The other night Mathilde and I were happy to have dinner with her grandmother, Mimi. Mimi is a spectacular woman, every bit the matriarch: ruddy, robust and flush with life in spite of her years, always with a bright, mischevious spark in her eyes. Mathilde has inherited this spark, the glint that looks for and finds joy, but it has not yet matured into the bright opalescence that Mimi’s contains. It is a mineral of love and humanity, I suppose, that can only be polished by time and experience, and which gleams brighter for each test of durability, and brightest when taking in the fruits of a life, the faces of a family well-loved and loving assembled near it. At all the large family dinners I have attended with Mathilde, but especially those at Mimi’s own country house in Normandy, I have watched this light in Mimi’s eyes as she pours the champagne to three generations, plays with the fourth, and pads from the kitchen with steaming osso buco for all. In any case, Mimi is an easy woman to love, and I am thankful that she favors me, because I would like never to see the alternate refractions of her crystalline gaze.

But dinner. From the first time I sat at table with Mathilde’s family, I noticed they had a very methodical approach to the special-occasion family or social meal. Now, I’m sure this procedure is not particularly unique in France, quite the opposite, I would imagine, amongst the petite bourgeoisie, but I was first introduced to it by the Perrottes and thus thank them for it.

Unless they come from a particularly foodie family, or one lately immigrated from, say, Italy, most Americans are unacquainted with the sort of end-to-end pleasure of a properly conducted repast, one whose purpose is not to feed, but to nourish with pleasure and company. Thanksgiving hardly counts – the menu is too staid, the day singular and fraught with the stresses of family…stresses, it seems to me, exacerbated by American mobility and by the general atrophy of the American family. Suffice to say that it is the rare and lucky clan that comes to its own table together more than twice a year, without the pretense of a holiday. (I stress its own because, in the States, I think we are more liable to take a non-holiday celebration out to a restaurant.) The Perrottes are one of these families.

Now, dinner with Mimi this time was, as it has been but once before, a smaller affair with she, Mathilde et moi. The ritual remains the same though, and I will outline its stages below:

1. Aperitif – Either champagne or negronis, though Mimi (and as well, Mathilde’s parents) often chooses whiskey. Knowing my fondness for whiskey above all liquors, and my peculiar sensitivity to the bubbly (ça me fait mal à la tête), Mimi always stashes a bottle of Paddy’s under the coffee table, which she gleefully produces as the preferred alternative. The aperitif is consumed over warming conversation and a variety of snacks – typically something crispy and something savory, and at Mimi’s always including some amazing piquante olives – while the main dish is being finished. In this instance, a massive cut of Limousin beef – raised on a Norman butcher’s family farm and brought back by Mimi that very day – which had five minutes in the oven before being transferred to a searing pan full of rock salt. I turned it once before the ice in my drink had melted, and by the time my glass was empty the kitchen aroma announced that it was ready.

2. Food & Wine – Obeying the call “Á table!”, we move from the salon to the dining room, where the meal itself is plated. This evening, the aforementioned viande, sliced thick, the rosy hips of each cut oozing with juice beneath a smear of roquefort blended with butter. On the side, a leek tarte and some exceptionally crispy roasted potatoes with garlic. I asked Mimi how to give spuds such an excellent texture, and she answered, simply, “Put them in the oven, and forget them.” Accompanying the meal were two bottles of red – a 1990 Bordeaux and a 1997 Burgundy, if I recall correctly. Every adult Perrotte maintains a respectable cave, and thus I have quickly realized the value of cellaring wine. I may not be able to distinguish a $100 bottle from a quality $15 bottle, but I can tell the difference between a good wine and a bad wine, and can safely say that now I understand how a good one definitely becomes better with age. By the end of the main course, belly bursting with and head high on red-meat, I was ready for a smoke. But the repas was not yet 2/3 over, and it would have been rude to leave the table. One must forge ahead.

3. Cheese and salad – In the States, both of these items are usually offered in advance of the meal, but not so here (nor, I believe, in Italy). A tray of three to five cheese – here, a chevre, a roquefort and a semi-hard whose name escapes me – goes around the table, followed by a bowl of salad. I’m sure that somewhere there are gastronomic treatises extolling the digestive virtues of appending, and not beginning, a meal with dairy and greens, but I can only speculate on the logic and affirm that it is rather nice to bridge the meal and the dessert with crunchy and creamy textures.

4. Dessert – Here, a home-made tarte aux pommes, unctuous with God knows how much butter. After a childhood gorged on candy I have rather lost my sweettooth, but I cannot deny that, in a procession of savors, it is best to end on a sugary note.

5. Coffee – By this point the wine is exhausted, or at least abandoned, and the juice of the bitter bean is required to guard against the lethargy of consumption. The arc of pleasure being almost complete, this stimulant helps buoy its latter half.

6. Digestif – Now a small glass, or two, of some regional firewater. As coffee rouses, so the digestif emboldens – calming the belly to its proper functions, and fortifying the mind to take on the remainder of the night, if there is any. In this case we had Mirabelle, a clear liquor from Lorraine, made from tiny yellow plums. Two shots from a silver thimble, some more conversation, and the arc is complete.

After saying our goodbyes, Mathilde and I cabbed it home and slept blissfully. I beleive I could get used to this “everyday civilization”.