salted, and rubbed with thyme and rosemary. It’s his first time in this part of France, and he’s obviously smitten with the area — despite the fact that the trip is really a Christmas present for his wife, Kerry, who is the avid cook in the household.

Parsons is more than holding his own here, though. As he’s guided on the right temperature and the importance of letting the cooked duck breasts rest properly before they’re served, Wood drifts by, inhales the aroma, and asks, “Doesn’t that smell wicked?” It does.

From the kitchen, where a group wrestles with their pastry dough, a voice laughs that, “I’m going to need therapy after this.” Another voice replies, “This IS therapy!”

I turn to Peggy Murphy, who oversees a savoury dish of lentils. While she stirs, she says that what strikes her most about rural Languedoc is the sheer variety of local specialties: “You go to one little town and find something; then in another little town it’s something else.” Cheeses, in particular, have made an impression on her, and the 44-year-old vows that “at Janice Beaton’s, I’m gonna be a regular after this.”

The reference to the popular Calgary cheese shop seems out of place somehow, as the completed dishes begin to arrive at the table in the warm French dusk.

But the connection between the Olonzac camp and the guests’ home town is valuable, Norton says. Most of the campers do not speak French. They would need much longer than a week to locate even a fraction of the area’s resources, so it’s a huge help “to have someone from your home town go with you that you can relate to.”

The Eglantines enjoy pointing out which local dishes can be prepared with ingredients available back in Calgary, and where to find them. Harbrecht says they find the most satisfaction in “not teaching, exactly, but exposing people to that whole combination of really nice wine and really good food with big flavour. It’s easy — everything we prepare is really easy.”

By this point, all of the food is served. There are sighs of pleasure as everyone tastes appetizers like thin-crust pizza and creamy cod brandade (also “easy”). The stories of the day are starting now, too: the local art purchase that will find its way into one Canadian home, the near-disasters in the kitchen and how they were remedied with a skilful Plan B, or C, or D, from the Eglantines.

This particular group is mainly couples, so tonight the diners are paired up to a certain extent. Other week-long camps have included mainly people traveling. From left to right: Gail Norton, Rosemary Harbrecht and Judy Wood alone, and in one early edition, a lone man found himself in a group of 11 women. Ages vary from 20-something to the 70s, and the gamut of cooking experience is just as varied. The campers agree that a week spent discovering new food and wine, while spending 18 hours a day with a group, can be “intense.”

I suggest this must mean the Eglantines have some, um, fascinating anecdotes about previous groups.

“Yes, we do,” they nod. Much laughter. “Not that we’re going to tell you any of them.”

Discretion while the tape is running— another essential qualification for a cooking camp host.

Everyone is now at the table, where we will remain for over two hours. As each guest in turn shares their tale of the day’s cooking adventure, candlelight takes over from the setting sun, music comes through the tall windows, and laughter echoes from the old stone walls. It turns out that we will dine until after midnight. But no one is going anywhere. We have all the time in the world.