This summer, I had the pleasure to go to France for a cousin’s wedding. Like my last trip to France, two years ago for another cousin’s wedding, I enjoyed the typical nutella crepes and pain au chocolat, and cheese, and the general goodness of food there. But this time what struck me most was the large family meals I ate with my cousins.

After the wedding, many of us went to my mother’s cousin’s villa on the Cap Ferret. Cap Ferret is like a French Cape Cod. Like Cape Cod, it has one road going the length of it that can get congested with vacation traffic. Like Cape Cod, prices are high. And like Cape Cod, it has a wonderful maritime feel and is a pleasant place to spend a vacation.

With a mind to giving his large family a place where they could all gather, my mother’s cousin, Jacques, outfitted his villa with numerous beds so that his three daughters, who each have four to six children, could all come and stay at once. As a result, the family, despite being spread out over France, is tight-knit and the cousins all know each other well. I was privileged to be able to partake in that dynamic for several days last summer.

We all arrived for the Bordeaux wedding on a Friday. The big party was on Saturday, and Sunday found us driving, late in the day, to the villa. In France, stores are closed on Sunday. And since we’d been staying in temporary lodgings since Friday, we hadn’t been able to provision ourselves. Twelve people with almost no food were about to arrive at the villa at dinnertime. On the way, we stopped at a pizzeria, but my cousin, Catherine, emerged from there saying the woman was unpleasant and the prices were way too high. And so we continued on, to see if the recent renters had left us any food.

When we arrived, my young cousins set to work pulling linens out and getting the place set up for us to live in. Catherine, the default matriarch of the brood, set to work in the kitchen. She found some rice and sent the two youngest girls to a neighbors to borrow a glass of oil. Meanwhile, my cousin Christel, had brought some zucchini and tomatoes from her garden. And Catherine had taken six eggs from her father’s refrigerator in Bordeaux. She cooked up a bunch of rice, sauteed the vegetables, and added the eggs. When we sat down at the table, what we had was a lot of rice and enough omelet for six people, which would have to do for twelve. We all took a large helping of rice and a spoonful of eggs. If we were still hungry after that, we had rice with soy sauce. Christel had also brought a hunk of maroilles, a cheese from her husband’s region of northern France, and we had that for dessert. It’s a slightly soft cheese, with a washed orangish rind and a strong smell. I loved it.

family dinner in France

My point with this story is, my cousin Catherine was my hero that night, for making a dinner out of almost nothing and feeding twelve people with it.

The next day, Catherine, Ondine, and I went to the grocery store. We bought hundreds of dollars of groceries and entirely filled the back of the car. The crazy thing was, with 12-15 people eating three meals a day, it would only last for a few days.

That first night, sitting on the back deck after dinner, Catherine hatched a plan for accomplishing the cooking. She knew that if she did nothing, organization of each dinner would fall to her, as the de facto matriarch of the group. She was on vacation and didn’t want that. She suggested that each person take on a night of cooking. As we sat there, I and my other cousins came up with a meal we could make and we each wrote the ingredients out on a list for the next day’s shopping expedition.

Wanting to get my night done with, I volunteered to cook first. Cooking in a foreign country is always dicey, but I figured I could manage some quiches, gazpacho, and a green salad. At home, I make a single quiche for me and Ben. Here, I quadrupled the quantities.

The next night, Christel made a delicous and filling gratin with potatoes, zucchini, and the ubiquitous pork bits.

The night after that, Arthur made spare ribs and grilled vegetables.

For lunch, someone always whipped up something. A rice salad with the leftover rice from the first night (rice, veggies, vinaigrette – delicious), a pasta salad, a bunch of hard-boiled eggs, and all 12-15 of us sat down to a meal. Dinner, we were once again all together around the big table, indoors or out.

My final family supper in France

When I came back to the U.S., what stuck with me from the trip were these big family meals. I made a little rice salad to try to get the feeling back, but it wasn’t as good (or I wasn’t as hungry), and I was eating alone and it just wasn’t the same.