Category: Food & Cooking

‘Brittany is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There’

…as LP Hartley nearly said.

When we first understood that Laroque is twinned with Melgven in Brittany, we were nonplussed.  Surely twinning arrangements are with England, Germany, Spain – or anywhere abroad.  What’s the point in twinning with a town in your own country?

Well, quite a lot as it turns out.  As part of the twinning arrangements, citizens from Melgven come for a long weekend here in Laroque , while Laroquais have the chance of a few days’ stay there in May.  This year, we signed up for the 10 hour mini-bus trip to Finistère

Straight away, we began to see the differences.  As we arrived, we were welcomed to enjoy poking round their fundraising ‘Troc et puces’ fair in the Sports hall.  The Bretons are a Celtic race, and it shows in their physical appearance.  Meanwhile, down here, there’s a long tradition of Spanish immigration, most recently in the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War, so many locals here are olive-skinned and not very tall.  A tannoyed announcement for M. Garcia and M. Sanchez to report to the desk in a public hall somewhere near here would have nearly half the room scurrying to reception.

And then there’s the food.  Brittany, like Britain, favours butter, and unlike the rest of France, the salted variety.  Out to a meal on Saturday, the lunchtime bread came with pats of butter, something that never happens down south.  In the Ariège, cooking’s done in duck fat, and more recently, olive oil.   No part of  Finistère is very far from the sea, so fish and seafood are an important part of the diet.  Down here, duck in all forms is king.  But pork, lamb, game, beef are all welcome on the dinner plate. If it moves, eat it.

When we looked round a market in Concarneau on Saturday, we were struck that there was little charcuterie or cheese on sale, and what there was came from elsewhere.  It seems as if every other stall in our local Ariègois markets is one selling cheese and charcuterie, much of it from just a few miles away.

Brittany – cider and beer.  Southern France – wine.  As part of our welcome apéro, we were served kir made with cassis and cider.  After sipping it suspiciously, we accepted refills with enthusiasm.

So…what were the highlights?

The welcome. Of course.  Some Laroquais have been going on these exchanges for several years, and the warmth of the relationships forged is clear to see.

A change of scene: the countryside. Our host, Albert, took us on several walks, and we were struck with how very British this part of Brittany looks: softly rolling hillsides, woodland and meadows.  We traded orchid spotting in the Ariège for enjoying the swathes of bluebell glades in the woods.

A change of scene: the town.  We exchanged the shallow-roofed, unpainted or pastel coloured houses of the south for the tall white narrow pitched roofs of Brittany.  Down here, we’re used to our towns and villages being shabby.  Brittany’s are clean, sparklingly so, with flower boxes, neat gardens, and a general air of pride in the community.  And then there are the churches.  No clochers-murs in Brittany, but rather complicated steeples instead.

The seaside. Concarneau was at its sparkling best, with breezes tugging at the flags, clouds pluming across the sky, an early pre-season freshness to the narrow streets of the historic quarter.  Their fishing museum there shows all too graphically just how very tough the life of the fisherman was – and is. But it’s a picturesque sight for the tourist

Sightseeing: Our first treat was to visit Locronan, a beautifully preserved granite built 16th & 17th century village, with a mighty central church, and a small chapel at the end of a charming walk.

Next was Trévarez, a chateau that might look Gothic, but is in fact a 19th and 20th century construction.  Its brickwork gives it the name “château rose”.  We spent more time in the gardens though.  Apart from a formal area near the house itself, the garden is informal in the style we’re so used to from English stately homes, and glorious at the moment with azaleas and rhododendrons

Celtic music: Friday night was concert night: the chance to listen to an hour or two of traditional Breton music.  Malcolm and I particularly enjoyed hearing those favourite Welsh hymns – Land of my Fathers, Cwm Rhondda in Breton– they sounded very different, but just as good

Story telling: Such a treat.  Michel Sevellec enchants audiences in Finistère and beyond with his tales drawn from many traditions.  On Saturday, as part of a local festival, we joined local children to hear his interpretation of Native American and other stories.  Can’t wait for him to come to Laroque in a fortnight!

Crêpes:Everyone knows they make crêpes in Brittany.  Lots of us have watched them being turned out on those special round hotplates.  I always assumed it was easy-peasy.  Until we went to eat crêpes at Albert’s mum’s house and she let me have a go.  First, carefully pour the batter with your left hand while equally carefully drawing the batter round the plate with a special wooden spatula – not too fast & not too slow, not too thin & not too thick.

Expert at work

Then flip the delicate creation, so thin you could read a newspaper through it, over onto its other side to finish cooking. It was lucky there were hungry dogs to eat all my cast-offs.  Lucky for us too perhaps: we’d still be eating them now.  Malcolm and I thought 6 crêpes each ought to have been enough for anybody.  Our hostess disagreed.

So….we discovered in Brittany an area very different from our own in languages, customs and appearance, and had a chance to be more than simply tourists.  We now have new friends in  Melgven but also in Laroque as a direct result of this weekend.  A good experience.

Pont Aven: I didn’t even mention this lovely little town, did I?

Asparagus Three, the Blogspot

Back in the UK, I’ve noticed that in the media, topics, like buses, come in threes.  For instance, I’d flick through an article in the second section of the Guardian: maybe about female circumcision, education-other-than-at-school, or some other equally right-on Guardian topic.  Two or three days later, listening to say Women’s Hour on Radio 4, they’d be discussing exactly the same subject, with exactly the same slant.  Then the following week, maybe on Channel 4, it would appear yet again.

Recipe from Kalba's blog. Recommended.

And so it has been in the world of blogging.  On April 24th, Kalba’s blog dropped into my in-box. I complained immediately. It was about asparagus, and I could have written it myself.  Not all of it.  I’ve never run a restaurant, and I’ve never lived in Norfolk.  But like her, I do like green asparagus, the thinner the better:  I don’t like the blanched, thick white spears  favoured by the French and throughout most of mainland Europe.

Then on the 30th April, Bloggerboy, the writer of my other favourite blog, Welcome Visitor, pitched in with an account of the German love of asparagus. He even convinced me to have another go with the white stuff.

An asparagus stall at Mirepoix

So now it’s my turn to write an asparagus blog.  In Mirepoix market yesterday morning there were quite a few asparagus stalls, and I picked the one where I could buy thin and thick green spears, and white too.  ‘I’m not too keen on the white spears’, I confided to the stall holder, ‘but I’m sure I must be wrong when you all seem to like them so.  How do you like to cook them?’.  If I’d expected to have my hand wrung in gratitude at my acknowledgement of his expertise: if I’d expected him to call over his wife to share her culinary tips, I would have been disappointed.  What I got was a Gallic shrug.  He was mystified by the stupidity of my question.  ‘Well, you could use them in tarts, or omelettes.  Whatever you like really’.  I realised our conversation was at an end.

Asparagus & strawberry tart

Luckily, there are recipe books, and there are other blogs.  I’ve just tried a suggestion from another blog I enjoy, ‘Chocolate and Zucchini’, which is available in English and French.  Asparagus and strawberry tart. A very odd idea indeed, but it works.  In fact it was memorably good.

This is what we ate yesterday evening, from Denis Cotter’s wonderful vegetarian book, ‘Paradiso seasons’.

Gratin of Asparagus, Roasted Tomatoes and Gabriel Cheese with Chive and Mustard Cream.

Ingredients – for 2

4 -5 large tomatoes

Salt and pepper, to season

Drizzle of olive oil.

40g. fine breadcrumbs

40 g. Gabriel cheese, finely grated.  I can’t get this, unsurprisingly, and maybe you can’t either.  Settle for a hard, densely textured cheese.

1 sprig thyme

I tablespoon butter, melted

30 ml. vegetable stock

30 ml. white wine

150 ml. cream

Small bunch of chives, chopped

½ tsp. hot mustard

16 asparagus spears

Heat oven to 190 degrees.  Cut tomatoes into 3-4 thick slices each.  Place on oven trays lined with baking parchment, season and drizzle with olive oil.  Roast until lightly browned and semi-dried – you may need to turn them once.

Mix the breadcrumbs with the thyme, the butter, and most of the cheese.  Season.

Boil the stock and the wine until reduced by half.  Add the cream and mustard, bring it back to the boil and simmer for 2 – 3 minutes until pouring consistency.

During this time, briefly cook the asparagus.

Heat a grill.  On each plate, place 6 slices of tomato, lined up 3 x 2, and cover with 5 asparagus spears. Place a single line of tomatoes on top, then 3 more asparagus spears on top.  Spoon a little mustard cream over the top, then finish with a generous sprinkling of the crumble. Cook under a hot grill for 2 – 3 minutes until the cream is bubbling, and the top is crisp and brown.  Put remaining cream back on the stove, whisk in the rest of the cheese and chives, and pour round the finished gratins.

Just enough for a second helping?

Alternatively (and this is more my style), arrange the ingredients in an oven dish instead of individual plates, and bake for 10 minutes until the cream is bubbling  and the top is crisped and brown.

This too is a really tasty simple dish, well worth adding to the regular asparagus repertoire.

Um, have you noticed, I still haven’t got round to thinking about those wretched white spears?

Nothing to do with asparagus. Our garden, south of France, 4th May 2010

Omelette de Pâques

Come to the Ariège on Easter Monday, and you won’t be too far from a community omelette. Communes and clubs all over the department seek out their biggest frying pan, get hold of dozens of eggs, sugar and rum, to make this sweet confection to round off, with any luck, the first barbecue of the season. Why? Nobody in our walking group could tell me, and Google wasn’t much help, but it does seem to be an ancient tradition dating back to….ooh, 1973 at least.

Anyway, the Rando del’Aubo have made this an annual event for some years now. For the last couple, it’s been rainy and cold. Not this year though. Down at the bottom of the page, you’ll find a few pictures of our walk between La Pène, an Audois hamlet on a delightful small lake, and Monthaut, which is a hill….higher up. It was a great way to work up an appetite.

Because the weather was warm, sunny and spring-like, we relaxed at the lakeside after our walk, chatting and enjoying those woodsmokey smells of a barbecue coming to life. Apéros first: Muscat, suze, pernod, whisky…all the usual French tipples, with nibbles to stem our hunger. Then grilled pork, grilled Toulouse sausage, bread (and wine of course), Coulommiers cheese, vanilla or chocolate pudding. And then we still had to find room for the all-important omelette.

Since the beginning of time, it’s been Marie-Therèse’s ‘job’ (good French word, that) to make the omelette, and of course it all ended in noisy recriminations because there were too many cooks all muscling in, breaking eggs, beating eggs, heating the pan, greasing the pan, measuring the rum. Half the raw egg mixture tipped out onto the grass, and Etienne and Danielle dashed off to every farm they could find to buy another….. 4 dozen.

Finally, it was done. Really, this omelette is scrambled egg with lots of sugar chucked in at the end, and flambéed with rum. Once a year is quite enough.

It wasn’t the end of the party though. Oh no. We couldn’t go before downing glasses of Blanquette de Limoux, an Alpine eau-de-vie, then cups of coffee (with madeleines, in case we were still hungry). And as a final touch, Easter eggs.

We came away suntanned and rather full, at the end of an Easter Monday that was one of the first really hot and sunny days of the year. A taste of things to come?

 

An English Interlude

We were back in England for a while, getting our house ready to market.  Those TV makeover shows have got a lot to answer for.  It’s no longer enough to do a bit of casual dusting.  We de-cluttered surfaces, touched up paint, knocked the garden into shape, and even gave one room a total makeover (‘People are so thick’, advised one chap who’d come round to give us an estimate for removal. ’Just because you’ve got that room organised as a study, they won’t be able to see it as the house second bedroom.  If you can, get rid of all those books, and set it up as a bedroom’). So we did.  We boxed up several hundred books and put them in the garage, then covered the dark green walls in restrained buttermilk paint, and popped in a spare double bed we just happen to have, a chest of drawers, a bedside light or two.  Add an artificial orchid from Habitat, et….voilà…one genuine bedroom makeover.  And then we had to live in, and keep up with, all the unaccustomed tidiness.  We hated it.

But we did love being in England.  At least I did.  Here are my 13 reasons for happiness.  Definitely NOT in rank order

  1. Harrogate in crocus and daffodil season must be one of the loveliest urban sights in Europe.  The Stray, that splendid open parkland which girdles the southern part of the town, was all but submerged in a sea of purple white and orange crocus, gradually opening to reveal saffron coloured stamens as the sun teased the flower petals apart towards midday.  The crocus fade away to be replaced by an equally extensive display of daffodils. They were only just reaching their best as we left town, but we did at least see them.
  2. Radio 4. I had it on constantly. From Our Own Correspondent, Paul Merton on Just a Minute, Daniel Corbett’s animated and informative weather forecasts, Gardeners’ Question Time….. all to help the day go by as we scrubbed and polished
  3. Spending time with those fantastic twin boys, the grandchildren, as they discovered the new adventure playground in Harrogate’s Valley Gardens.
  4. Nidderdale LETS. What a great bunch of friends.  We’d organised a Task Force of willing members to tackle the overgrown jungle that was our garden. Naturally it rained on the day.  So everyone turned to in the house.  They scrubbed paintwork, wrapped ornaments, painted the above-mentioned bedroom, hoovered…And we all had fun, and lunch together.  How do people manage without LETS, or SEL as it’s called in France?
  5. Friends. We had little enough time to socialise, but those hours spent sharing time at our house, in Ripon, in Huby, and in various spots in and around Harrogate were all very special
  6. Charity shops. Whenever I’m in England, I spend time combing through the stock of books in all our local charity shops. With everything from the latest Man Booker winner to little-heard-of classics all going for anything from 30p. to a pound, why wouldn’t I want to stock up?  And this time, we off-loaded quite a few things too
  7. Freecycle. The amount of stuff that Harrogate Freecycle keeps out of landfill must be quite phenomenal these days.  And its members seem to be amongst the nicest people in town.  So we were glad to pass on some stuff to various happy recipients.
  8. Pontefract cakes. Nothing else quite hits the spot.  Oh, except perhaps luxury-end crunchy hand-cooked crisps from Marks and Spencer or Waitrose.  Chilli flavour.
  9. Power walking in the Valley Gardens, 8.30 a.m. Sunday morning, with Angela and Chris.  Best start to the week.  Not sure we really ought to call it power walking any longer though.  Power chatting maybe.
  10. Hot cross buns. When I was younger, Good Friday was the day of the year when we ate hot cross buns.  Maybe for a day or two after as well, but no more than that.  Freshly toasted and dripping with butter, the sugary cinnammon smells wafting through the kitchen, they were one of the food highlights of the year.  Now they’re available all the time, they don’t seem half so special.  But during this last English fortnight, Good Friday or no Good Friday, Malcolm and I made sure we got quite a few hot cross buns under our belts.
  11. Indian take-away. After hard days spent painting and cleaning, few things are more reviving than a good Indian take-away.  Hot, pungent, spicey, sour, the vivid flavours cheered us up and brightened our mood.  The French don’t know what they’re missing!
  12. Guardian and Observer. I know I could read Polly Toynbee, Nigel Slater et al on line.  But it’s really not the same, is it?
  13. Talking in English. The sheer relief of being able to chat, chunter, chew the fat, confide, discuss, digress, argue, amplify, explain, entertain, without pausing to consider whether I’ve chosen the right gender, the right word, the right ending.  Yes, perhaps this really is so precious it really needs to go right up to the top of the list at number 1.

The Broccoli Blog

There are two things I especially love about early spring.  Daffodils.  Purple sprouting broccoli.  The French don’t really do either.

Well, that’s not fair.  In the woods near here, in a few weeks, there’ll be swathes of delicate, rather pale and lovely daffodils blooming.  At weekends, people will go and pick enormous basketsful of them.  They’ll take them home and stick the flowers in vases, where they’ll last only a day or two before wilting in the indoor heat.  But the civic displays which for me are one of the glories of the UK simply hardly exist here.  No dual carriageways are planted with unreasonable quantities of brilliant yellow daffs announcing to every passing motorist ‘Spring is here!’  There are no newspaper headlines ‘Daffodils on the Stray’, featuring a couple of four year olds gambolling among the flowers.  No florists or supermarkets here have buckets of blooms ‘3 bunches for £1’.  I probably won’t buy any here if I can find them, as they’ll already be open and the joy of watching them unfurl won’t be an option.

Purple sprouting broccoli’s even more unknown.  I haven’t even found an exact translation.  Like other English here, if I want to eat it, I have to grow it myself, with seed brought over from England. For 9 months of the year, the large ungainly plants occupy more than their fair share of the vegetable plot, and really, half the time I wonder whether it’s worth it.  Well,  it is.  Today, I picked the very first handful of tightly closed purple heads, enclosed in a collar of dark frilly leaves.  And now I know that there’ll be enough and to spare for several weeks to come.

Such a special vegetable deserves to be more than a bit part, one of two veg. playing second fiddle to a plate of meat. This is the meal we cooked this evening, thanks to Nigel Slater and his newest book ‘Tender’ (Read it, even if you don’t cook much.  It’s as good as a bedtime story, though it WILL make you greedily hungry)

Pasta with Sprouting Broccoli & Cream

250g. sprouting broccoli

250 g. orechiette or fusilli

30g. butter

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

4 chopped anchovy fillets

250 g. crème fraîche

170 g. crumbled gorgonzola (well, we used Roquefort – you would round here)

Put 2 pans of boiling salted water on the stove.  Drop the pasta into one, and the trimmed broccoli into the other.  As soon as the broccoli’s tender – 3 or 4 minutes- drain it, wipe the pan, and return it to the heat with the butter, garlic and anchovies.  Let them cook slowly for a minute or two before adding the crème fraîche and cheese.  Bring to the boil and turn down the heat.  Add the broccoli, season with black pepper, and then add the drained pasta.

Cheap, quick, delicious, and a real celebration of early spring

Atout Fruit

I love Atout Fruit. It’s a relatively small, but very effective local organisation that exists to protect and promote our heritage of local and ancient varieties of fruit trees.  By being a member, I’ve learned such a lot at some of their monthly workshops.  I’ve for instance practised grafting (as in:

‘a. To unite (a shoot or bud) with a growing plant by insertion or by placing in close contact.

b. To join (a plant or plants) by such union.’,

rather than ‘hard work’ as described so effectively by Kalba in her blog Slow Living in the French Pyrénées

The intricacies of grafting

Actually, what I learned about grafting, when I did it last year, was that it wasn’t my thing.  It’s very steady meticulous work, demanding razor sharp knives and attention to detail, deeply unsuited to a slap-dash like me.  My painstakingly grafted specimen died within weeks.

But there have been sessions on pruning, on traditional methods of gathering and preserving fruits, using those fruits in cooking….and so on.  Later this month, the session on growing biodynamically will be held in our garden, and I just can’t wait.

I’m different from most other members.  I don’t just mean that I’m English, though there’s that too.  Most ‘adherents’ were born with more know-how than I will ever have about trees and crops, and practice their skills every day.  Nearly all the rest have this background to their lives, even if they have themselves moved away from their ‘paysan’ origins.  I hesitate to use the word ‘peasant’ in English, because of the somewhat negative picture it paints.  Not here.  Even University graduates who have returned to the land are proud to describe themselves as ‘paysan’.  It’s been great for me that everyone is keen to help me and seems pleased that I want to learn: nobody patronises my amateurishness.

Sorting those saplings

Once a year, Atout Fruit is given a range of tree seedlings to hand out free to members – mainly fruiting trees, but other indigenous and introduced species too.  Members pore over the spread sheets of offerings and make their choices, and wait for the day when we can all go and collect.  I felt greedy: I’d chosen 10, but later found that others, with larger pieces of land, had chosen 20, 40, even 100 saplings.  This year I volunteered to help sort and distribute the trees, and drove to Claude’s place (which includes a wonderfully eco-efficient house of straw), high above lake Montbel, where it was all happening.  My job was to help replace the battered identification labels with rather more legible ones, and make up orders with members as they arrived. Have you ever tried to distinguish an 18-inch high mulberry whip from a crabapple or a wild cherry?  Best leave it to the experts…..  Later, warmed by glasses of hot coffee, 4 of us made up the bundles of trees for the people who hadn’t been able to come to collect.  Here’s a picture of some hard work in a chilly barn: merci, Claude!

Later that day, I planted my seedlings in pots, or direct in the garden.  I had quite a time of it.  But that’s another story….

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

How could they?  I mean, what ARE they playing at?  All last week, and most of this, the baker’s shop down the road has been closed.  Instead of rising at 2.00 a.m. to get busy making baguettes, flutes, ficelles, baguettes a l’ancienne, flutes tradition, pain noir, chocolatines, croissants and so on and so on, our bakers have chosen to lie in till – ooh, 7 o’clock perhaps – and then spend the day catching up with their families – the children are on half term.

It’s a family business, our baker’s shop.  M & Mme Fonquernie owned it, and now, although officially they’ve retired, they help out all the time .M. Fonquernie is the one who drives his little white van round the local villages which have no shops, selling bread. Their two sons have now taken over the day-to-day baking.  One is responsible for all those loaves, while the other specialises in patisserie.  Their wives divide the work of running the shop between them with Mme Fonquernie Senior’s help.

Mme. Fonquernie, Mater Familias

So our morning routine has been disrupted.  First thing each day, one of us usually walks down the road to get our favourite pain noir, hot and crisp still from the oven.  The other day, the baker forgot the salt.  The bread wasn’t half so nice, but I rather liked this very human error.  It proved that our loaves are still ‘artisanale’, rather than being churned out by some computer-assisted machine.  There’s usually someone in the shop to chat to, or to walk back along the street with, and so neither of us looks on getting the bread in as a chore.

We’re lucky, I suppose, that there are three bakers in town.  Last week, we went to the shops at Castellanes to the baker there.  No pain noir at this shop, so we chose their unbleached white.  The small one’s a slender baguette shape – an Ariegeoise – but buy the larger butch version, and you must ask for an Ariegeois.

But then what happened?  A notice appeared in the shop: from Sunday, they too would be closed for a holiday. So for a few days this week, we have to patronise shop number three. Everybody moans ‘C’est pain industriel ça’.  It’s true. It comes all the way from Lavelanet, from a bakery which has three shops.  That’s mass production, and it shows.  Roll on Thursday, when the Fonquernie family re-opens its shop doors

The Butchery Business

Once upon a time – though not very long ago, Laroque,  population more or less 2000, had dozens of shops. You could live your life here without ever needing to leave town, and many people did just that.

Now we have three butchers, three bakers, and three – no, not candlestick makers – hairdressers.  We have one épicerie left, 2 tabacs, a flower shop, and a new haberdashery store. There are six bars, restaurants and take-aways, and you can still buy paint, bikes, second-hand books, even a washing machine in town.  Greater mobility and the rise of the supermarket have put paid to the habits of the old days, and we’re lucky to have as many shops as this left.  But so many are no longer open for business, and our home is one of them.

From the early years of the 20th century until about 25 years ago, our house was Paul Vergé’s butcher’s shop, as well his family’s home – people here still refer to it as ‘l’ancienne boucherie’.  Passers by, workmen who come to the house, delivery staff  – all of whom remember coming to the shop as children, or working there as part time or weekend staff –  have told us tales about the old shop, and the house itself is giving up some of its secrets…….

The butchery business must have been back-breakingly hard.  After we’d moved in, we soon realised that carcasses were hauled up through the house to the top (or second) floor up a now filled-in shaft, where they hung from racks like clothes on an airer.  We wondered why broken bottles were suspended above these rails, upside down.  Answer: to prevent rats and mice running down onto the meat…

Anti-mice device

This floor of the house, without insulation, was bitingly cold in winter, but suffocatingly hot on summer days.  People have told us that their memories of the shop include seeing these same carcasses, after they’d been hauled down again from the attic, hanging outside the shop door, crawling with flies, just waiting for customers to come and buy…..

The attic also has an area that was used as a smoke room for smoking cuts of meat.  Hard to imagine that the pungent smells didn’t penetrate the rest of the house.

Our garage, next to what was originally the shop, has quite a few sturdy metal rings set into the walls.  Animals were tied to these, prior to being shot and butchered by Mr. Vergé himself.  Occasionally, a terrified beast would get away, and charge up the hill to Place de la Cabanette, where with any luck it would be rounded up by the sapeurs pompiers (fire and rescue service).  An early job, when we moved here, was to line and paint the garage ceiling – to eliminate all the blood stains from this domestic abattoir.

We still have 2 enormous ex-cold rooms just off the shop.  One of these is now a tool storage area, one a larder.  We haven’t parted yet with the big old scales which were part of everyday life in the shop.

Then: butcher’s shop. Now: games room

And then there’s the white-tiled shop, now a games room. The Vergés,in common with most shopkeepers, provided a few hard chairs for the comfort of those waiting or gossiping in the shop.  Mr. Vergé was convivial, a lady’s man who enjoyed chatting to his female customers.  Madame Vergé was busy in her little booth (remember those?) accepting payments and keeping the books.  Her responsibilities didn’t end there.  In the immense boiler in the kitchen, she made and canned patés of pork, duck and goose liver, rabbit, game; cassoulets; jarret de porc,  for sale in the shop, day after day after day.  We still have boxes of unused labels lurking in boxes in the workshop.

Mme. Vergé’s big old meat boiler: now defunct

Besides all this, they found time to look after the garden, 2 minutes walk from our house.  Just as they did, I grow vegetables: like them, I use the cherries, plums, apricots, figs, grapes from the trees there.  Unlike them, I can take my time to enjoy digging, planting, harvesting, bottling, preserving, cooking.  Frankly, I’m playing at it.  For them, the hard work of looking after a plot so much larger than a couple of allotments was something that had to be fitted in after they’d slaved away at the butchery business.  And they had a family….

Not working hard in the garden today……

An Update: the Good and the Bad

The good and the bad.  Good news first.  The birds have discovered there’s more to be had here than yesterday’s bread.  At bird mealtimes, which are not quite the same as ours, though much more frequent, they’re here vying over the nuts, the seeds, the fat, the mealworms, though still the stale soaked bread is best of all.  It must be the fat I mix in with it.

There’s an addition they’ve not yet come to terms with.  Henri arrived the other day with a large bag filled with sheets of suety fat that he’d cadged from his butcher.   Slabs like these hang in his garden, and the birds have pecked away at them so much that they look like fine and delicate antique lace tablecloths swaying gently in the breeze.  Our birds are still sticking to what they know.  Though one or two have been eying up the new additions

The marmalade?  Well, last Friday I was in Lavelanet market with a big shopping bag so I could clear the stock of Seville oranges from the one trader who’d had then the week before.  ‘Oh, those’, he said.  ‘I couldn’t sell them, so I’m not getting any more’.  I’ve pleaded with him to bring me some, but I’m not too hopeful.  All I have is the little cache of marmalade we made last week.  Now that IS bad news.

PS.  More bad news.  I left my camera in England, so the only shots I can use here are those that friends let me use, my own recycled from last year, or royalty free photos on the net

Marmalade

This afternoon, my friend Léonce and I made marmalade.

When Malcolm and I were in England over Christmas and New Year, battling with the Infamous Snow, one of the big questions was – ‘Will we be able to get Seville oranges before we have to leave?’, because the French don’t usually sell them.

Well, I DID manage to buy them in the UK, and now we’re back……..they were in Lavelanet market last week at 2.50 euros a kilo. What are Seville oranges doing on Lavelanet market?  I’d love to know.  The French, when they make marmalade at all, tend to use ordinary oranges, and they don’t seem to have any particular tradition of using this wonderfully bitter fruit.

But my oranges travelled from Spain to Harrogate in England, and then all the way back to southern France where yesterday, we transformed them into bright jewelled pots of marmalade.

‘So’, said Léonce as she diligently chopped orange skin after orange skin into long strips, ‘we’re not going to soak the peel?  We’re using it as it is?’  Her only experiences with this fruit have involved long soakings and several changes of water to eliminate nearly all the bitterness.

Smelling the strong citrussy odours as the marmalade cooked convinced her.  She’s getting a different idea about the English and their cooking now. We sat down afterwards for a Nice Cup of Tea and a buttered slice of malt loaf (Soreen’s of course.  Why make the stuff when theirs is so good?) and she remembered how much she’s enjoyed making – and eating  – all our traditional English Christmas baking.

Our walking group’s come to look forward to some good old British baking treats too: gingernuts, melting moments, drenched lemon cake, flapjacks (although perhaps flapjacks aren’t British at all?  But we HAVE adopted them, and the French don’t have them).  And they all say, slightly surprised  ‘So you British CAN cook.  These are great!  Can I have the recipe?’