My Good Life in France

by Janine Marsh

  Pride of place on the oven goes to a William and Kate tea towel. It is certainly strange that since the French cut off the heads of their own royal family they have taken the British lot to heart.

  Claudette decided my lack of kitchen skills was not acceptable and she set to work attempting to teach me the basics of rustic recipes.

  And it wasn’t only her. Before long, word got out (there are no secrets in a French village) that the English woman was not only an ex-townie, she was also an idiot in the kitchen and needed help.

  We have our bread delivered to our homes here in the middle of nowhere by a man in a van. The shops are miles away and for many old people the mobile stores are a lifeline, and for everyone else a real time saver, not to mention ecologically friendly. I leave a bag hanging over the gate and the bread man pops a loaf in as he goes by three times a week. One day he knocked on the door.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur bread man.’

  ‘Bonjour, useless cook.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Well, no, he didn’t actually call me that, but he might as well have done. It had come to his attention – someone in the next village had mentioned it – that Madame Merde could not cook.

  ‘It is easy to cook. Everyone can cook.’

  ‘I don’t really want to cook.’

  ‘But you must cook. It is the law.’

  No, he didn’t say that either, but again, he might as well have done.

  He handed me a piece of paper with some writing on.

  ‘Here is how to make bread.’

  Bread? Me make bread? He was the bloody bread man, what was he thinking? I thanked him and off he went on his merry way.

  After that, every week he would pop a recipe in the post box: how to make vanilla ice cream, beef casserole, buttery biscuits, simple cakes (nobody thought I would ever be able to tackle anything complicated) – a random array of goodies. This went on for months until one day the baker who made the bread had a heart attack and the deliveries stopped while he recovered, after which the bread man got another job and I never saw him again. We have a new bread man now and he does not leave me recipes.

  Meanwhile, Claudette had realized that I was never going to be a star pupil and had resorted to coaching me in the basics, like her version of French toast. Eventually I gave up trying not to cook and managed to make her a passable onion soup, which got me off the hook and allowed Claudette to stop her lessons.

  Actually, I never did learn to make that soup. It turned out that Mark, who had never cooked before in his life, had a feel for food, as it were. He got it. He understood the chemistry of mixing ingredients together, he appreciated the value of flavours and he rolled up his sleeves and started cooking. When Claudette sent me home with her passed-down-through-the-generations recipe for French onion soup I merely passed it to Mark to make.

  ‘Claudette says that onions are an aphrodisiac,’ I told him in an effort to drum up some enthusiasm. ‘I reckon it’s worth a go.’ She told me that in the old days, when country folk wed, the morning after they would be served a bowl of steaming hot onion soup to replenish flagging energy. I can’t honestly say that the soup had any effect on us, but when I took a bowl to Claudette to assess my efforts, she announced it was ‘quite good’ and that was the last time she tried to teach me.

  Mark, however, went from strength to strength in the kitchen, turning out cakes and pastry, stews and stir-fries. His grandmother had been a pastry cook in her youth, working for a rich family in a grand house. When Mark was a little boy and she was long retired but made cakes the family still talk about, he would watch her bake in her tiny kitchen and be allowed to lick the spoon. Whether it was the memory of that or just that he likes to win, cooking seems to be in his veins.

  We are both agreed: in this house he is top chef and I am flop chef.

  Although I don’t like cooking food that much, I sure like to eat it, and I don’t think there’s anywhere more interesting than France when it comes to great dishes. They’re not always perfect, however.

  Crow pâté doesn’t really do it for me but Jean-Claude swears by it and makes it often. I’m not that keen on snails either, though I have tried them. I consider myself quite adventurous when it comes to food – I’ll almost always order something on the menu if I don’t have a clue what it is, just for the fun of it. This can be good and bad. Once in the lovely covered market in Dijon I had snail cake.

  This market is gastronomically gorgeous. Designed by a son of Dijon, Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame, the building’s blue metal framework is really quite beautiful and the stalls that are laid out below its high roof are full of delectable delicacies. The producers, artisans and sellers are incredibly proud of their wares and when I was offered a taste tour it was a great honour. Gingerbread dipped in chocolate – yum; local cheese – delicious. All manner of goodies were displayed, but the best was being saved for last, I was told. I heard the word gâteau, which I knew meant cake, but the plate that was offered to me held a chunk of something grey and slimy looking.

  ‘Gâteau what did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘Gâteau moelleux aux escargots de Bourgogne, soft snail cake, a local speciality.’

  Ah yes, that will be what that slippery-looking head is hanging out the end there, I thought to myself, not with much relish. But you have to try these things, so I popped the chunk in my mouth and chewed … and chewed. You’ve heard that expression that something is an acquired taste; well, I haven’t acquired a taste for snail cake and I’m not sure I ever will or even want to.

  Many people tend to think that French cuisine cannot possibly be bad. Ever. It can. I promise you it can.

  One bitterly cold winter weekend, our friends Karen and Joe were staying with us and we decided to go out to lunch. We had by now become accustomed to phoning to reserve a table before venturing out, as it seems quite normal in the countryside for restaurants to close with no rhyme or reason. Even phoning to check doesn’t work sometimes. I took my dad to the D-Day commemorations in Normandy one year and we decided to go to a restaurant that had a good reputation according to the lady in the boulangerie. She was right – we went there for lunch, it was very friendly and they served good, rustic, tasty food.

  ‘What nights are you open, as we’d like to come back?’

  ‘We’re open every night … except Tuesday, Wednesday and Sunday.’

  ‘Okay, can we book a table for Thursday at eight p.m.?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We went back on Thursday night. It was shut.

  As the lunch with Karen and Joe was a spur of the moment decision we hadn’t actually booked anywhere. We warned them it wasn’t easy to find somewhere open in the country. We thought that if we went to a town, we’d have more choice. We ended up in Berck-sur-Mer, a lovely seaside resort about thirty minutes away, famous for its bracing air. As it was the week between Christmas and New Year, almost everything was shut. Only one small restaurant was open. In hindsight, it did look a bit dubious from the outside and normally we would never have gone in. We’ve been to Berck-sur-Mer many times since and found some fabulous restaurants.

  We were met by the sight of ten or so unloved rickety wooden tables that were certainly not prepared for diners. Not that there were any. A wooden bar ran the length of one wall, local and Belgian beer pumps lined the edge of it, bottles of apéritifs sat higgledy piggledy on shelves. It was rather dark and completely silent and I knew immediately that we should simply back out right now. Karen, meanwhile, was enchanted with the ‘Frenchness’ of it. As she came from Hammersmith in west London, I could see that she might find this place quaint, with its old tiled floor, old tired furniture and the old mad barman who now lunged into view from the swing door at the back.

  ‘Bonjour,’ he yelled loudly. ‘Sit, sit. Do you want an apéritif?’

  With this he lurched to the bar and poured himself a glass of absinthe, an action that was clearly not a novelty to him on this cold miserable day.

  It was m
esmerizing to watch him. He had an enormous nose. It was very red and speckled, like a freshly plucked chicken, and so big that, when he lifted the glass to his lips, he had to tip his head back and flick his long black quiff away from his eyes and then tip the liquid into his mouth, as it did not fit in the glass.

  ‘I didn’t even know you could get absinthe,’ whispered Karen. ‘I thought it was banned because it made you go mad.’

  She wasn’t entirely wrong. It was banned for many years after a tragic incident in the early 1900s in which a Swiss man killed his wife and children and then tried to kill himself after drinking absinthe. He had drunk it for three days without stopping to sleep, though. It wasn’t until the 1980s that it was quietly reintroduced in France. This time with half the alcoholic strength but with its reputation for inducing mania intact.

  We considered trying a drop of absinthe ourselves. In fact, I thought that a touch of self-induced madness might get us through the terror of eating there, but everyone else decided we’d had quite enough fun for one day, having been caught up in a village scandal.

  Mid-morning, Jean-Claude had knocked on the door, red-faced and puffing with the effort of rushing up the hill. This alone would have been enough to alert the local media, as it was highly unusual for him not to drive his van the short distance. He didn’t wait for me to say bonjour or exchange kisses.

  ‘Come quick, there are burglars in the chemin,’ he wheezed before rushing back out of the gate. ‘Hurry, you must come – and get Mark.’

  I wasn’t sure that I’d heard right, but he seemed pretty shaken up so the four of us donned coats and boots and wandered down the road to the chemin, a little alleyway that runs to one side of our hilly road. There are just a couple of houses in the chemin, both of which were holiday homes at that time and empty most of the year. Jean-Claude was hopping up and down outside the end house and when he saw us he came rushing over.

  ‘There’s someone in the house that shouldn’t be there,’ he whispered with a great deal of theatrical flair. ‘I’ve called the mayor and the gendarmes but we must keep watch.’

  He then positioned Mark and Joe outside the house where the burglars were, and told Karen and me to remain at the end of the alley where it meets our little road in case the intruders tried to escape. He himself would go down to the main road and wait for the gendarmes so that he could direct them to the scene of the crime.

  We stood there for ten minutes, chatting about whether the burglars might be violent if they came out. We weren’t worried as we were certain Mark and Joe could handle any situation, as they both liked to box and do martial arts. Eventually, we heard sirens in the distance and to our astonishment two vans containing nine police officers and a sniffer dog screeched to a halt.

  Looking splendid in their uniforms and drawing their guns, they proceeded with cautious determination to the empty house.

  ‘Stand back,’ said their leader. ‘This could be very dangerous.’

  At that, a female police officer herded the four of us down the chemin, the alley, and into the road where Jean-Claude was giving a statement.

  ‘I was walking along to my barn, which is in the chemin, when I saw the window of the house of the owners-who-never-come-out was broken. There was movement. I ran to call the police. That’s it.’

  ‘Did you see anyone, Monsieur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. There were two of them, though. Men.’

  The burglars were, of course, long gone, but the police team carried out forensic checks. They dusted the windows and surfaces in the house for fingerprints, took photos, looked for clues and made copious notes before departing, watched by all the kids in the village who had heard the clamour and come out to see what was going on.

  Jean-Claude called the owners, who came out the next week to check. Two saucepans and an electric fire had gone missing. Astonishingly, two years later the culprits were caught when they attempted to steal a ladder from a garden in a town several kilometres away and their fingerprints matched those of the saucepan thieves.

  In the restaurant that night, we discussed how different it was in the UK, where reporting a crime merely seemed to result in being given a number to make an insurance claim. We waited an age for the crazy absinthe-drinking barman to bring the apéritifs we’d ordered: Kir for the ladies, beer for the men. He had come swaying over to the table to take our drinks order but appeared to have completely forgotten we were there and was absent-mindedly sipping from his topped-up glass of absinthe and staring into space.

  We eyed the menu with little enthusiasm. Medallion of pork in Maroilles, a very smelly regional cheese, utterly delicious but not for everyone, and as Mark has an allergy to cheese, I tend to avoid it as he complains about the smell. Steak tartare, much loved by the French but completely baffling to foreigners. Potjevleesch, a regional speciality consisting of cold meat in aspic – usually rabbit, pork and chicken and a lot of yellowish jelly. The final choice was confit of duck.

  Eventually, Monsieur Mad came over with the drinks, spilling half on the way and thumping the glasses down on the table as if he thought the surface was a lot further away than it was.

  ‘I’ll try the potjevleesch,’ said Karen gamely.

  ‘Potjevleesch is off,’ came the reply.

  ‘I’ll try the steak tartare,’ said Joe. ‘I’m up for a laugh.’

  ‘No steak tartare,’ the barman growled.

  ‘Porc au Maroilles?’ I asked.

  ‘Non.’

  So four confit de canard then. A famous stew of beans and duck pieces that is supposed to be a classic stalwart of great French cuisine.

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to be good,’ I said, ‘but, if we’re lucky, the boulangerie will still be open on the way home and I’ll get us a cake.’

  You can almost always rely on getting something to eat from a boulangerie when everything else is shut, at least during the day.

  That day, in that restaurant, we were served what was, without a doubt, the worst, most unappetizing confit de canard I have ever seen in my life. It had clearly come out of a tin and had been briefly introduced to the oven. It was lukewarm, barely stirred and the duck fat was still hard, as was the bread that came with it.

  Our friends from London loved the experience and dined out on the story for weeks after. We left the meal, paid the bill and wished the mad barman a happy new year and departed laughing.

  The boulangerie was open and as luck would have it there was still some bread and a few cakes to be had, including doigts de Charles Quint, two long sponge fingers glued together with a bright red jam that oozed out and down the sides, topped with tiny slithers of green crystallized fruit.

  ‘Fingers of Charles the Fifth,’ explained the baker. ‘He was the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled Spain and quite a bit of France including the Seven Valleys in the sixteenth century.’ It turns out that the emperor had very bad gout and, despite making thousands of enemies, he didn’t die in battle but of the disease. Someone cut off one of his hideous gouty old fingers to keep as a relic and, to this day, cakes are made in honour of it. Only in France.

  Where we live, you wouldn’t even know it was Christmas until maybe the week before, when the mayor organizes for the single string of lights that hangs all year round in a tree outside the town hall to be switched on.

  You may see a few illuminations in a window if you’re lucky, perhaps a wreath of holly and mistletoe on a front door, cut from bushes and trees on the frosty country roads. The most obvious sign that it’s that time of the year are the swinging Santas, horrible inflatable plastic Father Christmas figures climbing ropes or plastic ladders. They are tied to chimneys and gutters, swings and doorways, windows and gates. On a dark night, they’re really quite creepy, a bit like festive peeping toms. On a windy day they sway back and forth, holding on to the rope for dear life or else are blown away to burst on a hawthorn bush.

  This being France, a celebration invo
lving copious amounts of food is what’s really on everyone’s mind. For me it has meant changing London habits, which used to consist of a mad dash to the supermarket on Christmas Eve to buy food for Christmas dinner. A fraught few hours in which the trolley would be stacked with packets and boxes, a long queue at the till, an even longer queue to get out of the car park. Here, I’ve learned to enjoy taking care over the planning, buying and cooking of the festive fayre.

  At this time of year in France, you can quite easily eat yourself to a standstill.

  It’s become a tradition of ours to head to the village of Licques in December, which is known locally as ‘Turkey Town’. Here, a strange event takes place annually called La Fête de la Dinde, the Festival of the Turkey. The birds were introduced by monks at the local abbey in the seventeenth century and they’ve been bred there ever since, alongside Licques chickens, which feature on the menus of the best restaurants in France.

  Almost anything seems to be an excuse for a party in northern France and this quirky turkey fiesta is certainly fun and festive. Go on the middle Sunday of December if you want to get a bird’s-eye view of a unique spectacle. At one end of the rue Principale, an enormous cauldron the size of a small shed steams gently. A man has to climb a ladder to a long paddle that reaches into the cauldron’s depths to stir the alcoholic drink that’s boiled in the pot. It’s a speciality of the town and its aim is to thaw out the hardy souls who brave the cold. I can vouch for the fact that it certainly gives you a warm glow. Next to the pot, about a hundred turkeys are hemmed in a pen, gobbling and flapping for all they are worth. Speeches are made (of course) and at about 11 a.m. (this being France it never quite starts on time) a parade takes place. The local food guild members are garbed in costumes that define their speciality: the Brotherhood of the Pomme de Terre in hessian sacks, the Brotherhood of the Chou-fleur with green hats. Local dignitaries, dressed in their formal robes, smile and nod to the crowds while a band plays stirring if not tuneful music. It’s good humoured and great fun, but what we are all really here for is to see the turkeys escape.