Professor Butter Beard’s “Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin”
“Our mailman was a dance teacher at night & I would watch him sometimes to see if he would deliver mail differently than the others. I expected to see him leap over bushes with his toes pointing like arrows, but all he ever did was walk.”
― Brian Andreas, “Still Mostly True,” 2005.
Nellie has a crush on our mail carrier. She wakes from her late morning nap every day the exact second she hears our mailbox being opened. With a giddy dog smile, she gallops to the door, whining to me to “hurry up!” I laugh as I open the door slightly and her big nose squeezes between the door and the screen to nab the treat left specifically for her. I wave hello to our beloved mail lady. She turns and smiles and calls back: “Howdy Nellie! Love ya, ya crazy sexy hound!” Nellie blushes for hours.
I believe Vincent van Gogh also had a bit of a crush on his mailman. Vincent painted Joseph Roulin for the first time in 1888 just after moving to Arles with the hope of exploring more artistic sensations in the “unspoiled” southern French countryside. The two lived on the same street and the artist easily fell into a friendship with the postal official at the Arles train station and his large family. Vincent painted about twenty paintings for the Roulin family and was so very proud of these portraits that when he wrote to his brother Theo about them, he stated: “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we try to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring."
Vincent was fascinated by his friend’s face, but he was at least as taken with the man’s character. Steven Naifeh writes that Roulin was “almost six and a half feet tall, with a thick salt-and-chestnut beard (a “whole forest” wrote Van Gogh) groomed to two points, a brow like an escarpment, and a perpetual drunken glow like someone out of a Daudet novel.” According to Vincent’s letters, his friend drank, sang and orated his republican politics with gusto until the bars emptied. He also paraded about the town at all hours, always exercising his booming voice, and proudly dressed in his deep blue double-breasted coat with brass button, scrolling gold embroidery at the sleeves, and a stiff weathered cap with “POSTES” emblazoned over the bill.
According to his biographers, Vincent underwent a psychotic episode, initiated by an argument with his friend Gauguin, in which he menaced his fellow artist and then sliced off a portion of his own ear. It was Joseph Roulin who tended to Vincent in the aftermath of this incident, seeing him committed to the psychiatric hospital in Arles, watching over him during his internment there, writing to his family to reassure them of his health, and providing constant solace to the recovering artist. As Vincent struggled to regain his mental balance, it was this friendship and support, renewed during Roulin’s return visits even after he and his family had moved to Marseilles, that help to stabilize the artist’s thoughts and renew his passion for capturing vibrations of color on a canvas.
Roulin’s postal livery blue inspired me to open a jar of my homemade blueberry jam, take a bag of the summer berries from my freezer and combine them with nutty browned butter in a tart ready to be served with vanilla bean ice cream and a mug of steaming hot tea. Enjoy, and try to remember to wave hello to your mail carrier when you can. That friendship may come in handy just when you least expect it!
Blueberries in Browned Butter Tart
One 9-inch Tart
Dough for one 9-inch tart shell (I recommend using an all-butter recipe)
½ cup Blueberry Jam (Now is the time to use your jam you made with last summer’s berries!)
1 cup fresh (or frozen) whole blueberries (If using frozen, let them sit at room temperature at least fifteen minutes before using and also increase your baking time by five minutes)
6 ounces (12 Tbsp) unsalted butter.
3 large eggs
¾ cup granulated sugar
½ cup dark brown sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp fine sea salt
1 Tbsp freshly grated orange zest
1 tsp vanilla paste
1) Roll out your tart dough to 1/8” thickness and press into a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill the dough in the pan while you heat your oven to 375 degrees. Spray a piece of aluminum foil with baking spray and tuck into the chilled tart pan to hold the pastry in place as it bakes. Bake the shell for 18 minutes, remove the foil and bake for an additional 5-6 minutes until the bottom of shell appears dry and is just starting to brown. Remove the shell from the oven and let cool slightly.
2) While the shell is baking, prepare your custard. Start with browning your butter in a small sauté pan, heating the butter until it stops foaming and is just beginning to smell nutty and offering up a bit of browned milk solids. Pour the browned butter into a glass one-cup measuring bowl to cool slightly.
3) In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the three eggs, the two sugars, the salt, the orange zest and the vanilla paste. Slowly whisk in the browned butter until the mixture is smooth and shiny.
4) Spread your best blueberry jam into the bottom of the cooked shell. Top with the whole berries trying to keep them in a single layer. Finally, pour the prepared custard over the berries.
5) Bake the tart for 30 to 40 minutes until the top is slightly puffed in the middle and the edges are starting to brown.
6) Remove the tart from the oven and let cool completely on a wire rack before removing the rim of the tart pan. Serve plain or topped with a spoonful of vanilla bean, cinnamon or ginger ice cream.
Detail from “Portrait of the Postman”
