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By Root 455 0

François René de Chateaubriand, the founder of Romanticism in French literature. Her husband had recently gone bankrupt—again—and she took up residence in a convent in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where Chateaubriand visited her every day to read to her from the memoirs he was writing. At one point, she became so ill that it seemed the end was near. She refused to eat but was finally enticed into keeping up her strength with a bowl of fresh peaches in cream. That was the beginning of her recovery, and she lived to be seventy-two.

NAXOS LUNCH

We had lunch in a small mountain village named Kata Potamia in a café overlooking parched brown hillsides. The tables were beneath trees with whitewashed trunks. We had been walking since eight in the morning along steep paths bordered by stone walls, through other villages, past fields with olive trees and a few goats, encountering only a couple of old men leading donkeys and no other walkers. It was as if we had the country to ourselves. The waiter brought omelets, Greek salad, and fried potatoes almost too hot to bite. There was the sound of cicadas, sometimes a great noise that rose with a rush and then fell, like a passing train. We were just below the church, old and white like every other building, and at noon its bell rang. It sounded like a hammer on an iron stove, without reverberation. You could hear the waiter and cook talking in the kitchen. The sun was ferocious, though not beneath the trees. The bill for the three of us was 4,600 drachmas, about eleven dollars. The lunch was worth far more.

WEDGWOOD

Josiah Wedgwood was born this day in 1730 in Staffordshire, England, in the town of Burslem, where his family made pottery. At nine, he began work in his brother’s plant, and before he was thirty, he started his own, eventually building a village nearby for his workmen that he named Etruria, which included schools, reflecting his concern for the quality of their lives.

Wedgwood’s distinctive pale blue ceramics, embossed with Greek figures in white, were a leap forward from the merely practical pottery produced until that time. Along with his other innovations and designs, Josiah Wedgwood turned what had been a backwater trade into a prominent industry, setting the highest standards in craftsmanship. His partner, Thomas Bentley was expert at promotion, and they marketed the elegant new dishes and decorative items to the upper classes, renaming one collection Queen’s Ware when Queen Charlotte made a purchase. He also created a dinner service for Catherine the Great.

His patterns are still produced by his descendants, but Wedgwood left behind more than a thriving business and a new elegance in the dining room. One of his grandsons was Charles Darwin, who had some original ideas of his own.

ICE CREAM

The emperor Nero, accustomed to getting what he wanted, ordered runners from the Alps to carry snow to Rome, which his cooks flavored with fruit purées into a kind of sorbet. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the recipe was forgotten until Marco Polo rediscovered something much like it in China in the 13th century and brought it back to Italy. With this double legacy, Italian sorbetto could easily be called the best in the world, if it weren’t for France. Catherine de’ Medici, who brought the seeds and recipes for her favorite foods, as well as her cooks, when she went to France to marry Henry II, also carried with her the idea of iced desserts.

They have their fullest realization in the glaces and sorbets made by Bertillon in sevently flavors and sold at various outlets around Paris, but most famously on the Ile Saint-Louis at a little window identified by the line in front of it. When our son was less than a month old, he had his first taste of their poire, which seems the absolute essence of the fruit, and pears have been a favorite ever since.

Or perhaps it’s in his genes. Kay’s grandfather owned a creamery until World War II and—long before there was an understanding of cholesterol—prided himself on the high butterfat content of his ice creams. Kay’s father