A Eureka Moment: an idea for specialization can spring from anywhere. A while back, I saw a poster at the James Beard House announcing an event titled, “Dumplings and Dynasties.”

Wow!

An entire career could be initiated from this concept. It could even become a kind of Alex Haley Roots, Joseph Campbell Power of the Myth or Ken Burns’s The Civil War PBS documentary series — with music and dance!

How fabulous that could be: Dumplings and Dynasties: The Origins of Everything Edible!

Imagine: a series of wedding ceremony traditions around the world with Edible Dumplings and Dynasties animated in living color!

It was Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, who suggested, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

The front door sign from my shop, La Bonne Femme

I mention this proposition to emphasize how vitally it is to do some serious research before embarking on any business or any endeavor of any kind.

The only way to learn the retail business is to spend a few years working in a store.

I learned this the hard way…

After spending a shockingly short time at the London Cordon Bleu School of Cookery (today, Le Cordon Bleu London), I decided to open my very own cooking school in Greensboro, North Carolina. I named it La Bonne Femme.

Of course, nobody in Greensboro had the least idea what that meant. (As a dish, it is a seductively tasty combination of garlic, onions, bacon and mushrooms in a red wine sauce to accompany a thick veal chop or chicken leg. As a namesake, it evokes “The Good Wife.” I preferred to think of myself and the shop as The Good Woman.)

I set up my cooking school in a beautiful, isolated little house in the woods where nobody could find it.

Nevertheless, word of mouth was generous. The school thrived. It thrived so mightily (on a small scale mind you,) I decided to expand it into a shop so I could sell the soufflé dishes and rolling pins and other gadgets and utensils I was using in the classes. That worked.

Then I thought how neat it would be to sell what was then quaintly called “gourmet” foods. A glass door refrigerator displayed great cheeses. There were exotic coffee beans, teas, chocolates and all manner of good things to eat. I arranged to have baguettes, croissants and brioche flown in from New York.

There were only two things missing from my little corner of Paradise: one was wine…so I decided to import it. The law required wine sellers to become U.S. citizens. I became a U.S. citizen.

The place was simply charming.

There now remained, only one thing missing: customers.

Lesson One: Don’t choose a fancy name for a business or to as your identity as a personal chef, or for a service, a blog, or book title.

Lesson Two: Each town has a doomed location where every enterprise is doomed. Before investing in a cash register, make sure you know you have chosen the best possible location. Know who your customers and suppliers are likely to be. Make sure there is enough parking for the crowds that will flock to your store. Check the zoning. Get insurance. Explore all the hidden costs including taxes, garbage and snow removal. Register your name. Make friends with the bank manager. Have a marketing and publicity plan. Be realistic about drawing up a profit and loss statement.

Think carefully about your ability to withstand extreme stress.

And as a rousing chorus of Les Bonne Femmes would say: Bonne chance! (Good luck!)

A handwritten sign tacked to a tree announces: CORN, NEW LAID EGGS, STRAWBERRIES, and the driver’s foot eases off the pedal. The car slows as we scan the road ahead. And there it is — the roadside farm stand, that is as much a part of the rural landscape as the white-steepled church, standing calm and quiet on the fresh-cut lawn, and the blue-painted clapboard houses with the American flag moving softly in the summer morning breeze.

Around the rough, wooden lean-to, there are small family groups reaching for the just-picked fruits and vegetables. A wooden plank stretched between two sawhorses holds homemade jams and jellies and honey with their labels written in a spidery hand. There are mushrooms and berries; strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and on two or three days a year, red currants and gooseberries and raspberries as sweet as sugar and as intense as stained glass.  Fresh-baked breads and pies and cookies, gingerbread and muffins and scones are proudly arranged in doily-lined baskets, and at the end of the table are bunches of basil, parsley, thyme and sage, and jugs of newly pressed cider.

On the ground are bushels of baskets filled with apples and pears, plums and peaches, potatoes and onions, leeks and carrots, zucchini (always heaps of zucchini), burstlingly ripe, juicy tomatoes, and big and baby black eggplants. There are beets and lettuces, and shuddering green greens and brilliantly red radishes. On a side table are the eggs, brown and white, laid this very morning before the cock crowed.

The car is filled with more vegetables than we can eat in a month of dedicated consumption. But, we will worry about that later. Nostalgia drives us to buy too much. Temptation always overcomes reason.

The simple country farm stands are miniatures of the urban green markets that’s are springing up everywhere. These city markets are places where friends run into friends and pretty women wear straw hats and toddlers sleep in strollers while their parents amble from stand to stand. Here there are even more choices than in the country.

There are dairy stalls displaying fresh goat and cottage and artisanal cheeses. There are a dozen kinds of wholesome breads, dark and raisin-studded along with a scattering of onion wisps baked into the crust. There are trays of ‘good-for-you’ sprouts. The chickens are free-range, the ducks plump, and the little poussins come from local farms. Smoked meats, bacon and pork and venison sausages sell fast, as do the blush wines from the neighborhood vineyards.

And in the fall, there are a dozen kinds of apples, tiny squashes and pumpkins big as a bathtub.

Street musicians fill the air with the sound of fiddles, and little children shyly step forward to drop a coin in the hopeful hat.

Shoppers buy from their favorite farmers, whom they know by name. Warm hands receive the money and pass the fresh foods they have themselves nurtured, hand picked, and packed into trucks before the morning’s first light.

These markets are our continuing link with our real or imagined past.

Here, we feel renewed and refreshed, for there are few things that give greater pleasure than shopping at the market, carrying everything home, and transforming it into a beautiful lunch for friends, who will spend the rest of the afternoon with their elbows on the table, a glass on wine in hand. Blissfully satisfied.