The story of our adventure, our move to Rue Tatin, began some thirteen years earlier, when I first went to live in Paris. Of course back then I had no idea that I would fall hopelessly in love with Michael Loomis, and then with France. Nor did I ever imagine longing so heartily for the French countryside, the French language, the thousands of things that make French life what it is, from dozens of varieties of bottled water to the sweet cream butter. There wasn't any way to know then how deeply and irreversibly seduced I would be by the markets, the restaurants, the French lifestyle that takes its cue from the meal and the table. The suitcase was big, and it was heavy. It had everything I thought I would need for a year in Paris, including a little wire contraption that worked on 220 current and would boil water instantly, my favorite earthenware Melitta coffee maker, and a Le Petit Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise French dictionary, the best I could find. After months of planning, applying for and getting a student loan, packing, and moving, I was finally in Paris for a year's experience as a stagiaire, or apprentice, at a cooking school for English-speaking students. It sounded like a dreamworking all day at the school, taking cooking classes at night with French chefs, and living in Paris to boot.

I was beside myself with excitement. And fear. I didn't know a soul. I'd only been to Paris once before, for a short week when I was barely twenty. I'd studied French for years in school but had never really spoken it. Already concerned about just how I was going to make the $2500 loan I'd gotten stretch for a year, I decided on arrival to take the metro rather than a cab from the airport to the city. That meant heaving the suitcase up and down stairs, through archaic turnstiles (all of which have been modernized since to accommodate luggage), in and out of metro cars. It was several very rough hours before I arrived at the apartment where I was to stay with a young woman who had just started working at the cooking school and had offered me her spare bedroom.

The apartment was in the ninth arrondissement, not far from Montmartre. I would stay there just long enough to find a place of my own. No one was at the apartment and I was in a hurry. I dropped my bags, took a deep breath, and immediately ran back out the door to renegotiate the metro and report for work. The apprenticeship was set out in six-week stages, the first of which was that of school receptionist, which meant sitting behind a desk, answering the phone, greeting visitors, and dealing with mounds of paperwork. My ideas of a romantic, food-filled year hadn't included such stultifying work; the only thing that kept me going was peeking at the cooking classes going on in the adjacent room, and knowing that two nights a week I would join the other stagiaires for cooking classes. I could hardly wait for the first class. When my workday was finished and the door to the street locked, I followed the other stagiaires to the kitchen.

They explained the system to me, which sounded too good to be true. There was a list of perhaps a hundred required recipes to work through during the year, calculated to teach the basics of classic French cuisine, and to prepare us for the year-end exam. All we had to do before each class was to choose the recipes we wanted to work on, in a certain order which went from simple to complex. All of the ingredients would be ordered so that on the night of the class we had simply to run downstairs to the cave, or cellar, where they were kept, and bring them upstairs. We paired up to work, and kept the same partners throughout the year, to the extent everyone's staggered schedule would allow. Once I had traded my phone and typewriter for a chef's knife and covered my street clothes with.