Apart from whatever’s cooking at Grandmere Yvonne’s and the gassy pancakes from Sweet Sue’s that everyone goes on about, there isn’t anything to eat in Phoenicia. The beverages are amusing, though.

This is how you find Grandmere Yvonne.

She lives on Highway 28, a few blocks from Phoenicia on the way to Pine Hill.

This is Grandmere Yvonne in her garden with Theo, who is resting after having taken a whiz on the parsley out back—with her blessing. I want to be her when I grow up. She makes cassoulet with her own duck (and then soap when she has a glut of fat), soup with wild dandelion and milkweed, which tastes like asparagus, and—depending on the season—sour-cherry jam, vidalia onion and apple relish, violette mustard that she remembers someone making in her village in France, home-cured cornichons, the duck-fat soap, French doughnuts of which she alone is quite fond, and more.

You have only to knock on her door. We were there a few weeks ago, and she had just come back from a forage in the woods with a basket of chanterelles from a place she would not divulge. “Come tomorrow on your way back to the city, and I will have some of these sautéed for you.”

I willingly parted with nine dollars for the pleasure of half a pint of chopped chanterelles, sautéed in butter with just the right amount of garlic and parsley. (Not that parsley).