Deep France

by Celia Brayfield

  The modern novice hunter can read a whole portfolio of hunting magazines for tips on buying a gun, choosing cartridges, training your dog and stalking, not to mention exotic hunting topics from abroad, such as the grouse shooting in Scotland or falconry in Pakistan. My favourite magazine was entitled Wild Boar Passion. ‘Step One. Gently move your gun 20 to 30cm away from you, holding it almost vertical. Step Two. In taking aim at the game, turn the weapon gently towards the horizontal. Keep the gun well clear of your jacket. Step Three. Position the sight a few centimetres higher than the desired point of contact on the boar’s shoulder. Tips: when you raise your gun, the game will run off. You must stay calm. Hold your breath before you pull the trigger. You will soon be able to control your emotions and, in achieving serenity, you will be more efficient.’

  First Contact

  One dark evening, just as I was logging off and shutting down the computer, the doorbell rang for the first time. On the doorstep outside was a woman with blonde hair and bright eyes, looking a little nervous. ‘I’ve just come from feeding our donkeys,’ she said in English. ‘The post lady told me you were here. I think she’s told the whole village.’

  Her name was Annabel. She was my neighbour, the owner of the donkeys in the field opposite, and of the imposing house which is half hidden by the fall of the land at the brow of the hill. Anywhere else in France a house of this stature would be called a chateau, but they are resolutely down-to-earth in the Béarn, so it’s simply called a manoir, and given the dialect name for a house, La Maysou.

  I made tea for us, and she sat curiously at the table, eyeing the mess of papers which had already covered it. ‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing major,’ I told her. ‘I finished a novel before I left England, and I’ll have to do some revisions on it at some point. I’ve proposed a new novel back in July. Now I’m just fiddling about with odd book reviews and an entry on another writer for the Dictionary of National Biography.’

  I showed her the pages I’d printed out and the proofs from the DNB. An expression of alarm crossed her face. At this point, I had not realized that many of the English abroad are living complete fantasy lives. Even if an ex-pat is not trying to pass him- or herself off as a former SAS hero, a millionaire, a brain surgeon, an aristocrat, a high-class call-girl or an international sustainable agriculture consultant, the neighbours may still prefer to think of them as a far more glamorous character than they really are. With this Walter Mitty spirit abroad, it is unusual for someone to produce concrete proof of their profession.

  Annabel is an interior designer and lives with her husband, who is retired from a colourful career as a marketing entrepreneur. They’ve been in France for fourteen years, first in a big house in the Gers and for the last four years in the Béarn. She keeps the donkeys, she tells me, because her family have always kept horses and they are good therapy for the children who come to visit them in the summer, the pupils at the leading London prep school where her daughter teaches French. ‘These poor children,’ she says, ‘are so deprived that some of them have never actually touched an animal before.’

  The idea of feeling sorry for a young Belgravia trustafarian was touching. She seemed like a nice person. I was invited over for a drink the next evening. Her husband, Gerald, is a veteran of World War II, in which he flew Spitfires, and of major surgery the previous year, in which the triple bypass was just for starters. He immediately revealed himself as one of the most charming men I’ve ever met, even if he began our relationship with the words a writer never wants to hear: ‘I’m going to write a novel,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you write it for me and we can make lots of money?’

  I told him how this works. ‘You have to write your own book,’ I said. ‘And there are no lots of money.’ He didn’t believe it. Nobody ever believes it.

  Recipes

  Poulet Basquaise

  This is our family favourite, and the first dish mentioned in that rugby song. Any dish called ‘Basquaise’ will feature peppers and be distinctly spicy. The richness of Poulet Basquaise is achieved by slow-cooking the chicken and peppers together, rather than just making a pepper sauce. The classic combination is red and green bell peppers and espelette, the hot pepper which is the number-one keynote of Basque cooking.

  There are more species of pepper grown in the Basque Country than there are variations on pelota, because Basques were great sailors and navigators. Most of Christopher Columbus’s sailors were Basques. As they got to America early, they had a head start in growing exotic New World vegetables in their own country. They brought back maize, tomatoes and chocolate, not to mention the peppers.

  Espelette is the favourite pepper in the Basque Country. It has a warm, generous heat, said to be somewhere between paprika and chilli, and the peppers are very dark red and of medium size. The full name is piment d’espelette, after the village of Espelette around which it is grown in such abundance that every building virtually disappears under a mountain of peppers when they are threaded on strings and hung outside to dry at harvest time.

  Espelette also comes as a dry powder or a paste. Go easy with it at first and, if you’re crumbling the whole pepper, do not on any account rub your eyes during the process or you’ll have to put your head under a cold shower until the agony ceases. If you have to make this dish without espelette, you can use a combination of warm paprika and a dash of chilli.

  a seriously decent chicken, organic, free range, say about 1.8 kg (4lb)

  3 tbsp olive oil

  60g (2oz) lardons, preferably of Bayonne ham

  1 large onion, chopped

  6 red bell peppers, or 3 red and 3 yellow, seeded and sliced or chopped

  3 cloves of garlic

  450g (1lb) fresh ripe tomatoes, or 2 tins chopped tomatoes

  1 tbsp chopped dried tomato paste

  a pinch of sugar

  1 glass dry white wine

  a pinch of espelette pepper

  sprigs of thyme

  a bay leaf

  a piece of orange peel, pared carefully without any pith

  Elizabeth David suggests adding about 6 of the spicy Basque sausages called loukenkas as well. I’ve never tried this, but it seems like an excellent idea, particularly if you have to stretch the dish at the last moment for unexpected guests.

  Wash and dry the chicken, and cut into large pieces, car­cass and all. Most domestic French cooks would do this with a cleaver or poultry shears, and plan on a chicken feeding 10 to 12 people.

  Put the oil in a sauté pan over medium heat and brown the chicken pieces. When they’re sealed on all sides, take them out of the pan while you turn down the heat and sweat the lardons and onion until the onion is almost transparent. Add the bell peppers and garlic, and continue cooking for another 5 minutes.

  Add the tomatoes, the tomato paste, the sugar, the wine, the espelette, the herbs and the orange peel and mix well. Then put the chicken pieces back, make sure they are well buried (add a little water if you need to), put the lid on the pan and leave to simmer very gently for at least 40 minutes, by which time the peppers and tomatoes should be melting into a rich red sauce.

  Poulet Basquaise is usually served with saute potatoes or plain rice, but it would be delicious, and perfectly authentic (as we shall see later), to serve it with polenta. I usually serve it straight from the cooking pan, after checking the seasoning, cutting the breast and thigh portions in half and picking out the less attractive bony bits.

  Pumpkin Gratin

  This is a lovely and simple recipe from my all-time favourite cook book, Memories of Gascony by Pierre Koffmann, the founder of London’s Gascon cooking tradition, who grew up in the Béarn, in the town of Tarbes, but spent his summers with his grandparents on their small farm in the Gers, near Lectoure.

  The gratin by itself is a deliriously creamy vegetarian dish. It’s a great solution to the post-Halloween pumpkin problem, and a good side dish to serve with a roast.

&nbs
p; 2 tbsp duck fat, or olive oil if you want the vegetarian version

  800g (1¾ lb) pumpkin flesh, cut into cubes

  120g (4oz) cooked round-grain rice

  100ml (4fl oz) double cream or crème fraiche

  salt and pepper

  60g (2oz) grated hard cheese – ideally Ossau-Iraty ewe’s-milk cheese, but Gruyère, Parmesan or Cheddar would be fine

  Melt the fat or heat the oil in a thick-bottomed saucepan over a medium flame, then tip in the pumpkin cubes, put on the lid and let them cook gently in their own water until they can be mashed easily – 30 to 40 minutes. Shake the pan occasionally, though if the pumpkin catches and browns in places it won’t be the end of the world.

  If you haven’t already cooked the rice, you can do that at the same time. Preheat the oven to 220°C/ 425°F/ Gas 7.

  Mix the rice roughly into the mashed pumpkin and bind with the cream. Season with salt and pepper and pack into a greased gratin dish. Sprinkle the cheese over the top, and brown for about 15 minutes, then serve at once.

  December

  Henry IV of France – nouste Hemic

  A Moving Experience

  A call from a mobile phone. A trip out to the front gate with the largest piece of paper I can find bearing the words THIS IS IT, which I fix to the hedge with clothes pegs. Soon a massive lorry lurches into the lane outside the house, bringing the container stuffed with my books, my clothes and the rest of the things I think I need or can’t expect my tenant in London to tolerate, the bookcases, the bicycle, the work table, the photographs, the souvenirs, Chloe’s old toys and the little bag of her baby shoes.

  Oh, and the No. 1 family heirloom, a mahogany four-post bed that my father bought in an auction in Dorset, now known to be from the time of William IV. For Chloe, the bed is all about fun and romance, and climbing up onto the billowing mattress is a nightly adventure. Our heirloom has passed to her with no argument. Luckily for all of us, the bed is a fine example of early self-assembly furniture, and can easily be taken apart for transport.

  In fact, two lorries arrived, having come in convoy from England, the younger driver leading, the older one complaining and calling his colleague on his mobile with navigation tips. The younger driver was on only his second trip abroad, but the road to the South was extremely familiar to the older one, who has spent the past six years of his life helping the British to emigrate.

  They had slept overnight at a truck stop in Castets, on the motorway near Biarritz where there had been no coffee available, so they were grateful for mine. Everything was carried in, and the bed squeezed into the largest bedroom, by lunch time, when they drove off to Spain to make another nine deliveries among the vast British diaspora.

  There aren’t any reliable figures for the number of British people who’ve chosen to live in mainland Europe. Maybe the government just can’t face knowing how uncongenial the country has become to its citizens. There are only official European statistics, which suggest that Spain is the least popular place for Brits to settle, with a mere seven thousand expatriates. Wrong, obviously.

  Unofficially, the Foreign Office thinks there are about half a million British ex-pats in France. Many of them take care to be invisible, of course, but many more have been happy to notify themselves to their local mairie, fill up their tax returns annually and apply for the carte de séjour, which gives them certain temporary rights to French state benefits.

  There are certainly enough British abroad to keep dozens of international removal firms in business, not to mention hundreds of international estate agencies, scores of property finders and fixers, companies who will export and assemble an Aga for you, two Web sites from which British delicacies such as Marmite can be ordered and an ex-pat newspaper, the News, in which all these industries advertise.

  I’ve found many back numbers of the News in the kindling basket. Among many other gems of reportage, I read a story from Charente-Maritime headlined ‘No Rural Post Offices To Close’, fundraising appeals for animal sanctuaries run by various dotty English ladies, a feature on tea and the report of the tenth official championships mounted at Abjat-sur-Bandiat by La Fédération Frangaise de Conkers, at which the defending champion was a Frenchman, Claude Bernard. There hadn’t been a British-born conker champion in France for six years.

  There’s nothing like moving house to make you want to be a Buddhist nun, with no possessions except a robe and a begging bowl. To heighten my sense of death by over-consumption, it was clear that most of the things I thought I couldn’t live without were actually French: the table I intend to work on was knocked up somewhere in Normandy from an oak plank and cherry-wood legs. It has the great virtue of being so ‘distressed’ (the antique dealer’s word for bashed) that no coffee spill or maladroit move with scissors can do anything but add to its charm.

  The clothes, of course, the Robert Clergerie shoes, the Agnés B skirt, the underwear by Chantelle and Lejaby, the myriad T-shirts and beach bags emblazoned with the logo ‘Elle’. I left in a hurry, so there was no time to do sensible things with the kitchen. Thus the moving men scooped out the cupboards wholesale and I found myself repatriating a cornucopia of French items: the tart tins, the steak knives, the coffee bowls, the jar of duck fat, the apricot jam, the bottles of walnut oil, cassis syrup and Crème de Mûres.

  Finally, I got to the plates. The plates are symbolic as well as beautiful. I bought them when my first novel was a best-seller, to make up for all the wedding presents I’d never had. It had been a little hard to look on while my relatives and friends got married and were deluged with food mixers and matching china that they never used because they hate cooking, while I, who love to cook, was still single and therefore denied such equipment. The plates are wavy-edged Provencal pottery, glazed a beautiful rich green. I put the big ones up on the mantelpiece over the fireplace.

  Tea at la Maysou

  Annabel, I realized pretty soon, is the queen of the international community hereabouts. She is the vice-president of the Club International de Saliès-de-Béarn, which is currently homeless and in crisis since the Mayor of Saliès has withdrawn the privilege of an official meeting room. Sessions have to take place in the pool room of the Café du Temple, under the inhospitable eye of the proprietor.

  She speaks very pretty and absolutely fearless French, which is a considerable asset in integrating with the community, and essential in her career as an interior decorator. She also has a lovely soprano voice, which has allowed her to join a choir in Pau.

  Annabel’s most recent clients were a South African couple, for whom she has decorated a grand chateau in the nearby village of Andrein. She invited me to tea to meet them.

  ‘Tea’ proves to be the total English tea-time experience, complete with cucumber sandwiches and scones. I remember from my student days how living in another country suddenly moves you into a whole new area of national consciousness, so that experiences you might have passed on in England are suddenly infused with a nostalgic glamour. The tea is served in the primrose drawing room, which has an Aubusson carpet, a grand piano for Gerald and six pairs of French doors leading onto the terrace, with a full-on 180-degree view of the Pyrenees.

  The South Africans are planning their Christmas party, and talking about fish to a Frenchman, Christian, whose major profession is angling. Could Christian get lobsters for them? Certainly. And prawns? Of course. And display them all magnificently in a buffet? Understood. Christian’s wife, a Russian who he met when she was his translator on a fishing trip to her country, sits beside him and smiles shyly.

  The other guests are a young Dutch couple, lawyers in their mid-thirties, who maximized their earnings for ten years in Amsterdam then sold up everything and bought a farmhouse not far away. They keep a lot of chickens and are very happy. Also in the party are my neighbours, the potters, an elderly couple, and their son, Benoit, a slim, large-eyed man also in his early thirties.

  I have been warned that nobody else in the village talks to the potters, because they a
re supposed to be pieds-noirs, French colonists who returned to the mother country from Algeria after the war of independence in the Sixties. They obviously know that their reputation precedes them, because the old man launches into an elaborate definition of pied-noir, which, he explains, cannot possibly include him because he merely attended university in Morocco during the war. Not that he approves of all these Arabs over here, marrying nice blonde French girls. Benoit, who attended university in New York State, hears his father with a fixed half-smile.

  Goodbye to Tarmac

  Tarmac died suddenly. One morning, instead of grabbing a quick breakfast before going out to patrol his new territory, he refused food and drink and went to sit on the sofa with the decisive look of a cat who knows he is seriously ill. Having lived with Tarmac for twelve years, I respected the opinion of a noble animal with superior street-smarts who has often judged situations far better than the rest of us. Annabel told me where to find the vet in Sauveterre.

  The practice was a suite of rooms in a building on one of the main streets. I took a seat in the corridor, and read the announcements on the notice board while we waited. Puppies offered to a good home. Animal refuge has kittens. A two-page letter written in biro on blue paper, from a farmer thanking the vet from the bottom of his heart for saving one of his cows.

  The vet was a middle-aged man, taciturn but reactive, who took the cat box off me as if it was a heavy burden I shouldn’t be carrying. Being completely unaccustomed to small acts of consideration from strangers, I nearly burst into tears at that point.