Category: Ariège

The Orange Man

Winter has arrived.  How do I know?  Although the nights are cold, the afternoons are still for going walking or tidying up the garden wearing a tee-shirt, beneath a duck-egg blue sky. So until the other day, I thought we were clinging on to autumn.

But on Thursday, the Orange Man arrived.  This is exciting enough news for it to be worth phoning a friend.  Every year, once winter kicks in and the orange harvest is well under way in southern Spain, a huge container lorry arrives in Lavelanet. It parks up at a disused petrol station on the main road into town and becomes an impromptu shop.

The man with the lorry, the Orange Man,  speaks only Spanish, and sells only oranges.  Not singly or by the half-dozen, but in large 10 kilo boxes.  10 kilos, 10 euros.  What a bargain.  These oranges, though sometimes a little knobbly and in irregular sizes, are the juiciest and tastiest you’ll ever eat, and it’s no wonder that whenever you pass, you’ll see someone pulling up their car and opening the boot for a case or two.  Our Spanish friend won’t have to stay long.  In a few days the entire container-load will be sold, he’ll return to Spain …. only to return when he’s loaded up again.

When he departs for the last time at the end of the season, we’ll know for sure that spring has arrived.

PS.  Very topically, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall takes oranges as his subject in today’s cookery column in the Guardian

‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’ *

Autumn colours beginning means it’s harvest time for foragers

I’ve written before about the ‘au cas où’ bag: the carrier you always have with you on a walk, ‘just in case’ something tasty turns up and demands to be taken home and eaten.

Well, at this time of year, it isn’t really a case of ‘au cas où’ .  You’re bound to find something.  A fortnight ago, for instance, Mal and I went on a country stroll from Lieurac to Neylis.  We had with us a rucksack and two large bags, and we came home with just under 5 kilos of walnuts, scavenged from beneath the walnut trees along the path.  A walk through the hamlet of Bourlat just above Laroque produced a tidy haul of chestnuts too.

Yesterday, we Laroque walkers were among the vineyards of Belvèze-du-Razès.  The grapes had all been harvested in the weeks before, but luckily for us, some bunches remained on the endless rows of vines which lined the paths we walked along.  We felt no guilt as we gorged on this fruit all through the morning.  The grapes had either been missed at harvest-time, or hadn’t been sufficiently ripe.  They were unwanted – but not by us.

So many vines: there’ll be unharvested grapes there somewhere.

The walnuts we’re used to in the Ariège are replaced by almonds over in the Aude.  You have to be careful: non-grafted trees produce bitter almonds, not the sweet ones we wanted to find.  But most of us returned with a fine haul to inspect later.  Some of us found field mushrooms too.

Today, the destination of the Thursday walking group was the gently rising forested and pastoral country outside Foix known as la Barguillère.  It’s also known locally as an area richly provided with chestnut trees.  Any wild boar with any sense really ought to arrange to spend the autumn there, snuffling and truffling for the rich pickings.  We walked for 9 km or so, trying to resist the temptation to stop and gather under every tree we saw.  The ground beneath our feet felt nubbly and uneven as we trod our way over thousands of chestnuts, and the trees above threw further fruits down at us, popping and exploding as their prickly casings burst on the downward journey.

As our hike drew to an end, so did our supply of will-power.  We took our bags from our rucksacks and got stuck in.  So plentiful are the chestnuts here that you can be as picky as you like.  Only the very largest and choicest specimens needed to make it through our rigorous quality control.  I was restrained.  I gathered a mere 4 kilos.  Jacqueline and Martine probably each collected 3 times as much.  Some we’ll use, some we’ll give to lucky friends.

Now I’d better settle myself down with a dish of roasted chestnuts at my side, and browse through my collections of recipes to find uses for all this ‘Food for Free’.

I think these chestnuts represent Jacqueline, Martine and Maguy’s harvest.

* Two lines from an English hymn sung at Harvest Festival season: ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’

The tragic and savage history of l’étang d’Izourt

The drive to the start of the walk was dramatic enough.  Forested and craggy, our narrow road out of Auzat switch-backed steeply up the slopes in a seemingly endless series of hairpin bends.

And our walk began, an 1800 foot climb, upwards through forest then out onto the stony, rocky path towards the man-made étang d’Izourt, one of the many reservoirs in the area maintained by EDF to provide power. Once, a helicopter flew over.  Since there are no roads up there,  it was delivering either men or supplies to a team we could see labouring on a more distant slope.

The walk changed for me as I learnt the story of what had happened back in 1939 when the reservoir was being built.  Most of the members of the construction team at that time were economic migrants, Italians from the Veneto, and whilst working there, they lived in huts on site.

The weather conditions had already been atrocious for days when on March 24th 1939, a fierce blizzard struck.  There was no option for the workers but to hole up in their huts.  The storm was so fierce that huts B and C were destroyed from the weight of snow above, and the roof from hut A blew off.  The desperate men sought both to escape and to try to help their work mates, many of whom had died or been gravely injured by the tumbling buildings.  A nearby avalanche brought down the cable car linking the site with the works below.  The only way up was on foot, and rescue attempts were pretty much futile, though bodies and the injured were recovered as management attempted to evacuate the entire area.  On 28th March, a team of army skiers managed to get through and working into the night, brought down the remaining bodies and wounded.  31 men, 29 Italians and 2 French, were buried at the cemetery in Vicdessos on 31st March.  There they remain, as the families in Italy were too poor to manage the expense of repatriating the corpses.  The memorials at the lakeside are still the site of pilgrimage, thanks to the efforts of the ‘Ricordate-Izourt’ Association: locals and Italians who honour the memory of those lost workers.

We ourselves had started our walk in bright sunlight.   Spots of rain began.  Then the wind.  By the time we reached the lake, there were times when the gusts felt almost horizontal, and we struggled to find protection from the rocks to eat our lunch.  The more modern huts now on site have their roofs held on by strong metal cables, and we could understand why.

The sky turned the colour of lead, and we rejected the idea of exploring the lake in favour of hurrying down the way we had come.  We knew we’d be OK, but we also know to treat the mountains seriously and with respect – conditions can change very quickly.  We were fine of course, but that fierce wind on a warm October day gave us the smallest hint of what things could be like if you were trapped there in much nastier conditions.  Even now, the most efficient way of supporting the workers still on site from time to time is to get them and their supplies there by helicopter.  A noisy chopper whirled up and down the mountainside several times as we walked down, our journey cheered by a rainbow linking our mountain with the one next door.  Though we were sorry the weather had chased us home, we were grateful  not to have been exposed to  the dangers the mountains can offer from time to time.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Château de Lordat

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Fourth of October.  The sun’s shining hot, but not too hot, high in an azure sky.  A small group of hikers stands outside a little church and gazes up a steep slope towards the ruins of the Château de Lordat.  And then sets off in the opposite direction.

It’s Anny who’s picked our route, and it’s designed to wind us up the hillside to the castle along chunks of country road, craggy uphill scrambles, dry-leaved woodland just thinking about exchanging green summer leaves for the ochre and russet tints of autumn, and the occasional tiny village – no more than a couple of streets encircling an ancient church.

Most of the time there are views upwards, towards the castle itself, or the cable-wagons serving the talc mines of nearby Luzenac, or across to the more distant mountains covered for the first time this season with bluish-white powdering of snow.  Or down, past thickly forested almost vertical slopes to craggy rust-stained rocky outcrops with occasional hamlets and villages scattered through the countryside. Near villages and farms, we pass walnut trees, and feel obliged to gather the recently ripened and fallen nuts – this is France after all.  We exchange recipe ideas.

Suddenly, we’re there. Lordat.  In high season, the village must be a tourist trap, but now we’re happy to saunter along the sunny empty streets, with their pastel-painted cottages and tubs of geraniums.  A final yomp and we’re at the castle walls.  It’s ruined and closed to the public at the moment, but the views in all directions make the climb worthwhile.

A meandering trek through the woods, trying hard not to kick over the delicately-stemmed autumn crocus, brings us to our lunch spot in Axiat, sitting outside its Romanesque church.  Mal and I are particularly taken by a notice on the door in French, English and Spanish. The English version reads: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen the visitors, we thank you for closing the door by going out’.

Afterwards, more craggy descents, sometimes through woods, at other times with more of those impressive views, along an ancient man-made winding path.  And back to the village we started from.  It’s a wonderful walk.  If you come to stay, make us take you.

From the Pyrenees to the Pennines: a Quiz

That exhibition, ‘From the Pyrenees to the Pennines’, about Yorkshire.  It’s over and I’m not sorry.  I loved working with the children in schools and in Centres de Loisirs, but the whole business of getting the exhibition for the general public up and running was stressful and exhausting.

Still, it’s good to remember why we did it.  We wanted to introduce Yorkshire, particularly North Yorkshire, to local people here.  We wanted to show how much these two areas have in common.

Both North Yorkshire and the Ariège are largely rural areas, where sheep have an important part to play.  In no small part, they contributed to the development of the textile industry.  Once the most significant part of the economy in the communities where the industry once thrived, now textiles have largely left Europe for the Far East.  Formerly prosperous areas such as Bradford and Lavelanet are now struggling to find a new role.  At the same time, immigrant textile workers have changed the face of these communities for ever: Spaniards in southern France, those from the Indian sub-continent in northern England.

Mining is similarly in decline. Coalmining in the north of England is the most obvious casualty, but industrial archaeologists in Yorkshire and the Ariège can point out many signs of a mining past – in disused and decaying workings of lead, alum, potash and talc.  Jet, the black gemstone popular in the 19th century was worked here too, and a local historian here in the Ariège has uncovered correspondence between manufacturers here and in Whitby.

Both areas owe much of their character to limestone scenery.  That’s why I’m going to give you a little quiz.  Have a look at these photos.  Where were they taken do you think?  Yorkshire?  Or the Ariège?  It’s not always easy….

1. Limestone rocks.  But where?

2. And this?

3. Does this sheep baa in English or French?

4. And these?

5. Where’s this?

6. And this?

7. More scenery.

9. And a typical market in, er….

10. And a bridge.

11. And a ruined house

12. Last one

13. Oh, an afterthought

Answers

1. Rocks near Marc, Ariège

2. Goredale Scar, Yorkshire

3. Herdwick sheep

4. Tarasconnaise sheep in Troye d’Ariège

5. Axat, Ariège

6. Bridge at Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire

7. Grassington

8. Cap de Carmil, Ariège

9. Otley Market

10. Bridge at Grassington

11. Le Taulat

12. Roquefixade

13. A Yorkshire terrier.   Often seen here in the Ariège.  I wonder how many owners know these little dogs were originally bred in the 19th century in Yorkshire to catch rats in the textile mills?

England comes to Laroque d’Olmes

Yorkshire Dales: as interpreted by the children at the Centre de Loisirs, Laroque.

Yesterday afternoon was the best fun.  20 odd-children (that’s ‘about 20 children’, not ‘Twenty Odd Children’) here in Laroque spent the day in England, courtesy of  ‘Découverte Terres Lointaines’,  without setting foot outside town.

These children spend their Wednesdays, a no-school day, at the Centre de Loisirs.  Their parents are probably out at work, and here is somewhere they can spend the day having purposeful fun, without its costing their parents too much.

We turned up with bag full of groceries, and spent half the morning baking biscuits, basic English everyday crunchy biscuits.  It was great to see them, girls and boys alike carefully measuring out flour, sugar, butter and so on, stirring, mixing, watching a dough come together from these simple ingredients.

Let the baking begin.

A bag full of cutters and a rolling pin meant that they could transform the mixture into stars and circles, miniature gingerbread-style people, bells and flowers.

Upstairs, another group had been talking about the green moorlands of the Yorkshire Dales, then making a mural of a Daleside landscape, complete with Swaledale sheep, farm gates, and obligatory grey cloud (it’s England after all).

Lunch break.  Afterwards, the children came to see our long-prepared exhibition looking at North Yorkshire, which has so many features in common with the Ariège: mountains (OK, the best Yorkshire can manage is Whernside’s  736 metres.  Ariège’s Pic d’Estats is 3143m); textile and mining industries past their glory days; wide open spaces home only to sheep…. and so on.  They enjoyed an extract from Roald Dahl’s ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine’, and then it was back to the Centre de Loisirs.  Where we produced a long skipping rope with the idea of teaching them a couple of English skipping games…

‘I like coffee, I like tea

I’d like, er, Nadine, to jump with me’.

Getting started with skipping.

They loved it.  Unfortunately they couldn’t skip at all and tripped and fell all over the place, and all the adults mourned that it was a lost art. As in England (Is that so?  Not sure.) children don’t skip any more.

Back into the kitchen, it was time to decorate those biscuits.  They tinted their bowls of icing in lurid shades, and made free with all the sugary decorations we provided.  ‘Glorious Technicolor’ doesn’t begin to do it justice.  Once decorated, they ate the lot, and we sent them off to their parents for the evening crammed full of enough e-numbers to see them through the week.  One lad, as he set off home, was heard to say ‘I’ve had a great day’.  So had we.

Glorious Technicolor biscuits.

Château de Fiches

This weekend, as any fule kno (thank you, Nigel Molesworth.  That’s quite enough from you) are the European Heritage Days, when hosts of historic buildings not normally much open to the public, throw open their doors to curious locals.

So when Léonce proposed going to Château de Fiches, we were keen.  If you come home the back way from Pamiers, past villages with evocative names such as Seigneurix (Surely Asterix and Obelix can’t be far away?) and Parent, you’ll pass its fairly undistinguished drive-way: we’ve passed it dozens of times before, and it’s always been shut.

This gives some idea of the charmingly domestic scale of the operation

Not today.  This weekend, the team were keen to show the place off.  If you want a château complete with crenellated façade and turrets, you’ve come to the wrong place. This 16th century building is strictly domestic, more farmhouse than stately home.  It was built originally for a Toulousain Parliamentarian, and later passed into the hands of a lawyer from Pamiers, Joseph Fauré, whose family own it still.  It has unexpected treasures, most of which I wasn’t allowed to photograph.

Back in the 19th century, someone in the family went plant collecting, some 1600 specimens.  Nobody knows whether it was the plants themselves that were collected whilst travelling, or simply the seeds which were then raised back here in France.  Dried, mounted, thrust in dense piles deep into a cabinet, they’re only recently being catalogued by an English couple, Mavis and John Midgley, excited to use their expertise in this way.

I can show you photos of the kitchen.  Enjoy the mechanical mayonnaise maker, the coffee grinder, the charming and enormous hearth.

Churn round your egg yolks, oil and so on in here, and apparently mayonnaise will emerge
Here’s the coffee grinder
And here’s the hearth

I can share pictures of the library.

The library

What you can’t see is the bestiary.  This is such a shame.  Painted in the 16th century, a series of charming and vibrantly coloured animals enliven the beams of a ceiling on the upper floor.  The artist is unknown to us, just as elephants, camels, monkeys, satyrs and so on were unknown to him.  He got his information third, fourth or fifth hand, and made an efficient if imaginative job of visually describing the 40 or so beasts he illustrates.  On safer ground with rabbits and peacocks, he painted every single beast, known and unknown, with vitality and verve.  Another equally interesting ceiling is currently being revealed.  Part of this are painted more in the manner of blue and white Delft ware.  If you’re round this way, they’re worth a look.

It’s only a shame that all the various treasures of the Heritage Weekend are usually available For One Weekend Only.  So much to see, so little time.

Gone but not forgotten – our local charcuterie.

The sign above the shop’s no longer lit up.
Sausage ‘maison’
Marcel’s been busy.
…and busier still…
…and even busier.
Black pudding and hams.
Other good things on sale.
Mercedes at work.
Last day at work.

Today is the first day of the rest of Marcel and Mercedes Resseguier’s lives.  Today (barring the odd holiday) is the first Tuesday for 28 years on which they haven’t opened their charcuterie (like most small-town shops, they didn’t open on a Monday).  At 60, Marcel’s retiring.

Their shop is a bit of an institution hereabouts.  Go to an event where food is served and discover that the plates of cold meats, pâtés and cured sausage are from the Resseguiers’ shop, and you’ll be piling your plate high with all that’s on offer.  Go to buy some sausages for an easy lunch, and you’ll join a queue of customers chatting away animatedly as they patiently wait their turn.  What will we do without them? They’re not trying to sell it on – no point.

Once upon a time, theirs was a busy shopping street.  Nowadays, it’s (oops, was) the only shop left.  Still 2 butchers remain in town here however.  Nearby Lavelanet, a town that’s more than twice as big as ours has only one, Marrotte.

When he was 14 ½, Marcel went to Limoux, apprenticed to a butcher’s where he learnt all he needed to learn about the butchery business.  And then he came back to the Ariège to work at the above mentioned Marotte’s. This shop sells not only fresh meat, but charcuterie too: in other words fresh sausage, cured sausage, hams both dried and cooked, and pâtés: mainly, but not exclusively, pork products.  Working here, Marcel realised that, for him, charcuterie was a lot more interesting than presenting fresh meat for sale, and he profited from his time there to learn all he could.

A little later, after his short spell in a general stores with a meat-counter in nearby Villeneuve d’Olmes, the charcuterie here in Laroque came up for sale.  A certain Monsieur Vié owned it.  His son Michel is a pillar of our town, involved in everything from singing in the local choir to supporting our local town-twinning operation.  He didn’t want to go into his father’s business, but like so many people round and about, he’s learnt many of the skills, and will often knock up some cured sausages or a bowl or two of pâté for a family celebration.

Well, Marcel, with his father’s help, bought the shop, together with the good-will and customer-base that came with it. The rest is history.  The charcuterie is hard to find, being tucked away in a side-street where it’s almost impossible to park.  But that didn’t stop it being a shopping destination.  Once there, apart from all the expected meats and sausages, you could buy his tins of jarret de porc or jars of pâté de foie, as well as wine or bottled vegetables.  His was a depot de pain too.  So he’ll be missed, as will Mercedes, his wife, who served the customers and balanced the books.  Happy retirement, Marcel.  Enjoy your new career Mercedes (that’s another story) …. and see you on the next Sunday walk with Laroque’s walking group.

In search of a druid – or a trout

Mont d’Olmes: local playground for skiers.  You wouldn’t travel any great distance to spend a holiday here, but for locals, it’s the ideal winter sports spot.  It’s a wonderful area for walkers too.  We’ve only just begun to discover the wealth of footpaths, mainly across truly ‘sauvage’ slopes, with views downwards to Montségur, Roquefixade, and northwards almost, it seems, as far as Toulouse.

It’s alright waxing lyrical though.  For many people living in the area many years past, and until the early years of the 20th century, these slopes were the places where they came for long hours each day, working both on the surface and by crawling through narrow airless tunnels, mining talc.

Talc?  Yes, that stuff you sprinkle on babies’ bottoms.  That stuff those Olympic gymnasts plunge their hands into before taking to an overhead bar.  That stuff that apparently still has many industrial uses, notably in the ceramics industry and for plastics paints and coatings.  This soft soapstone was found here on Mont d’Olmes and is still mined in nearby Luzenac.  Here though, all that is left are the gashes in the mountainside where the workings once were, and a few ancient trucks once used to transport the material down to civilisation.

Come and take the path we took last Sunday.  We walked in more or less a straight line, up and down hill after hill, as the path became increasingly rocky and impassable.  Our reward was the occasional handful of raspberries or bilberries, then a lunchtime picnic by l’étang des Druides.  No, sorry, l’étang des Truites.  Whatever.  Nobody seems to know which name is correct.  Some say the person making the first map of the area misheard and wrote ‘truite’ – trout – instead of ‘druide’.  We saw no trout.  We definitely saw no druids.  But we had a jolly nice picnic.  And I paddled.  And then ruined a perfectly good day, in which morning chill and mist had given over to hot sunshine, by falling flat against the rocky path, cutting open my face and chipping three teeth.  I hope the druids weren’t lining me up for some kind of sacrifice.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Au cas où ….you find some mirabelles

Mirabelles…there for the taking

I’ve written about the au cas où bag before: that little shopping bag or some such that you tuck into your pocket before any walk, au cas où you find something worth harvesting or talking home.  It was as well we had that bag yesterday.  Walking in the fields above Laroque, we found 2 mirabelle trees, their tiny juicy fruits just turning to golden ripeness.  We harvested what we could, and came home.

Then we remembered the trees we’d seen one previous year on the road between us and Léran.  We went home for another bag and hunted out those mirabelle trees lining the route.

Hundreds of plums, thousands of plums, millions and billions and trillions of plums – to misquote that much loved picture book by Wanda Gagabout rather a lot of cats.  Reader, we picked them – some of them anyway.  We came home.  And this is what we made.  With a few of them, anyway.

Bag not big enough? Find a hat.

Mirabelle and Rosemary Jam

I kg mirabelles

400g high-pectin sugar, or add pectin powder according to pack instructions to granulated sugar.

4 rosemary sprigs, each approx 5 cm long

1/2 vanilla pod.

Directions:

  • Put mirabelles, sugar, rosemary and vanilla pod in a preserving pan and bring slowly to the boil, so the plums have chance to release their juices.
  • Simmer briskly for about 7 minutes.  It’s not necessary to bring it to jam setting temperature as the pectin will do its work, and it’s a fresh flavour you’re aiming for. But the jam won’t keep long outside the fridge.
  • Take from heat and remove rosemary sprigs and vanilla pod.  This is important.  If you leave the herb in, the jam will taste medicinal. The hint of rosemary should remain elusive, and just add that extra Mediterranean je ne sais quoi
  • This is the bad bit.  You could have halved the plums before you started and removed the stones then.  But I think it’s marginally easier to fish them out now.  Only marginally though.  The choice is yours……
  • Add vanilla seeds from the pod and mix.
  • Fill your ready-prepared jars.