While we were in England in May, Léonce wrote and said the local cherry harvest had been and gone. The fruit, thanks to the early heat wave, was wizened, dry, and had peaked far too early. We wrung our hands in displeasure at having missed the offerings from the two mighty cherry trees in our garden, and tried to forget about it.
On Tuesday, when we got back to Laroque, I went to the garden. And there were our trees, branches grazing the ground with the weight of their fruit. I started to pick. Five minutes later, it was raining. Stair rods. I scuttled home with some treasured cherries.
Wednesday morning dawned clear after a rainy night, and straight after breakfast we were up at the garden with buckets, eager to pick all that lovely fruit. Almost every single cherry had turned mouldy overnight. We managed to pick a few, half a bucketful. But back at home, they didn’t stand up to close inspection and we had to discard almost all of them. So that was that.
Now for the good news. In early spring, we bought a peach tree. We planted it. It prospered. It flowered. To give it the best start in life, so the tree would give its energy to putting down roots rather than nourishing its fruits, we removed every single blossom. Or so we thought.
When we went out to see our little tree on our return, this is what we found.
We ought to pick it and throw it away I suppose, but we haven’t the heart. Come and visit us in August, and you might get a bite of our very first home-grown peach
Last November, I joined L’Assocation Découverte Terres Lointaines, and wrote about it here. This month, I’m really involved, up to the neck, because next week, at the library in Lavelenet, we’re taking over, and bringing Algeria to town. More later, then. But for now, have a look at some of our more relaxing moments during our preparations.
Were from England, Brazil, Algeria: but the clothes are all from Algeria
On Friday afternoon, Nadia invited us round and got out a tantalising bundle of her traditional Algerian clothes, many dating from the time of her wedding, for us to try on ahead of next week. Here’s what some of us eventually chose, after we’d struggled in and out of dresses each prettier than the last, elaborately embroidered, beaded and sequinned. Just as well you can’t see us pirouetting around our workaday tee shirts and trousers discarded on the floor.
Before that, we’d been busy baking, selecting recipes to make for some of next week’s sessions. Here’s my favourite, Basbousa. Like most recipes from the area, quantities are expressed in volume rather than weight.
Basbousa
2 cups fine semolina
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
½ cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup water
about 20 blanched split almonds
2 cups caster sugar
1 cup water
Tablespoon of orange flower water or the juice of 1 lemon
Preheat the oven to 180°C, gas mark 4. Grease a rectangular cake tin, about 8” x 12”.
Sieve together the semolina, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Set aside.
Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy. Stir in the eggs with a little semolina to prevent curdling. Mix in ½ cup of water. Stir the sifted semolina in and beat until you have a smooth batter. Pour into the prepared cake tin. Score diagonal lines across the top of the cake creating diamond shapes. Place an almond in each diamond. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the cake is firm and golden.
Meanwhile place the caster sugar in a small saucepan with 1 cup of water. Heat gently until the sugar has dissolved then add the orange flower water or juice of the lemon and bring to the boil. Boil for about 10 minutes or until syrupy.
When the cake is removed from the oven, gently spoon the syrup over it. You may not need all the syrup: stop spooning when the cake has absorbed all it can. Allow to cool in the tin before turning out and serving sliced into diamonds.
When I tested the recipe at home, I had no orange flower water, so used lemon juice. Nadia said it wasn’t traditional…..but she liked it anyway. It’s sweet, simple, and keeps well. Worth having in the cake tin.
Nadia serves mint tea the traditional way, from this elegant pot in small decorated glasses
In the UK, Richard Mabey’s the original, and still the best known proponent of foraging for good things to eat in the countryside. Here in our patch of France, it’s Stéphane Martineau, and we spent yesterday afternoon with him, strolling down the lanes near Roquefort les Cascades, nibbling at petals, leaves and roots.
It was a free afternoon organised by Alptis, who provide us with the health insurance we need to complement the state-provided health service, and we enrolled as soon as the invitation came through the post.
Stéphane encouraged us to look carefully at each plant, at how it’s structured, what it feels like, what the crushed leaves smell like. That afternoon, we found leaves that reminded us of mushroom, garlic, mint, cloves….
We began to understand how welcome the new spring growth must have been to villagers over the centuries. After months and months of bland beans and turnips, the tasty bitterness of black bindweed, eaten raw or lightly cooked like asparagus must have been a real treat. Its other name is l’asperge aux femmes battues – battered wives’ asparagus, because it’s also good at relieving bruising and swelling.
At this time of year, before many of the plants have flowered, and growth is young and fresh, there are so many tasty additions to the salad bowl. Garlic mustard has both leaves and flowers to offer. Hedge woundwort has nettle like leaves and a slight mushroomy odour. Primula gives a pleasantly bitter taste so use it sparingly, and creeping Charlie makes a lively addition to a salad, or an unusual addition to soup or lasagne.
Nettles are of course the kings of country flowers, packed with vitamins, minerals and even proteins. They can be eaten raw (with a thick and tasty dressing) lightly cooked, or included in sauces and stews and baking. Fermented, they make an all-round fertiliser, and gardeners dig them into the ground too, to enrich the soil.
We found plants to cure warts, substitutes for aspirin and for the cloves that we’re supposed to tuck next to a throbbing tooth. We even learnt that horsetail, just as it first thrusts above the ground, makes a good mineral-tasting asparagus substitute. Failing that, once it’s matured, a big bunch tied together is a good pan scourer.
Just one plant was completely new to me: purple toothwort. It’s a mauve parasitic plant, looking rather like a small clutch of rhodedendrons in bud, and modestly hidden under grasses at the foot of trees.
I’ve got pages of notes about plants I plan to look out for and try: using only a few specimens from each patch, of course, and just taking a few of the very youngest leaves, as instructed.
Just before we all headed off home, we shared a foraged snack which Stéphane had prepared earlier. Nettle blinis, Douglas fir cordial, various jams and jellies. Good stuff, this food for free.
He’s here now. Not in person of course. But his books, nearly all of them, arrived with the removal van that brought much of our stuff over from England.
I love Nigel Slater. As a cook, I mean. He takes such pleasure in all the messier aspects of making and eating food, as I do. Greasy fingers from extracting those last little bits of chicken flesh from an already picked-clean carcass. Sticky hands from rhythmically kneading and transforming dough from a tacky, gluey lump into barrel-shaped silken responsive mass. Spoons and fingers to lick after a cake and biscuit-making session. Weirdly, I even enjoy, if it’s not TOO bad, the burning eyes I get when I absent-mindedly rub them after I’ve been chopping chillies.
During this kind of cooking session, Malcolm and I look at each other with mutual incomprehension. ‘Want to lick the bowl?’ I ask. ‘Ergh, no. Shall I get you some rubber gloves so you can keep your hands clean?’ He thinks I’m facing up with commendable fortitude to jobs on a par with sorting out a couple of messy toddlers after a glue-and-paint session. I think he’s missing out.
In the end though, it’s Nigel’s recipes I come back to. He rarely worries about precise quantities, tasting and adjusting as he goes till the dish seems right. But he does celebrate ingredients in their season. Here’s what I made the other evening from the remnants of one of Is@’s chickens, and a bag full of the spinach included in our panier of vegetables: I found the recipe in Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch, Volume 1
Chicken Spinach and Pasta Pie.
Nigel reckons it serves 4. I reckon 6 wouldn’t go hungry if they sat down to this lot.
Cook the spaghetti in deep, generously salted boiling water. Drain and set aside. (A little olive oil will stop it sticking together.) Set the oven at 180C/gas 4.
Cut the mushrooms into quarters. Warm the oil and butter in a deep pan and add the mushrooms, letting them colour nicely here and there. Add the cooked chicken meat and then pour in the wine.
Bring to the boil, scraping away at the sticky remains at the bottom of the pan: they will add much flavour to the sauce.
Pour the cream into the pan, bring back to the boil and turn off the heat. Wash the spinach and put it, still wet from rinsing, into a pan with a tight-fitting lid. Let the spinach cook for a minute or 2 in its own steam, then drain it, squeeze it to remove excess water and chop it roughly.
Fold the cooked spaghetti, mushroom and chicken sauce and spinach together then stir in two-thirds of the grated parmesan and tip into a large baking dish. Scatter the remaining cheese on top and bake for 35 minutes until the top is crisp and golden.
If you live within the long oval that has Mirepoix at the top, and Tarascon at the bottom, you might be lucky enough to get your fruit and veg. from Le P’tit Marché d’Is@ – Isabelle’s Little Market.
This isn’t like that. Her fruit and vegetables are organic or Agriculture Raisonnée, (limited use of drugs, fertilisers etc. permitted, within strict guidelines) all locally sourced: this week’s panier included potatoes, carrots, radish, celeriac, cabbage, spinach, chicory, lettuce, kiwi fruit, oranges and apples, all organic, and squeaky fresh. Last week’s, apart from the basics of potatoes, carrots and apples, was quite different.
Sorting out the shopping
Besides this, she’ll sell individual quantities of various fruit and veg , and she also has other lines. Poultry, pork, dairy products including various Ariégeois cheeses and yoghourts, all from farms no more than a few miles away. Groceries include wonderful organic flour from a mill near here, pasta, beers, and from slightly farther afield in the Pyrénées Orientales, oils, dried fruits, nuts,tapenades etc.
Just arrived and ready to deliver
It’s very simple: you order by Monday midday for delivery later in the week.
Now I really look forward to 11 o’clock on Thursday mornings when her little white van swings into the parking space outside our house, and she cheerily hands over her bulging panier of shopping for us to unpack and plan the menus for the next few days (she even has a recipe idea or two tucked in the bottom of the basket). It even beats market shopping. AND it’s made me feel not quite so unhappy about deciding not to grow my own vegetables this year.
Enfin! We are at last a real proper French household. Pop round to us for a mid morning break these days (as Henri often does) and you’ll get coffee (freshly brewed in a cafetière of course. Small cups. No milk offered) and the sugar on the side will no longer be in a dinky English sugar bowl or – even worse – bag.
Certainly not. We have invested, as any French householder should, in a pretty box specially designed to hold the rectangular cardboard boxes of sugar lumps on sale in any old grocer’s or supermarket. C’est normale.
Forget politics. Here in the UK, the news story that really means something to any right-thinking English man and woman is that marmalade sales are falling. The reason though, according to most commentators, is that many of us prefer to make our own. I do.
Over the last few years, I’ve been so glad to have come across Jane Grigson’s recipe, which gets me out of the whole business of hacking mounds of tough raw orange peel into marmalade sized chunks. It delivers a tasty sweet and bitter marmalade which beats anything you’ll meet on the grocer’s shelf
Our house, now a temple to magnolia paint and packing cases, is currently innocent of recipe books. Somehow I contrived to find my preserving pan the other day, and make her marmalade, or something jolly like it, from memory. Impressive, huh?
I kg. seville oranges (about 10 fruits)
1 lemon
3.4 litres water
2 kg. granulated sugar, or half granulated, half light muscovado.
Scrub the seville oranges and the lemon, and place in a large pan with the water. Bring to the boil and simmer till the fruit is soft – maybe an hour or so. Allow to cool. Cut the oranges in half, scoop out the flesh and pips and reserve in a large muslin square. Chop the skin as thick or as thin as you chose – it’s so easy now the skin is soft.
Tie the muslin with its contents into a bag, and put it, with the orange peel, remaining water (about a third will have evaporated) and sugar, into a preserving pan. Bring the mixture slowly to the boil, so that the sugar dissolves, then cook rapidly till setting point is reached (I can’t manage without my jam thermometer, but that’s pathetic. Most people seem happy enough to test for the setting point by putting a spoonful of marmalade onto a cold saucer, and seeing if it crinkles as you push your finger through the cooled mixture).
Allow the mixture to sit for about 15 minutes before pouring into sterilised jam jars. Makes 6-7 jars
No stay in England is complete without a visit to a Greasy Spoon. Hot, crowded, cheerful, and full of burly men stolidly chewing their way through mountainous piles of chips, bacon and sausage, the average transport caff is not the place for fine dining. But the good ones are worth a visit, and today, we visited the Bridge Cafe at Apperley Bridge, on the way over to Bolton to see the boys.
It was only quarter to twelve, but we needed an early break after a hard morning shifting furniture, skidding up and down our impossibly icy street, lugging huge bags of books and discarded household items to the charity shop, visiting the Letting Agent, scouring Bradford’s Asian shops for essential supplies of Indian spices that are hard to get in France. After that, what better than a hot plate of comfort food washed down with a huge mug of tea?
Yes, quarter to twelve. But the place was already crowded with joiners, truckers, shoppers, pensioners. Most were having the all-day breakfast.
This is what you get if you order the small one: £3.80
Some had gone for the Full Breakfast: 2 slices bacon, 2 sausages, 2 eggs, spam, black pudding, mushrooms, hash browns, beans, tomatoes, fried bread, toast and tea or coffee.
Nope, not a chance that we could cope with that: poached eggs on toast was more like it.
A quick flick through the daily papers provided – tabloids of course, broadsheets need not apply – a quick chat to the owners ( Italian? Lithuanian? We couldn’t agree), and we were off, sustained for an afternoon of meeting 5 year old twins as they came out of school, to enjoy the rest of their action-packed day
Nobody could call our nearest town, Lavelanet, a hub of multi-culturalism. But neither is it an Ariegeois ghetto. Of course, as in most French towns, there’s a big Maghrébin presence: inhabitants of the former French colonies of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. There are significant numbers of people of Spanish origin: their families probably came over in the Spanish Civil War. Dunno how so many Portuguese got here, but in addition there are Swiss, Belgians, Roumanians, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Argentinians, Australians, Germans, Dutch…..ooh, and a few English of course.
Recently, I got to know two local women, Sylvia and Noëlle. Some time ago they, together with another friend Nadia, had come up with the idea of bringing together women from some of these countries to share their cultural heritage, particularly through the medium of cooking. The idea got bigger. Over the last 18 months or so, they’ve developed themselves as an official voluntary group, ‘Association “Découverte Terres Lointaines”‘. They and their ‘benevoles’ (volunteers) have animated cookery workshops in schools, old people’s homes, youth clubs, centres for people with various disabilities. They’ve raised money for these activities by selling foods from all over the world, which they’ve prepared, at local festivals. But why stop at recipes? We all have a culture to share – children’s stories to tell, songs to sing, our daily lives ‘back home’ to compare, and all this too is included in the mix. Recently, I’ve joined in some of their activities.
It’s got a bit more formalized now. There’s a bit of a special focus now on a particular country in any one year. This year it was Quebec (OK, it’s a province, not a country. But it DOES have a very distinctive voice within Canada), and next year it’ll be Algeria.
Nadia makes the dough for her Algerian sweetmeats
Last week was a first though. We were invited to provide an International Buffet at a multi-services training day being laid on by the Mairie. At various points in the days leading up to it, we got together in the kitchen of the Family Centre (CAF), and helped each other cook.
Then Sylvia winds the dough strips into little 'birds nests'....
Nadia showed us how to prepare Algerian grivvech: thinly rolled dough cut into strips and wound into jumbled little nests before being deep fried and doused in honey and sesame seeds. There were Quebecois dishes, guacamole topped toasts, and treats from around the world.
...the deep fried, sticky, delicious result.
Best of all was the unlikely sounding tomato and banana soup from Brazil. Do try it: recipe below.
What could I contribute as an English finger-food? I thought long about this, and came up with Scotch eggs (thanks, Kalba, again). You need to know that here in France, sticky tape, as in England, is known by a trade name. Not ‘Sellotape’, but ‘Scotch’. So Sylvia’s eyes darkened in puzzlement when I suggested these Scotch eggs. ‘Sellotape eggs? What on earth….?’
And what fun it all was. I can and do open recipe books to try out dishes from any and every continent. But it’s not half so exciting as working with women from Algeria, Brazil, Roumania, wherever, as they talk you through the techniques they’ve known for years and years, and stand over you and make you practice and redo things till you jolly well get it right.
I'm NEVER deep-frying 30 Scotch eggs again
Anyway, here are my photos of the preparations for a successful lunch. We could have taken any number of repeat bookings, but for the time being, the organisation will maintain its ‘benevole’ status, and not venture into the hard realities of developing a business.
Brazilian Tomato and banana soup
Soup just cooked and ready to go
Ingredients
I onion
I tbspn rapeseed oil
Large bottle of passata
5 ripe bananas
1.5 l. bouillon
Small carton cream
3 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. cayenne
Gently cook the onion in the oil. Meanwhile, remove the black central thread which you may never previously have noticed and any seeds from within the peeled bananas, and mash thoroughly. Add the passata to the onion, together with the spices and cook gently . Add the mashed banana and continue cooking. Add cream, reheat gently, and serve
A friend brought us some mushrooms yesterday. I’m not going to tell you which friend. And I shan’t tell you where he found them either. He was ranging about in the woods, snaffling mushrooms. If the forest ranger or a landowner had caught him because he’d strayed onto private land, they could have fined him. 150 Euros. And the friend who was with him, another 150 euros. It’s a lot to pay for half a pound of mushrooms, but everyone does it.
Nobody however, wants to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, and most people, like our friend, pick carefully and respectfully so that mushrooms will still be growing there tomorrow, and the next day, and for as many years as there are people wanting to eat them.
The ones he brought us are lactaire delicieux – saffron milk caps. I know they exist in England, because Googling produces a score of recipes from the UK, but I’ve never seen them there.
In fact they’re native to this part of the world, both in France and Spain, and live in the acidic soil under Mediterranean pine trees. They’re yellowy orange, and exude orangey milk when broken or cooked. Roughly handled, they develop a scary green stain. But that doesn’t mean they’re poisonous. Anything but.
Here’s what he suggested we do with them.
You’ll need at least 2 or 3 large ones each. They’re often small though, so you may need more. Clean them by brushing them gently and lay them cap side down in a shallow buttered oven dish. Cover generously with knobs of butter and Roquefort cheese – 4 parts cheese to one part butter. Grill till the cheese is melted and the mushrooms cooked. Serve with lots of crusty bread to mop up the juices, and a green salad.
If he brings any more, or if we’re lucky enough to find some ourselves, I’ll be Googling again, because there are any number of simple ideas, just waiting to be tried and enjoyed.
On Tuesday, when we got back to Laroque, I went to the garden. And there were our trees, branches grazing the ground with the weight of their fruit. I started to pick. Five minutes later, it was raining. Stair rods. I scuttled home with some treasured cherries.
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