A la Recherche du Yaourt Perdu

For my sophomore year in high school, I was dropped into a French boarding school while the rest of the family led a peripatetic life following the fleet around the Mediterranean. I felt pretty hard done by at first, but as I made friends, learned some shaky schoolgirl French and got a taste of the food (even in a boarding school, it seems the French are incapable of cooking lousy food), I settled in and started to have fun.

One of the pleasures that I learned there and that stays with me today is so simple, it hardly seems worth posting about - plain yogurt with granulated sugar.

In France, the yogurt came in charming little clear glass jars, like miniature milk bottles for those of you who remember recyclable glass bottles delivered to the back door by our childhood folk hero, the Milkman. The French students taught me to lift the little cardboard stopper and fill the small space between the top of the yogurt and the top of the jar with granulated sugar and to mix it carefully in. Regular granulated sugar is best for this, not the superfine kind.

The result is sweet and tart, smooth and crunchy all at the same time, a dairy treat that sends me back with a single taste, like M. Proust, to my youth. All at once, I am 15 again, plotting how to sneak cigarettes without being caught by the redoubtable headmistress, Mme. Blay.