Marguerite Duras at the table

Duras did not think of the table in terms of starter-main-dessert but as a house always ready to feed: a soup-staple that simmers for whoever walks through the door, a one-pot dish left on the fire for a long time, wine set beside it, and at the back, like a memory, the sweet treats of childhood Indochina. For her, eating means keeping the house and keeping the world at a distance — a cuisine of solitude and hospitality mingled, shared between the France of leeks and the Vietnam of nuoc-mâm.

A humble poor man's vegetable, the leek is the quintessential Duras emblem: she devoted a famous text to it in *La Vie matérielle*, where leek soup becomes the symbol of the solitary woman, free and yet held by her home. Nothing simpler, nothing more laden with meaning.