I want to tell you a story about being far from a home you didn’t know was yours anymore or if it even ever was. And how one evening halfway through my time in Paris I spent two and a half hours on a video call in what was supposed to be an interview with a chef for a magazine article, but because the chef was Kristin Smith and because she is who she badass is, and because we grew up in neighboring counties feeling like other, and because we both left as soon as we could and because she came back -- after going way further than I did, living in Thailand and in China -- and found or built (or both) community, and because I could see and hear in every gloriously southeastern Kentucky twanged word her love for that home in that interview that just became a conversation that should have been a podcast, I hung up on absolute fire to make some buttermilk biscuits.
Hey. This isn’t like the rest of my Paris essays. I work on those for days, even weeks for all double digits of you, dear readers. What I’m sharing below is directly from my journal. I’m not making it pretty or poetic or anything other than that version of me spilling onto a couple of the hundreds of pages I scrawled while I was gone.
February 27, 2025
… she said she got tired of code switching her accent when she was in California and I told her about Dr. Hadley, my voice and diction professor my freshman year at Queen's college in North Carolina (of all places) stripping us of our accents, telling us we would never get jobs if we sounded like that.
Kristin said that was in the same mindset as the Chinese cutting Tibetan kids' hair, changing their clothing, their language. It wasn't that I was proud of where I was from, I was not. It was 1992, no one was talking about pride in your heritage like that. But I didn't get a chance, and I was 17. The truth is, at the time, he was right.
But my job now? Interviewing and telling the story of this amazing woman who speaks her very eloquent and articulate voice with such pride, meanwhile, I’m paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time to learn to speak French and not sound American.
To explore later: Is it because I moved to Kentucky at age 9? It wasn't my place. Kids called me city slicker at school. Even the teacher hated me. I corrected her on something in class one day. She later threw away the Christmas present I'd made her.
We were poor and I couldn't buy anything and I did one of those felt coloring page things and then I saw it in the trash can by her desk. What a cruel, sad, small person she was. And here I am sitting in Paris.
After talking with Kristin I had to make biscuits for the potluck at class today.
It's my last day [in class]. I grew up eating biscuits. My dad called my grandma's drop biscuits Tony biscuits for her nickname. And biscuits and gravy was one of the first things I learned to cook. Kristin gave me her recipe for buttermilk biscuits and I went out in the dark and rain to Monoprix for ingredients.
And it was like a fun scavenger hunt. So different from those first days here. I found buttermilk, sent Kristin a video clip, took a photo in my little fridge with bottles lined up: champagne cream, gingembre elixir, red wine vinaigrette and my buttermilk, with foie, gras, butter and duck fat, and eggs on the little shelf. Posted on Instagram. This was fun even if I was daunted by rolling biscuits and decided to do drop style.
next time maybe wait to make sure you don’t shit it up before talking about what you’re up to on Instgram?
I got the brown bag of sugar from the hall closet, where I keep the pantry drawer overflow and added my first spoon or two to the (stupid ugly plastic, because there is no mixing bowl here), red bowl, and stopped. That bag didn't say sucre. It was fucking citric acid that she keeps for cleaning. I felt so stupid. How did I not look at the bag?
The actual sucre was natural, so brown, not white like this, and was actually in the pantry drawer. The phone rang, and it was Mike calling, I was in tears and told him I needed to cry, then I told him what I'd done, that this was my connection to home. He didn’t know what to say. So all he said was I love you.
I told him I'd call him back when my head was in a better place and just looked around hopelessly and so mad at myself, and just sad. Why was something SO important and special, just gone, through my own error. I knew nobody at this potluck would even care, which made it worse. I’d been thinking about listening to Ben Sollee and really making this a home connection and it was gone.
On a last dash hope I put in Claude what I had done in case it wasn't ruined, but yep, it was a loss. He suggested making cornbread. Nice try, but it's 8:30. I've got wet hair from my shower, and I'm not going out for flour, let alone anything else. Then I saw the jar of white beans I bought a couple of weeks ago. And I had bought ham for the biscuits. That's it.
I also grew up on soup beans with ham hocks, so this would be a French version of that. I showed Claude what all I had and cobbled together a dish: crisp the ham in the duck fat, sautee garlic, add beans, make stock with the fond de veau I had, add some sundried tomatoes, my herbs (even a Bay leaf). I decided to add some foie gras at the end.
Hot damn. It's great that I salvaged a dish. A million times better was I salvaged my belief I can take a hit and keep going. Gold star to me. :)
The next day I toted that pot of bean soup (carefully swaddled in a box inside a bag) onto the metro and to my French school in Oberkampf, Ben Sollee in my earbuds. I’d felt for most of the four-week intensive class that honestly I wasn’t getting anywhere. But we always started class with talking about what we did the night before. And it turns out that maybe I had learned to at least string together enough words to push out sentences that formed a story, because I told the entire debacle, en français. And got the parting gift from Marion, the instructor, the French term for when you make such a mistake: J'ai merde -- I shitted it up.
I shitted it up and I kept going, and that? That’s the only thing that mattered.
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"I shitted it up" - ha - I kind of love that. Great story :)