The Tappan Fabulous 400
Crepes & The American Dream
We were arguing over who was next. I, being the oldest cousin, insisted it was me. Nicole, the next oldest, said it was her. The two redheads (our little sisters Hilary & Phoebe) were on their own. My grandmother Dee was making crepes and she couldn't cook them fast enough.
“For heaven's sake, you kids have got a hole in your stomach.”
I peered over the top of the pull-out stove of her Tappan Fabulous 400, at seven now tall enough to see the action, and watched.
Her crepe pan was on the second of the four horizontal burners. In front of them was the wood ledge where she had her tools: a metal mixing bowl filled with crepe batter, a soup spoon, a cube of butter sitting on its opened waxy wrap, her dented silver-plated sugar tin, and a metal spatula. First, she sliced a pat of butter and dropped it on the crepe pan. It sizzled and melted, browning on the hottest edges, as she swirled it around. Next, she heaped two spoonfuls of crepe batter in the middle of the pan and tilted it this way and that until there was an even, round carpet of crepe. Then, she waited.
“How do you know when it’s time to turn it?” I asked.
“Oh, it doesn’t take long. See how it’s starting to brown on the edges?” Her expert spatula gets under and flips the golden brown crepe onto its back—or stomach. Next, she added a thin slice of butter that she slid around with the knife; then a generous scoop of sugar. She folded the edge of the crepe a little, then again, and again, now rolled up like a Persian carpet and … onto my plate!
This was crepe #2 for me. The most delicious of all, as the tastebuds are primed and the tummy isn’t too full. Who will eat the record number today? We keep score.
I take my plate to my chair at the wooden table. All the leaves are in because all four granddaughters spent the night here with Dee and Pop at the ranch.
I spread my red cloth napkin on my lap. My grandfather Pop has a laundry so we all have cloth napkins and tablecloths at our houses. The smell of the melted butter-sugar combo gets in my mouth before my first bite and makes me salivate. I cut the crepe into narrow horizontal slices and put them in my mouth as I work my way from the bottom, slowly at first, then faster, to the top, and then, it's gone.
“Who’s ready?” Dee asks.
“I'm ready!” all four of us yell.
The crepe recipe came from her French mother-in-law, Laurence LaPouble, who she didn't like. Laurence was by all accounts a tough and cold woman whose first husband Jean Labourdette had died of the flu in San Francisco at age 26 in 1912. Her son Lucien, my grandfather Pop, was four years old at the time. His immigrant parents had run Lace House Linen, a French laundry, in a two-story building (Pop was born upstairs) on Divisadero near Bush Street. Laurence had been pregnant when her husband died, so she returned home to Laas, a farming village in the Bearn region. She gave birth to a baby girl who she named Jeanne, after her husband. The family story goes that Laurence planned to leave both the baby and my grandfather with her mother and sister and return to San Francisco to run the laundry, but my grandfather made such a fuss that she relented and brought him with her back to California. She never returned to France, but always sent money to support her daughter. She re-married another French laundryman, Jean Libarle, a widower with a young daughter, who became pop’s stepfather. Mr. Libarle eventually adopted Pop and changed his surname to his own.
Pop was very attached to his mother Laurence. After Mr. Libarle died, he would stop at her house every day on his way home from work at the laundry, which had relocated to Petaluma and he had bought from his stepdad. After a few years of this, Dee said she put her foot down and told him: “You can go home to your mother or you can stay with me, but you can't do both.”
Pop, and the crepe recipe, stayed with Dee. Laurence visited on special occasions, dressing formally and rarely smiling in photos.
Dee’s Italian immigrant parents couldn't have been more different. Both illiterate, from Convalle, a hilltop village near Lucca, Pia Giusti and Giocondo Benedetti were affectionate, hospitable, and came to California to escape poverty. He worked as a laborer and for Sonoma county wineries. They saved and bought the land where Dee & Pop’s future ranch house would be. Pia insisted all her American-born children go to college instead of working on the farm.
When Dee got her brand new Tappan Fabulous 400 stove in the 1960s, she said her mother Pia saw the American Dream come to life for her daughter. An oven you didn't have to bend down to open? That you could see the food cooking? That you could close the burners away? It was a miracle.
Dee cooked for four generations on that stove—her four children, six nieces and nephews, her eight grandkids, 11 great-grandkids, plus friends of all of the above.
In 40 years that I saw her use that stove, I never saw her eat a crepe.
I return to my Christmas childhood with your delightful - and so evocative - story, Pia! My mother could've been related to your grandmother in how she poured, flipped and served our family's version of your family's crepe recipe. But...we called ours French crepes (synchronicity!) for the recipe my mother clipped from the 1950's Betty Crocker Cookbook (the red & white version). Ours had orange marmalade in the center and we only had them Christmas morning. And Mother never ate one, either. Wild!
Pia-I felt like I was in the kitchen eating a crepe and participating in the scramble for the next crepe-your 7 year old’s perspective is awesome!!