This is kind of an Aesop’s Fable for food writers. The moral of the story—well, that comes at the end, silly. The fable begins in France, in a little town called Châteauneuf de Grasse, where I went to take a cooking course with Simone Beck, Julia Child’s co-author. I was the first of the students to arrive the day before the course was to begin and, not knowing what to do with me, Madame Beck invited me to dinner at her home. From that moment until I walked through her doorway two hours later, I fantasized about that meal.

Escargots or caviar, I imagined. On the terrace or under the festive glitter of chandeliers. With champagne or with some other French drink beloved in the region and known to few outside it. An acquired taste, she’d warn, using a French phrase whose meaning I would divine from context. I’d opt for the French drink, naturalement.

And then the meal. Or rather the first course: when would it be served? Linger: that was the French way. In France, eating—which is to say dining—wasn’t a marathon race like it was in America. Simone would see by my attitude that she didn’t have to explain that to me. I wasn’t the usual American. I’d nibble and sip, live totally in the moment.

In some cultures, you’re supposed to slurp your food to show appreciation, make a lot of noise when you eat. I wasn’t sure about the mores in Châteauneuf de Grasse, but at least I was prepared psychologically to click my teeth and lick my lips in ecstasy if called upon. I’d watch to see what they did.

Simone Beck swung the door toward her in her grand-gestured Normandy manner and said “This is Jean.” Her husband, a tall, slightly hunched man, headed toward me with smiling eyes.

“Do you like soft boiled eggs?” Simone asked as I stepped inside. “One or two?”

Soft boiled eggs? Why would I want soft-boiled eggs with all the tantalizing treasures of the French table just ahead. Maybe this was like slurping: you insulted them if you didn’t.

“Two,” I replied.

“Tonight you have many choices,” Simone said, leading me into a softly lit room with bookshelves along every wall. She directed me toward an overstuffed couch. This was more like it.

On the table between us sat a tall clear bottle containing some colorless liquid. The French drink, I smiled knowingly, watching her reach for it, pick up a tumbler and ask, “Water?”

“Ah,” she said, whisking me into the dining room where the table was covered with trays and bowls. “As you see, the class on Friday ate practically nothing from the lesson. They were afraid to be too full for dinner at Moulins de Mougin. Well,” she said with an inviting grin, “so we have many leftovers.”

I was supposed to fill a plate with whatever I wanted, cafeteria style, and meet her back in the other room. Next to the soft-boiled eggs sat strips of buttered toast: soldiers my grandfather used to call them, but here they were moulles, if I heard correctly. Nothing else looked remotely familiar. I scooped up some green stuff surrounded by white stuff, I cut a wedge of the red-flecked yellow square; I speared a few hunks of what I hoped was eggplant because if it was meat the color was not one with which I was familiar. This unpromising gastronomica would become downright romantic, I was sure, once Simone revealed their lusty French names.

The question of where we would dine was being answered before my very astonished eyes as I watched Simone position what looked like a TV snack table smack in front of the television set. Jean nodded to us as he went to get his own green stuff and white stuff. I thought we should wait for his return before we began the ceremony of dining that I was still imagining, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Not only did Simone Beck switch on the television and dive audibly into her soup before Jean was even out of the room, she finished every last drop before his return, simultaneously resolving my food slurping question in the process. Even so, as the guest I still wasn’t going to slurp something she said was called soupe de cresson. It didn’t seem right.

Any concerns I had about keeping up my end of the dinner conversation were obviated by the floods of emotion suddenly gushing forth from the television set. Jean and Simone immediately fell silent, their unblinking eyes riveted to the TV screen. It was obviously a soap opera with more than its share of tragedies per minute, but I didn’t understand a word. One thing was clear though: we weren’t getting dessert till it was over.

She then brought out a big bowl of chocolate mousse, half a bowl actually, the leftovers from a recipe she’d been testing for her new cookbook.

“A good experiment,” she declared, lifting a large clump of it onto my plate, “but it didn’t work.”

“Fromage?” she asked, as if it was an afterthought. There were five—Roquefort, reblochon, boursault, gruyere and fromage des fraises—and I hoped it was ok to taste them all. They didn’t seem to mind, but neither of them did likewise. They were discerning; they knew what one would taste like against the other, which first, which last, which not at all. Maybe someday I’d know that, but then I felt lucky not to. I gave them all equal time, tried to fix them in my mind the way you try to remember the noses and eyes of people you want as friends. A few minutes of this and I knew I’d never forget them.

Shortly thereafter, Jean walked me back to the cottage where the other students would be joining me in the morning. From that dew-misted slope, the roof of their little house seemed to glow, its shingles caught in snowdrifts of moonlight. The air smelled of strawberries and rosemary and tall grass shaking itself free of the day. I looked up at the sky dusted with blue glass stars. Watching Jean climb back up the hill, I felt honored just to be there, to have spent the evening with him and Simone, to have known these sacred moments which I hoped I’d remember forever.

Which brings us, as promised, to the moral of the story: Take Notes. These events happened in 1978 and led to the publication of the first article of my 30-year food writing career. More recently I used specifics such as these in many chapters of my memoir, Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer. If you want to be a writer whose work is lit up and energized by the telling detail and the palpable freshness of the moment, get yourself a nice, little easy-to-carry notebook. And don’t leave home without it.

Jeannette Ferrary is the author of eight books, the newest of which, Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer, is a memoir about food and the food world. She has written the memoir/biography M.F.K. Fisher and Me: A Memoir of Food and Friendship, A Good Day for Salad, and six cookbooks. She has written widely about food, nutrition, restaurants, trends, and personalities as a stringer for the New York Times, and a contributor to Bon Appetit, Travel/Holiday, Food and Wine, VIA Magazine and many others. She served as staff restaurant reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and has worked extensively in food-related advertising and public relations. She has studied cooking with Simone Beck and Julia Child in Châteauneuf de Grasse, France. A member of IACP, the San Francisco Professional Food Society, the Culinary Historians of Northern California and Dames d’Escoffier, she has taught food writing courses at UC Berkeley Extension for more than 10 years.