by Janine Marsh
Constance and Guillaume brought out little canapés: tarts with baked eggs and truffle shavings, blinis with grilled herring, jellied vegetables and slices of dried sausage that were perfect with the chilled champagne. After that it was on to entrées, starting with snails swimming in lurid green garlic butter so hot it was bubbling, and fresh oysters from Boulogne-sur-Mer less than an hour away. When we sat down to the main course, Guillaume carried in a huge tureen of stew called beef carbonnade, cooked with beer and brown sugar – everyone cheered as he whipped off the lid and aromatic steam filled the room. Each course was accompanied with a wine perfectly paired with the dish.
Just before 12 p.m., Guillaume counted ‘dix, neuf, huit, sept, six, cinque, quatre, trois, deux, un …’, and we all kissed on the cheeks and wished each other bonne année. Mark and I hugged each other tight, but not anyone else in the room – the French don’t hug, they kiss. If I had tried to hug one of our hosts or their guests, it’s almost certain that a rumour would have started circulating about the weird British woman being a hugger. It’s bad enough that I’m known to some people as Madame Merde after my septic tank exploded.
Then it was time for the cheese, served before dessert in France. It was a beautiful display from the famous Fromagerie Caseus in nearby Montreuil-sur-Mer. A cheese course in France isn’t just a stage in the meal – it’s a history lesson on a plate. Local cheeses in these parts that are firm favourites include Mimolette, Maroilles and Vieux Boulogne. Aged Mimolette, which originates in Lille and has a right royal history, is considered to be best. When France fell out with Holland in the seventeenth century, Louis XIV banned the import of Edam cheese and commanded that a French equivalent be made – only better. Local cheesemakers in Lille, tasked with this tall order, came up with a ball-shaped cheese with an orange rind. They also discovered they could add extra flavour by introducing cheese mites to the surface, where they dig little holes. It doesn’t look or taste similar to Edam but it stayed because everyone liked it so much! Except in America, where it’s banned because of the bugs.
Maroilles is incredibly smelly but delicious and was invented by monks in the town of Maroilles more than a thousand years ago. And Vieux Boulogne, which despite its name is quite a new cheese, invented in 1982, is officially the stinkiest (or most fragrant, if you’re French) cheese in the world according to scientists at a university in the UK. Thankfully there was no Gris de Lille, which the locals call ‘stinky grey’ or the ‘stench of Lille’. Believe me, if you are ever unlucky enough to have some in your mouth, you will probably call it many names worse than that (although apparently the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev fell head over heels for it when he visited Lille in 1960, and had a load shipped to Moscow). It doesn’t actually come from Lille, but from Hainaut, near the border with Belgium, but when it was first made in the nineteenth century, it was sent to Lille to be preserved, developed and packed, hence the name. Let’s just say that if you like the aroma of old and sweaty socks, you’ll love the stinky grey.
We discussed new year’s resolutions over the cheese course. This being France, there is a distinctly philosophical air to many discussions. Whether your aim is to get fitter, as many of us announced, or you want to learn to speak another language, which no one announced, you must talk about it as much as you can. The French absolutely love to have long, complicated discussions, to introduce topics into the conversation that will have no conclusion, to never admit to being wrong and to never say they don’t know the answer to a question.
Madame Bernadette surprised no one when she announced that this year’s goal was exactly the same as last year’s. And the year before. Rumour has it that she has been on a diet since 1972. Sometimes it’s tough living here in the rural north of France. We’re surrounded by little villages with tempting boulangeries and pâtisseries, and I guarantee that the aroma of fresh-baked baguettes from a wood oven, lifted out by a ruddy-faced baker on the end of a long paddle, or the scent of flaky, buttery and golden just-cooked croissants, is utterly irresistible.
And then there are the cakes. Cake makers in France are craftsmen. They train for years learning how to make perfect little edible works of art. Opera cakes, Paris-Brest, eclairs, macarons – classic French cakes really are in a league of their own.
Regions, departments and even some towns have pastry specialities that are unique to them. Here in the far north, the merveilleux (marvellous) is a favourite. A speciality from Lille, it’s a seriously sweet meringue puffball of a cake covered with whipped cream, chocolate or other sweet things. I can promise you, it requires fortitude to eat a whole one.
In the little town of Beaurainville, the local baker makes a cake that I’ve never seen anywhere else, though I am not sure you could put it in the category of great French gateaux. Le doigt de Charles Quint is a long sponge finger – literally. Red jam and Chantilly cream ooze from the centre. It’s meant to represent the gouty pinky finger of Emperor Charles V who once ruled these parts. It tastes better than it sounds ... There are even seasonal cakes and breads. A galette des rois (kings’ cake) is de rigueur in January, as are bûche de Noël (yule log) in December and cherry clafoutis in spring.
I am always reading in some newspaper or other that French women are somehow able to exert superhuman strength over their appetites and remain skinny. That might be true in Paris where, at the posh Café de la Paix next to the Opéra de Paris, I once saw a pencil-thin woman order a bowl of lettuce for dinner as her lover (I knew because they were kissing each other with wild abandon and much flashing of tongues across the table in between mouthfuls) tucked into succulent oysters, a juicy steak and ended with a dreamy tarte Tatin. But I promise you, your average French woman, at least where I live, is quite normal and able to resist anything but temptation – just like the rest of us.
Madame Bernadette loves cakes. The Bread Man (not a man made of bread but the man who delivers bread and pastries to our village, and many others around, three times a week) knows this, and he is a good salesman. In January, he hardly mentions the sweet feasts he has in the back of his van. The dieting Madame Bernadette accepts her lonely baguette with a sigh. By February, she will be asking ‘Do you have a mille-feuille?’ By March, the Bread Man is openly tempting her with sugar cakes (a sweet pastry baked with a thick butter and sugar topping), pastel-pink macarons, passionfruit pavlovas or a sticky and creamy coffee religieuse. The battle is lost. Resistance is futile. But as Madame Bernadette says, there’s always next year …
Around 1 a.m. Constance brought out cakes that looked like works of art. They were from Patrick Hermand in Le Touquet, which, if you’re ever in the town, you can spot by the queue of people drooling at the window over the magical display.
By now, much as I love cake, I was thinking that Mark might have to roll me home in a wheelbarrow. I was aching from laughing as we played charades, the game where you have to act out a word or phrase without talking and everyone has to guess it. But this being France, there were rules that were different from wherever else you might play it. Everyone had to act out being a celebrity. Added to that there was a strict time limit. You had two minutes to present your charade and the guests had five minutes to discuss and guess. Jean-Claude, Paul and Monsieur Martel were all the late, great Johnny Hallyday, the French Elvis Presley. And believe me, the sight of more than one rather drunken, elderly Frenchman gyrating his hips to the imaginary sound of French rock and roll in a small salon in middle-of-nowhere France is enough to give you nightmares. Then Madame Bernadette and Bernadette were both Edith Piaf, hunched over an imaginary microphone, shaking with passion, throwing arms wide and mouths wide open in full silent song. ‘Non, non, non,’ said Constance, admitting she was miffed as she too wanted to be Edith Piaf, ‘we must all be someone different.’ The rules were changed. You had to mime being a celebrity who wasn’t Johnny Hallyday or Edith Piaf.
Nobody could guess that Guillaume was Jacques Cousteau, the great sea explorer, as he lay on the floor, his long, thin frame fac
e down, a thumb in his mouth and a finger pointed straight up (evidently this was meant to be a snorkel), with his other arm miming a diving position. And in my wildest dreams I would never, ever have figured out that Delphine’s imaginary hair tossing and pouting lips was meant to be Brigitte Bardot. Nobody guessed that I was Joan of Arc, riding an imaginary horse and wielding an imaginary sword, but I was disqualified on the grounds that she was not a celebrity but a saint. Mark was Quasimodo, which everybody guessed.
Some hours later, I could swear I heard a cockerel crowing outside and I noticed everyone was by now openly yawning. I’ve found that French people are terrible at ending a get-together. Whether it’s an artisan who’s come in for a cup of coffee at the end of a job, a neighbour who has popped in to borrow a packet of sugar, or a party, no one ever wants to be first to say goodbye. Being British, though, we’re very good at calling it a day, and announced that we needed to go home. We said goodnight and good morning, kissed everyone again, and pulled on our coats and hats. Immediately there was a rush by everyone else to join us. A straggle of tired and tipsy villagers made their way home, pushing through the frozen air blanketing the silent village, crossing fields, along muddy alleyways and onto the silent main road.
It felt like I’d been asleep for five minutes when my alarm went off. There was no chance for a lie-in with animals to feed. My first job was to visit the bird pens, where my ducks, chickens and geese weren’t remotely grateful or sympathetic to my fatigue and honked, clucked and quacked loudly for their own feast. Then the cats needed feeding and cuddles, the dogs needed walking and the fire needed stoking. And finally, it being New Year’s Day after an all-night eat-athon, we could ‘relax’. That meant we got back to the job of tiling the kitchen floor.
With twenty-one rooms to renovate, we had started with laying concrete floors inside the house and some hard standing outside so cars would not get stuck in the mud – it rains a lot here. Over the years, Mark estimates, we’ve laid more than a hundred tons of concrete.
Then, we’d replaced all the old wood-framed windows with double-glazed PVC. It wasn’t what I wanted – I had dreamed of lovely bespoke wooden windows – but we had thirty-seven windows to fit and the cost of the wooden ones would have bled us dry. And, in such a damp part of France, we would have needed to paint them every year. So, in the end, and after much heated debate, I caved in to the sensible option.
After that, we moved on to insulating the house, boarding the walls and ceilings, and plastering. Then everything had to be painted and cupboards built, electrics installed, sinks, showers and loos fitted. Tiling the kitchen floor was the last job we had to do before that room and the adjoining walk-in pantry were finished, and we were determined that, despite my dad’s prediction that this house would be a never-ending job, we would finish the entire renovation by the end of this year.
Tiling isn’t just tiling in this part of France. It’s not just a question of nipping to the local hardware or tile shop to choose your tiles and take them home in the boot of the car. We have to drive for an hour to get to a store with a greater choice than just plain beige squares, which are a firm favourite in these parts. In the week before Christmas we hitched up the trailer to the car, headed to Boulogne-sur-Mer on the Opal Coast and the Brico Depot superstore, where they know us by sight because of the amount of time we spend there buying materials. By the end of January, all the tiles were to be laid and everything in the kitchen ready to go. It would soon be our turn to host a dinner for our neighbours!
The cold fog lingered for several days. The water in the dogs’ bowls iced over within an hour of being filled, and the pond in the ducks’ pen was solid. Everything liquid turned to ice and every day I had to carry buckets of water down to the bird pens. The cats decided to hibernate in the house. Even Winston, who’s known as the biggest cat in the village, came in to sleep at night, a rare occurrence these days. When I first found him under the wheels of our van in Boulogne, a tiny, bleeding bundle of fur with bright blue eyes (he’d been attacked by a bigger cat), I was totally smitten with what was my first pet. I nursed him back to health, feeding him kitten milk with a pipette until he was well enough to eat on his own.
Winston was a bit mad right from the start. If the doorbell rings, he hides. If someone comes into the house that is not me or Mark, he hides. Over the years he has gradually become more and more of a loner, disappearing sometimes for days on end. He comes in for food as long as there is no music, no strangers are present and the chairs in front of the door are in the same place – he really doesn’t like change.
During the cold evenings, he lies watching the flames dance while he stretches out on a cushion with lazy Loulou the tortoiseshell cat, ’Enry Cooper, a fluffy feline with Zorro-mask-like eyes, and Shadow the black cat.
Ella Fitzgerald, who was supposed to be a spaniel but turned into a rather large German shepherd who doesn’t think she is a dog at all, likes to lie on her own cushion. Bruno the Labrador lies across my feet, and Churchill the German pinscher (like a miniature Dobermann, but yappy) joins the cats in front of the fire where it’s warmest.
The only cat who wasn’t there in the cold spell was Hank Marvin He’s Always Starvin’, the one-eyed cat. He was in another room as his incurable cat flu made him sneeze constantly, so he had an enclosed cage that was easy to clean (one of my least favourite jobs). He cast broken-hearted looks at me when I carried him through the house and he saw the others living it up in the front room by the fire, but the alternative was full-time cleaning of cat snot off every surface. There are times when I look at what has become of my life and I shake my head in bewilderment.
Even now, years after we fitted the wood fire, I appreciate it more than I ever thought possible. Like many old houses in these parts we don’t have central heating and rely on a single fire to keep the whole house warm. Often people around here grow their own trees and chop their own wood. Communal land is also used to grow trees for wood and the mayor allocates parcels to people in the village to use for their wood needs – always a great opportunity for manly wood-chopping get-togethers.
By Saturday night, a few days after New Year’s Eve, we needed a break from the tiling and felt lively enough to venture out to Arnaud’s bar in a town nearby. There are no shops, bars or cafés in our village. There is a main street and a few side streets, around 100 houses, a town hall, an old church, 142 people and 1,000 cows. But there are several towns not far away with bars and cafés, supermarkets, cheese shops, chocolate shops and boulangeries, and everything we need to live life to the full in the French way.
Although most people had by now taken down their Christmas decorations, we were surprised to find that Arnaud’s was looking mind-bogglingly festive – unusual in itself for rural France but even more so since he is known to be a man who is not prone to wanton spending. He is said to enjoy counting his centimes fondly. Normally the bar is a rather minimalist place with dim lights, dark wooden tables and chairs spread through two large rooms of a house. You can peep through the curtains behind the bar and see the family kitchen, and regulars like to play ‘What is Arnaud having for dinner today?’ as the smell from the cooking pots wafts through to the bar. The dark wooden counter, with its floral porcelain pumps for the obligatory Leffe and Stella Artois beers, is always propped up by elderly farmers in their uniform of blue, green or brown boiler suits, sipping a glass of strong red wine or a throat-burning nip of Calvados, an apple brandy from neighbouring Normandy. There are black-and-white photos of unknown vintage boxers on the walls. It’s said that Madame Armandine, Arnaud’s mother, has never explained who the pictures are of, but it’s thought that one of them might be a long-lost love. There’s not a lot to do in these parts so imaginations tend to run wild. There is no basis for the story other than someone once suggested it thirty years ago. What is true is that Madame Armandine has a goal in life. She recently read about a barmaid in a town not far from here who, at one hundred years old, is the oldest barmaid in France. N
ow Madame is going all out to match or beat the record. Since the time taken to pour a beer is already painfully long, we are all going to suffer through this ambition with her – for the next seventeen years.
When I say that the bar looked as if the love child of Liberace and Andy Warhol had run amok with reels of tinsel, spray cans of glitter, fake snow and shiny paper chains, while under the influence of mind-altering drugs, that is an understatement. Everyone who came through the door let out an ‘Oh, là là.’ Not so much La La Land as Oh, Là Là Land.
‘C’est psychédélique,’ said Monsieur Martinez, one of the regulars, as we looked around in wonderment at the radiant cave that the normally dour bar had become, wondering if we were hallucinating.
The reasons for this unusual festive spending soon became clear. ‘We’re closing at seven-thirty tonight,’ said Arnaud as he poured our drinks, ‘for maman’s birthday.’ He nodded at the old lady who was sitting in the corner knitting a coat for her giant dog, a hairy white Pyrenean mountain dog that’s bigger than her. When she takes it for a walk everyone stops to smile as it’s the size of a small pony and she is the size of a hobbit. Fortunately for her, the dog has a good nature and is very lazy, or it could certainly take her for a walk.
We joined Monsieur Martinez at a table of regulars who were openly discussing the new-look bar. ‘Arnaud’s trying to show his new girlfriend he’s not a meanie with the money,’ said one. ‘It won’t last, remember that time …’ said another and they all raised their eyebrows. ‘What time?’ I whispered so that Arnaud wouldn’t hear.