Les Poissonchats

The kitchen is the heart and soul of the house, at least where I come from. Our old farm houses are typically rectangular with four rooms per floor with a built-in tiled oven in the middle of the house. It’s fired up from the kitchen stove, its biggest part reaches into the parlour. Regular meals mean a well heated house for you’d fire up twice a day, for breakfast, and for supper. The tiles keep warm for well overnight and there’s little gaps in the ceiling that open with a slider into the sleeping chambers, so the heat rises and keeps the sleepers comfy.

There is no such stove in our castle, though we’ll soon build in a mini version of it in the dining room. Yet the kitchen, it is the heart of the house no matter what.

With my guests I cook in the big medieval cuisine, which is one of my favourite rooms in the castle yet it is completely unpractical come wintertime – too big, too airy, too grand. Hence we decided to install our very own little private kitchen at the other end of the house, facing the rising sun and the orchard, looking over the village, in the 19th century tiny towers. It’s quaint and comfy and very practical come wintertime. I’ve decided to show you a peek into this the very most private corner of our lives (it’s a sanctum sanctorum really for I noted that everyone stops dead at the threshold as if there’s an invisible wall they can’t cross, so I really do have to insist strongly that they come in), there’s still odds and bits that are missing but it is now a fully functioning cuisine.

We’ve done almost everything ourselves with the help of friends and we’re rather proud of us all. The blue and white tiles come from a house in Evian, yes, that’s a town too, it’s where the famous Evian water is sourced and it’s right on lac Léman looking over to Switzerland. It was right before Christmas some years back and I booked us into a room with a view, we bought a crate of oysters and a bottle of Ruinart and made it a room pick-nick, that was during Covid. We opened the big window and sat there with the duvet around our shoulders having a little private blast. In the afternoon we got the tiles. We bought them from a kind man who had renovated his father’s house to live there with his wife and children. She didn’t like the vintage tiles too much but because he’s a good man he took them out and kept them, confident that someone someday would come and put them to use. We packed them in empty champagne boxes and went on to the Swiss alps to celebrate Christmas with my husband’s family, driving up the break neck winding roads with a trunk full of presents… and champagne boxes full of vintage tiles.

The kitchen is nearly almost completely finished now, we even did the worktops ourselves but I haven’t taken any pictures yet. I’ve also decided to keep the gas cooker despite it’s being super old but I find it cooks really splendidly. I call it Micheline’s cooker after the lady who used to have the house we renovated two years ago. I’ve never met her which is a pity but in a curious twist of fate I had a box of photographs of her when she was young, she was very beautiful, and also I heard she was a terrific cook (best blanquette de veau in the universe). I gave the box to her son. Maybe I should ask him if she ever wrote up the recipe for her famous blanquette?