Stepping stone recipes, part 5: mash!

A few years ago, when I lived in Paris, I bought a big fat French cookbook with lots of colored photographs. I thought it would unlock some of the mysteries of French cooking - not the fancy stuff, just the day to day basics in a French household kitchen. I tried to use it regularly for a while, but I stopped when I mastered purée de pommes and decided that this was one dish where I preferred the American version: mashed potatoes.

Go back a bit. It is the 1950s. A little girl visits her grandparents in Reinbeck, Iowa for Thanksgiving. She is small enough and shy enough to crawl under the round dining room table, which has fat carved wooden legs. She scoots up against the base and listens to the grownups talk about the couple across the street who didn't speak for 30 years but were buried side by side for eternity. They rake over who hasn't paid his bills to the store and why that might be. Who isn't long for this world.

The smells of pumpkin and apple pies drift down and curl under the tablecloth. If I, the little girl, try hard enough I can almost see them cooling on Grandma's very old iron stove as I peep through the holes in the lace tablecloth.

The meat is roasting, a warm, cajoling perfume that makes me very hungry. I crawl out long enough to sneak a few black olives, a luxury Grandpa insists on, that we never have at home. He grabs a fistful and without looking at me shoves a couple in my hot little fist. I duck back under the table. He talks loudly and listens only when he feels like it, the result of a hearing aid and a fierce sense of independence in old age.

Voices and noises buzz above and around me. It's possible I doze. And then suddenly I am sitting at the table and there is a beautiful brown drumstick with crispy skin in front of me ("yyyy," mutters my sister Tara in disgust at me as she slices her more elegant white meat). Next to the turkey leg are some of Grandma's bright green garden peas. And next to that is the most beautiful sight on earth to a hungry little person, a round and smooth lump of mashed potatoes. I hurry to make a well in the middle with my fork, making neat lines in two directions, a gravy-holding grid.

"Gravy?" asks Grandma, but she doesn't wait for an answer. The steaming meat juice is poured into my neat well. I pause to let it cool and observe Grandma's lovely long silver braid twisted into a thin knot at the back of her head. Someday, I think, I will have hair like Grandma and bake pies and. . .

But by then the gravy is just cool enough not to burn my mouth. I tuck in.

Purée de pommes is a watery substitute for all that. Apologies to the French, but I love my mash.