Enjoying a Burgundian Brunch by Autun Cathedral with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Enjoying a Burgundian Brunch by Autun Cathedral with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Before and after our visit to Saint-Lazare Cathedral in Autun, my husband Laurent and I walked down the curving, narrow medieval streets and reviewed menus posted outside restaurants.  We passed the Rolin Museum and sat down on the benches outside it, not knowing that this was the childhood home of Nicholas Rolin (1376 – 1462).  Nicholas Rolin was the Chancellor Burgundy for more than forty years, and was appointed by Philippe le Bon (1396 – 1467), Duke of Burgundy.

Rolin is notable in French history for helping draft the Treaty of Arras (1435) that ended the hostilities of the One Hundred Years War (1337 – 1453) between Burgundy and the Kingdom of France.  King Charles VII (1403 – 1461) of France recognized the independence of Burgundy in return for Burgundy’s disbanding its alliance with the English.  (The English continued to battle in France, but were finally defeated in 1453 at Bordeaux.)  We would discover more about Nicholas Rolin as we toured around Burgundy.

Dinner preoccupied us at the moment and not history.  We chose to eat at an outdoor restaurant across the street from the cathedral.  The restaurant had a perfect view of the tower rising from the church.  Umbrellas over the dining area and flowers sitting atop the restaurant’s low stone wall made it appealing on a hot day.

We started our dinner with “Oeufs Pôchées au Vin Blanc Aligoté, Cèpes et Queues de Morilles.”  This dish was translated as “Poached Eggs with white wine, Cèpes, and Morels Sauce.”  That translation hardly did justice to this rarefied delicacy.  The poached eggs came in a small bowl with a whipped white sauce brimming over with wild mushrooms.  I could have eaten just this, but as the French say, “I had big eyes” when I ordered my meal.

Following the rich poached egg dish came “Brochette de Magret de Canard” – skewered and grilled duck breast.  This particular kind of duck breast comes from ducks raised for the foie gras industry.  Magret de canard meat is dense and has a thick lining of fat, which allows it to be grilled without drying out.

The duck breasts were skewered to look like little hearts. Saffron rice accompanied the duck breast along with a salad.  The salad dressing made of red wine vinegar and Dijon mustard helped cut some of the richness of the magret de canard.

For dessert, I ate France’s famous apple upside down cake called a tarte tatin.  The tarte tatin came with crème fraiche and vanilla ice cream on the side.  The warm tarte tatin reminded me of an apple sundae with the crème fraiche as a topping and ice cream. 

I took this meal to be ample proof of the Burgundian appetite for food and life.  After this day of tourism, it was time to go home and get ready to see more of Burgundy the next day.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Autun Cathedral in Burgundy, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Autun Cathedral in Burgundy, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One year my husband Laurent and I arrived in the Burgundian town of Autun during the church feast of Pentecost.  A concert was taking place in the Saint-Lazare Cathedral.  (Cathedral of Saint Lazarus).  The feast of Pentecost celebrates the ability of Christ to give the gift of tongues to his disciples.  The gift of tongues allows one to speak foreign languages to spread Christ's gospel far and wide.

During the concert’s final Alleluia chorus, tourists were allowed into the cathedral to admire the singing and the perfect acoustics in the high-ceilinged cathedral.  The masons who built Saint-Lazare knew more than just engineering it would appear.

The Saint-Lazare Cathedral at Autun was built between 1120 and 1146.  It is considered a Romanesque church and not a Gothic one for more than the dates of its construction. The cathedral’s ceiling is considered Romanesque for its single rib, barrel vaults that run the length of the nave or main aisle of the cathedral.  

Guidebooks often describe Gothic churches as having arches, which Saint-Lazare Cathedral does not have.

Other Romanesque features in Saint-Lazare Cathedral in Autun include the clerestory windows, which extend down from the ceiling to a blind triforium.  The triforium looks like a corridor than runs around the cathedral nave, yet is solid stone.

The triforium rests upon columns with sculpted tops that run along the nave.  The clerestory windows provide light, but it was not until the Gothic era that flying buttresses on the outside of a church allowed walls to be opened up for stained glass windows as at the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.

The high nave or main aisle makes it difficult to see the tops of the columns that are sculpted, but, in general, Romanesque churches are decorated with imaginary beasts on tops of columns.  Perhaps beasts like these Romanesque ones and Gothic gargoyles share the same function of scaring away evil doers.

Outside the cathedral on the west portico (covered porch), there is the famous Last Judgment scene art history students study in their introductory classes.  The tympanum, or semi-circle, above the doors features Christ as judge, sending the good to heaven and the evil to hell.  One sinner is forever doomed to having hands clasped around his head in hell.

Last judgment scenes figure on many Romanesque churches and probably served to remind parishioners that life is precious, especially when it is tied to the land.  Bad harvests are just as life threatening as the plague and war.  

The French historian Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie wrote in several of his books that the difference between aristocrats and peasants in the Middle Ages was that the aristocrats had stores of food that could tide them over bad harvests, war, and lawsuits whereas peasants were kept weak on gruel or died.

You had to be ready to have your soul weighed at any moment as the Last Judgment during the Romanesque Period when harvests were precarious.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

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Attending Dance Performances from India and Senegal (Africa) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Attending Dance Performances from India and Senegal (Africa) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I happily brought my young daughter Florence to all the free programs and activities for children that Madison (Wisconsin) offered to them when I lived there like the free zoo and year-round performances by entertainers, who came to perform at the Civic Center Auditorium.  I found out about this programming in the local newspapers’ print versions, which is probably offered online now as well.

My favorite venue for year-round children’s entertainment was the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and Bolz Conservatory, which offered a dance series for children and scavenger hunts that were fun and educational at the same time.

I took my daughter to the first of a fabulous dance series of programs for children called Children of the Rainforest at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and had just as much fun as she did.  The first set of shows in the series was called Dances of India.  The show was made up of six dance sequences that used song, dance, storytelling, and poetry.  The dance sequences were called: Jungle symphony, Tippani, Mayur Dance, Ferris Wheel, Garba, and Village Mother.

The music of Anand Shankar evoked the rain forest as young dancers enacted elements of the jungle including the gentle and savage in the Jungle Symphony presentation.

The Tippani dance presentation featured a “functional” dance of India.  It is called functional, because it helps with work.  In this case, it is used to help women of the Saurastra to give them rhythm to their chore of beating the mud floor of a house during construction.

The Mayur Dance is the Peacock Dance and featured the peacock opening its feathers to dance.  Dancers gently informed children of the wheel of life in the Ferris Wheel dance.  Finally, the Village Mother dance taught about greed and the Earth’s resources. 

This dance series was such a loving way to teach children to love nature, other cultures, traditional art forms, and beauty. 

About two weeks later, I took my daughter to see an African dance troupe.  The introduction to this group in the brochure described various dances coming from different countries: Gumboot Dance (South Africa), Che Che Kule (Ghana – Twi people), Goombe (Liberia), Drum Call (West Africa), Kou Kou (Guinea), and Dounba, Dance of Joy (Senegal).

The Gumboot Dance was created by South African miners who wore big rubber boots to work accocrding to the brochure handed out.  Che Che Kule was a lot of fun.  It is a call and response game of Ghana that the audience participates in with response, but also with movement, song and rhythm.

Drum Call could have been the basis of an adult symphony orchestra.  It featured a Djimbe orchestra “using rhythms from 13^th and 14^th century West Africa” according to the guide.

My favorite dance had everyone in the audience up on their feet dancing.  This was the Dance of Joy from Senegal.  First, the dancers individually showed off their best moves and then everyone in the group was asked to get up and improvise based on the rhythms.  My daughter and I were the last people to leave this show; I like to dance a lot.

We especially went to the Olbrich Botanical Garden’s Bolz Conservatory to visit the tropical plant conservatory in winter.  They had several informative guides for visitors.  My favorite one was the one on Indian plants.  We liked looking at fish in the many ponds and trying to find plants that matched the drawings in the plant guide that was really a scavenger hunt.

The introduction to the guide and scavenger hunt said that 15% of the Earth’s people live in India.  The guide was also a pharmacopoeia and cooking lesson for adults.  The plants we had to find included pomegranate, scarlet ginger-lily, papaya, tamarind, fig, hibiscus, kumquat, lemon, angel-wing jasmine, coffee, coconut palm, banana, bamboo, black pepper, and acacia.

I always like learning new things and tried to impart that way of looking at the world to my daughter at Olbrich Botanical Gardens.  It was nice to learn things in the warm Bolz Conservatory in a Wisconsin winter, too; I thought that the Olbrich Botanical Gardens and its programs should have been headline news sometimes.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and In Detroit at Moliere plays, the art museum, and other activities by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and in Detroit at Moliere plays, at the art institute, and other activities with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Thanks to my high school’s French club in Detroit, Michigan, I felt like I made a trip to France every week for an hour before school started on Wednesday mornings.   The Club was open to students who had completed one year of French with a “B” or better average.

I was elected Social Chairperson for my ability to come up with activities to do on a weekly basis.  On easy planning weeks, we would play Milles Bornes™, the French card driving game, and learned all the vocabulary and insults that went with it.  We also played Parlor Games, the French play these at rallyes at home, like 21 Questions, Simon Says, Who am I? and I Spy in Franch.

We went to see Molière’s (1622 – 1673) Tartruffe with the third- and fourth-year French class that was performed by the drama department at Wayne State University.  Before going to see the play, we read the play in French, so we could understand what was being said.

When many of us became advanced French students, we wrote a play based on Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and performed it before the junior French classes and the high school’s drama classes in the school auditorium.  I was the lamppost lighter, who chose to light up the world or dim it.

Despite a heavy homework load, I arranged trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) to see: 

-the Detroit Industry Murals (1932 – 1933) by Diego Rivera 

-Martha and Mary Magdalen (c.1598) and The Fruit Vendor (c.1635 – 1620) by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)

-The Wedding Dance (1566) by Pieter Breugel (1520 – 1569), called Breugel the Elder

-The Visitation (1640) by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)

-Ruisdael’s (1628 – 1682) Jewish Cemetery (1654 -1655), Canal Scene (late 1640s), and Landscape (1665 – 1668)

-The Nigerian sculpture collection

-The medieval knight armor hall 

The DIA had docents at the time from the University of Michigan, who gave tours for free, if you reserved ahead of time.

Going to museums is a French national sport, so we planned several trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, which we traveled to by city buses.  We also visited the Detroit Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and the Aquarium and learned all the French vocabulary to describe what we saw.

Sometimes I had to stretch my imagination for activities to do like planning a baseball and picnic outing on Belle Isle.  Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. 

The island has a French name which reveals Detroit’s French heritage.  The name Detroit is derived from D’étroit, meaning “from narrows," because the Detroit River is indeed narrow.

On other occasions, I would contact the French consulate in Detroit to get films, posters, maps, and brochures for our club.  We all learned about Loire Valley Châteaux, Paris, the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), and Normandy from these films. 

We organized dinner parties at club members’ homes and tried our hands at French onion soup, crêpes, and tarte tatin (apple, upside-down cake).  I was more of a taster than a cook then and was happy that several French Club members knew how to cook.  I am a good French cook now thanks to a lot of practice from both necessity and pleasure.

I liked organizing lunches in French restaurants in Windsor, Canada for about thirty to thirty-five people usually at a fixed price. 

 

The restaurants would have us arrive early and gave us a choice between two main dishes such as roast chicken or ratatouille.  We would start the meal with vegetable terrines and French onion soup.  Cheese, salad, and chocolate mousse or ice cream would follow the main dish.  Water or sodas accompanied the meal.  

Long walks around Windsor followed the meal down Oulette Street to the flower gardens by the Detroit River before boarding the Detroit-Canada bus to go back through the tunnel and our life in Detroit.

We danced to Jean-Michel Jarre music on the Boblo Ferry Boat as our last club activity before college.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Traveling around England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great-aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Traveling around  England, Scotland, and Wales with my mom and great aunt by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

The British said “River Thames” and not “Thames River” I noticed as my mother and great-aunt purchased tickets for a boat and bus tour out of London when I was on a trip with them as an elementary student.

We took a taxi to Maidenhead, where we boarded the tour boat.  We stopped first at Stokes Poges and visited a church from Anglo-Saxon times called Saint Gilles that was more than 1,000 years old.  My great-aunt and I smelled the antique roses with many petals, whose perfume seemed all that much stronger in the misty air.

Back on the boat, we passed an English village, which looked mysterious due to the foggy mist.  This village called Bray on Thames harbors Michelin four-starred restaurants, but I was enchanted with Bray, because it looked like the drawings in my fairy tale books.

Finally, we arrived at Windsor Castle.  Windsor Castle was built around 1078 by William the Conqueror as a fortress high on a chalk cliff over the Thames.  As a child, my lasting impression of the place was of the Queen’s Gardens.  After admiring the flowers, we set out for lunch at the Castle Hotel in Windsor.

After lunch, we took the bus to Runnymede where the Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215 to guarantee the rights and property of barons; American colonists knew of this document and used it as a precedent for the American Constitution. 

 

My maiden name is Ruth Pennington, and three Penningtons signed the Magna Carta.  I was pretty happy to learn this later in life when I thought about running for president one day.

From Runnymede we took the bus to Hampton Court.  The gardens there are fantastic as well, but under no condition was I allowed to go into the maze made up of towering Yew trees.

Earlier in the week, while my mother and great-aunt were watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace from the Victoria Monument, I walked across the street and into Saint James Park.  I started counting swans, because the Queen kept track of them. 

When I came back out of the park, the English policemen were on the scene and the whole tour group was rather agitated.  I just laughed at all the commotion and got back on the tour bus for the rest of the London city tour.  I had become a "lost child."

So, my time at Hampton Court was limited to photos in the garden in my double-breasted, blue coat with brass buttons.  My hair was in pony tails, because I had succeeded in taking down the bun my mother had sent me out into the world with earlier in the day.  

I wanted to see a castle a day, but I was quickly realizing that the gardens were the true treasures of the British Isles. 

The journal that my great-aunt and mother kept for me of this trip made me realize that it was my great-aunt, who made me love gardens so well.  

Her handwritten notes about how much she loved English roses are the best souvenir I have of the wonderful trip I took to the British Isles many decades ago.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about Canada‘s French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget

Learning about Canada's French Culture in Montreal by Ruth Paget 

I learned about the vestiges of French exploration and/or colonization from my high my first French teacher in Detroit, Michigan. She was from Guadalupe and ran an efficient classroom.

She told us that French was a language of diplomacy, business, art, cuisine, and fashion to introduce us to the language we would be studying.  

She also gave us expectations for classroom behavior and homework rules.  She emphasized that if we wanted to go on the spring break trip to Montreal that we would have to keep our grades up.  “Up” meant a “B” or better.

I loved traveling and studied hard to make it onto the train to Montreal in the province of Quebec, Canada for a week.  Instead of taking the tunnel under the Detroit River to Canada, my mother drove me to Windsor in Ontario over the Detroit-Canada Bridge, so I could see the Detroit skyline.  

As soon as you enter Canada, the signs are in English and French, signaling a different way of life.

Almost all of the students in my school including me had been to Windsor, Canada.  Windsor offers visitors river front gardens, a great view of Detroit with John Portman’s (b. 1924) Renaissance Center in the middle of the skyline, beautiful restaurants, and crystal and china shops galore along Oulette Street.

Montreal was a cousin to Paris albeit colder, we had learned in our teacher’s orientation session before we set out on the trip.  I thought Montreal must have had massive traffic jams as it is located on an island where the St. Lawrence and Ottowa Rivers meet.  

Our teacher made sure that we could order in a restaurant, buy clothes, purchase movie tickets, and get directions in French before we headed out to Montreal.

Everyone stayed up all night on the train talking with our friends, telling jokes, and playing logic games like 21 Questions and Who am I?

Upon arrival in Montreal, we loaded our suitcases into a tour bus and took an all-day city tour, which required several stops and walks up steep hills.  The hills seemed steeper than they were, because we were tired.

The stop that interested me the most was our visit to St. Joseph’s Oratory.  I had been in Catholic Churches before, but had never seen a pilgrimage site before.  Canes lined the walls along with crutches and wheelchairs left by people, who had been cured by a visit to the Oratory.  

According to the Michelin Guide I read years later, Brother André, born Alfred Bessette (1845 – 1937) created the devotions to Saint Joseph at this church that healed ailing pilgrims.

Some of us lit candles and prayed for loved ones.  

Our next hilly stop was Parc du Mont Royal which was planned by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmstead (1822 – 1903), who had planned New York’s Central Park.  

We drove through the exclusive Westmount neighborhood to get to the park and took many photographs of the nineteenth century mansions, which reminded us of Detroit’s exclusive neighborhoods of Palmer Woods, Indian Village, and Sherwood Forest.

Later in the week, we took another tour bus out to the Olympic Park built to host the 1976 summer Olympic Games.  These games were fresh in our teen minds in 1979.  I loved the excitement of sports; the skier Franz Klammer was my favorite athlete.

We all complained to our French teacher that she had not arranged for us to go swimming in one of the six pools of the aquatic complex.  I think she might have wanted to throw all of us into a swimming pool after five days in a youth hostel.

The best part of our trip, though, was getting to spend a day in a bilingual high school.  We attended algebra, English, and biology classes.  In English, we read parts in a readers’ theatre of part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a Grade 13 class; Canadians go to school for thirteen years.  The algebra and biology classes were taught in French.

I could keep up with the algebra class and was happy, because I knew that Canadian schools at the time were among some of the best in the world when using international testing standards.

I also learned from one of the English-speaking teenagers that she liked studying French, because it reinforced her understanding of English grammar.  I was not entirely sure of what she meant until I studied French for another year. 

When and why to use certain verb tenses became very clear to me in English as I studied the same verb tenses in French.

When I diagrammed sentences in English class, I knew exactly what to do with subordinate clauses thanks to studies of French as well.  French was my insider secret to doing well in English class.  That secret was the best souvenir I brought back from Montreal.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Attending Tea Parties in the US, the British Isles, and the People's Republic of China with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Attending Tea Parties in the US, the British Isles, and the People's Republic of China with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

“The hors d’oeuvres are for the adults only,” said the English colleague of my mother, whom she had invited with his wife for tea at our house.

I, the eleven-year-old princess, was not going to be denied the liver pâté on crackers that my mother was serving as part of the tea.  I went into my bedroom to execute my plan.

I immediately began making placards to wear over my chest and back.  I wrote out my message, attached the placards with a string, and put them over my head.

I took the American flag out of my mother’s closet and reappeared in the living room.  I circled in front of the coffee table before the English couple with the flag held high and the message “Equal Rights for Kids” emblazoned in red marker on the placards.

“You just have to like some children,” the Englishman said as he was guffawing American-style now.  Victory won, I sat down nicely to enjoy the liver pâté and drink tannin-rich Red Rose™ tea from Canada that we always drank in my childhood home in Detroit, Michigan.  I willingly fought for my tea, because I knew that “biscuits” known as “cookies” in America would soon appear.

Thanks to a trip I took to the British Isles with my mother and great-aunt when I was seven, I already knew what a tea held in store.  On our trip, we visited my grandmother’s English pen pals, who plied us with cucumber, radish, and butter sandwiches served on white bread without crusts.

The sandwiches occupied the bottom tier of a three-tiered tea goodie tray.  The smaller tier in the middle usually held dry yet sweet triangular scone muffins that tasted good once you dunked them in tea.  The very top and smallest tier held dainty desserts and cookies.  As a child, I munched away on cucumber sandwiches just waiting to get to the top tray.

More than the cookies, though, drinking tea even at the young age of eleven, conjured up the magic landscapes I had seen in the British Isles.

I liked standing in the doorways of the stone farmhouses we stayed in overnight and looking out over the misty, emerald fields with stone fences of irregular heights separating them.  I always felt like I was dreaming while I was wide awake while looking at this scenery.  Sipping tea helped me recall that otherworldly feeling.

Tea brought on other feelings in high school when I had the chance to visit the People’s Republic of China in 1979.  At that time, China prided itself as having an “iron rice bowl” or social security blanket for all.  

After reading about the Chinese war for independence, communes, and the Cultural Revolution, I had a rugged view of the Chinese, who wore blue Mao jackets.

How surprised I was to find that communists liked overstuffed furniture covered on the backs with white lace doilies.  No matter where we went – train station reception rooms, hospitals, factories, hotel lobbies – we invariably sat through presentations and question-and-answer sessions in chairs like these with a warm cup of tea beside us.

Chinese tea cups offer countless play opportunities, especially while you are listening to a presentation about how tennis ball production has improved yearly since the 1939 Revolution.

The mug-sized teacups came with a cover.  Every time you would take off the cover, you would get a cloud of jasmine-scented tea that you could waft toward you.  Jasmine tea appeared to be China’s official function tea. 

 

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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