In the end, we got no further than the next town in the general direction of the mountains, an elegant and prosperous little place called Mauléon, which seems to have got rich on espadrilles, since its only industry is the manufacture of these rope-soled sandals. The day was almost as warm as an English summer, and we ate a picnic under the walls of Richard Cœur de Lion’s castle, watching a shepherd check over his flock, some of whom had just begun lambing.
Our Good King Henry
On a bitterly cold morning, I went out to retrieve the post and saw a wild ginger kitten dart into the bamboo thicket. Domesticating a wild cat is, of course, the height of folly, since they always make terrible pets and will probably run away. All the same, he was damn cute. But he probably belonged to somebody.
A wild cat can smell a soft heart from a hundred kilometres away. The kitten took to reappearing at about eleven every morning. Quite soon, he was discovered in the kitchen, finishing off the breakfast left by Piglet and the Duchess. He then moved uphill to Annabel’s kitchen, but she had three ex-wild cats already and they were not welcoming. I decided to call him Henri Cat, after the great king of the Béarn, and of France.
‘A young man with a keen eye, black hair cut very close, thick eyebrows, and a nose curved like an eagle’s, with a sneering smile and a growing moustache and beard’ was how Alexandre Dumas imagined the youth who would soon be King Henri IV. His description matches the face of an anonymous but contemporary drawing of Henri at the age of eighteen. He was only a few months older when his mother died and he became King of Navarre. The year was 1572.
Henry was raised by feminists, or the nearest creatures to feminists that Renaissance France recognized. His grandmother was a free-thinking princess, Margaret of Angouleme, who attracted intellectuals of all disciplines to her brilliant court. Her husband, Henry II d’Albret, who had ruled the little kingdom of Navarre wisely and well, had no male heir. Their daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, married a local duke, Antoine de Bourbon.
Henri was born in Pau and legend states that his grandfather moistened the baby’s lips with Jurançon wine and a clove of garlic, an aromatic Béarnais baptism. Legend also states that Henry’s cradle was a tortoiseshell. Visitors to the chateau in Pau, where he was born, are duly shown the carapace of a giant tortoise, suspended on silk ropes from crossed spears, but the castle was lavishly restored in the late nineteenth century by the Empress Eugénie and the shell was discovered in a house in the town at that time.
Henri’s father then went back to the battlefield, leaving his mother, a passionate advocate of the new Protestant religion, to do as she liked with her kingdom, which she converted with fire, sword and English mercenaries. She naturally raised her son in the Protestant faith.
Jeanne d’Albret and her son were invited to Paris by another ruthless female ruler, Catherine de Médicis, the Italian-born queen-mother of France, who proposed that Henri should marry her daughter, Marguerite, in order to help reunite a country that was being torn apart by religious intolerance.
The Catholic view is that Jeanne then died of pleurisy, and the unfortunate massacre of the Protestants in Paris on the evening of St Bartholomew’s Day, shortly after the wedding, just happened. The Protestant view was that Catherine had Jeanne poisoned, and staged the wedding on purpose to draw a large number of Protestant leaders into Paris so that the Catholic elite could murder them. Jeanne’s unhappy ghost is said to haunt the forest of Iraty.
Henri won his place in history by the brilliance with which he tiptoed to the throne through this political minefield. He was a scruffy, garlic-breathed teenage princeling from an obscure and far-off province, and his accent was so strong the courtiers in Paris could hardly understand him. The Pope refused to bless his marriage to Marguerite, known as la reine Margot, so the wedding of the two teenagers took place on a special dais built outside the cathedral of Notre-Dame. They were both in love with other people at that time, and frequently afterwards.
Somehow – Alexandre Dumas attributes it to the cleverness of his wife – Henri survived the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. According to legend, when it was put to him later that Paris would never accept a Protestant as King, he said, ‘Paris is worth a mass,’ and converted to Catholicism. After his marriage he spent much of his time in Paris in prison or under house arrest. He finally escaped the toxic atmosphere of the court in 1576, re-converted to Protestantism and became the very able commander of the Huguenot resistance. The King, Catherine’s neurotic oldest son, died a hideous death, bleeding from every pore, either from poisoning or TB. His younger brothers did not last much longer, and Henri of Navarre became Henri IV of France in 1589. He was a popular ruler, not least for his famous promise that when he was king every peasant would have a chicken in the pot every Sunday.
Henri never went back to the Béarn, which he entrusted to the rule of his sister, Catherine. He did, however, pass the Edict of Nantes, which allowed both Catholic and Protestant religions to exist side-by-side in France for almost ninety years. Ironically, he was assassinated by a Catholic in 1610. To this day, most towns in the Béarn have both a Catholic church and a Protestant temple, and Henri remains a well-loved figure.
Ten years after Henri became king, he and Marguerite had gone their separate ways and he married the Tuscan princess, Marie di Médici. Marguerite was a beautiful and clever woman, who wrote poetry and a useful and amazingly frank volume of memoirs. Their marriage she regarded as the blight of her life, but it was an effective political alliance, and it seems a pity that it was never more, since they had a lot in common, not least a good appetite for la vie galante. One of the many legends about ‘la reine Margot’ is that she kept the hearts of her dead lovers in gold boxes, so it was perhaps as well for Henri that he was not among them.
Our First Guests
The beds were made, the croissants bought, the plans for New Year’s Eve laid. I drove to Dax to pick up our first visitors, Glynn and Carrie Boyd Harte, both painters, and Henrietta Green, food writer and founder of the farmers’ market movement. They arrived together on the TGV, exclaiming over the interminable boredom of the Landes. Half an hour later, and the serendipity of an outing in good company kicked in as soon as we stopped in Saliès-de-Béarn for the cashpoint at France’s most picturesque branch of the Credit Agricole.
Since everyone fell in love with Saliès immediately, and started to feel frisky after the journey, it seemed like a good opportunity to show Glynn the interior of the Hôtel du Parc. For reasons which nobody appreciates, this lovely building is in the hands of casino operators, who have filled its airy salons with fruit machines. Sedate as life in Saliès is, only a handful of old ladies are so desperate for a good time that they find the fruit machines irresistible. The place can be a ghost Las Vegas, the croupières in the gambling rooms sit chatting and inspecting their manicures all night and the machines twinkle into empty space.
The hotel was built in the glory days of Salies. A builder from Oloron Sainte-Marie, J.-B. Cazenave, commissioned by a local developer, completed most of the work in a year. In good Béarnais tradition, the developer then ran out of money and a hotelier from Arcachon, on the Atlantic coast just south of Bordeaux, took over the enterprise. The hotel was finished and opened for business in round about 1893, under the direction of the owner’s son, Gabriel Graner, whose initials, GG, are carved into the facades. It’s an imposing building, overlooking the thermal baths, and surrounded by a melancholically unkempt park.
After the Belle Époque, the White Russian princesses and the ‘sirs’ from England migrated to the Riviera, Saliés fell from fashion and the hotel’s fortunes continued to be chequered. An Alsatian family owned it for forty years, then sold it to a British hotel chain operating out of Jersey, who sold it to the commune in 1977, who restored it and made it into a holiday village for members of the public sector workers’ union, then decided that what the town really needed was a casino.
The chief beauty of the hotel is its main hall, a huge atri
um, whose walls are painted old-rose pink with squirly art nouveau flowers. It’s dominated by a sweeping double staircase of polished wood, which leads up to a series of Italianate galleries. The design is strangely similar to that of the bigger Basque churches.
Off the galleries would be the bedrooms, if the present management had got around to restoring them. The atrium is so huge, twenty-seven metres high and fifty-four metres long, that it has cost a bomb to restore and money ran out before the job was finished. It usually looks the picture of Edwardian elegance all the same. On that day the potted palms had been pushed aside and the art work was hard to see because the place was packed for the weekly tea dance.
A small band played a medley of Bearnais tunes and half the company was stepping out on the floor, girls in satin jeans, matrons in chiffon, a few older men perspiring in suits. Since some traditional Bearnais choreography is a close cousin of Texan line dancing, the body of the hall was filled by a crowd of smiling and self-absorbed individuals enjoying the pleasure of their own nifty footwork.
Glynn was enraptured, so there was nothing for it but to find a seat, order a round of the pink aperitif called pacheran and watch the spectacle. Even the discovery that pacheran tastes even more like cough-mixture than Campari could not spoil the magic of the hour. Just as well the daube in the oven, intended for our dinner, would only improve with longer cooking.
Recipes
Beef Daube
Daubes, hearty casseroles, are typical winter dishes all over the south of France and in previous centuries would have been cooked slowly for hours over the embers in the fireplace. In the Béarn, they used a special pot-bellied earthenware casserole with a well-fitting lid, called a toupin.
The Béarnais daube is one of the simplest, and traditionally has pork rind among the ingredients. The rind makes the juice exceptionally rich, and can either be used in one piece at the bottom of the casserole or cut into pieces with the meat. Most people now would prefer their casseroled beef in reasonably hearty chunks, but in past times the daube was made with small slices of meat about 5 mm (¼ in) thick.
One old trick which is worth trying, however, is to make the daube the day before you need it, without cutting off the fat attached to the meat. Chill the daube overnight, and before reheating it you will be able to render the dish fat-free easily by lifting off the dripping that has risen to the top and congealed.
A Béarnais daube is slightly spicy, flavoured with a mixture called quatre épices. It’s a blend of common spices which is used all over Gascony, especially in pates and casseroles. Coming from a region where nothing succeeds like excess, it naturally combines more than four spices, and most cooks make up their own mixture to suit their own taste, choosing from cloves, black or white pepper, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg or mace. The spices are, of course, a Moorish legacy, imported by the invaders from North Africa who overran Aquitaine and got as far north as Poitiers in the eighth century.
Serves 8
1.5kg (3½ lb) beef – shin, stewing beef, topside or silverside
6 shallots or 3 medium onions
500g (18oz) belly pork, salted or fresh, with the rind – if you are blessed with a real butcher, you can ask him to slice off the rind in one piece for you
1 bay leaf
several sprigs of thyme
6 cloves of garlic
1 tsp powdered quatre épices, or whole spices tied in a piece of muslin
1 tbsp chopped parsley or small bunch of parsley stalks
a pinch of salt
1 bottle of red wine
Preheat the oven to 130°C/ 275°F/ Gas 1.
Cut the beef into pieces of your preferred size. Peel and slice the shallots or onions. Cut the pork into small chunks; if you have been able to buy the pork with its rind, put the rind in the bottom of the casserole, fat-side down because the skin side will stick. Put the bay leaf and a sprig of thyme on top of it. Crush the garlic.
Put a layer of shallots or onions in the casserole, then a layer of meat. Sprinkle with the quatre épices, or add the whole spices tied in muslin, and the salt, garlic and herbs. Add a second layer of shallots or onions, a second layer of meat, then more herbs, and repeat until all these ingredients, including all the thyme and the salt, are in the casserole. Finally, heat the wine in a small saucepan, let it boil for about 5 minutes to reduce it, then pour over the meat and flavourings.
Put the lid on the casserole, with a piece of foil or a damp cloth if it does not fit tightly, and cook in the centre of the oven for 5 hours. If you want to serve the daube immediately, simply take it out of the oven and pick out the bay leaf, thyme stalks and any whole spices – carefully, because the meat will be meltingly tender. Then serve with mashed or baked potato, or polenta.
If you’re making the dish the day before you need it, you can then leave it to cool in the oven with the heat turned off, and transfer it to the refrigerator. The next day, pick off the surface fat and reheat for an hour at the same oven setting.
Hot St Clement’s Cake with Jurançon
This is not a classic recipe, but my own take, with Béarnais flavours, on the light dessert cake found all around the Mediterranean, and wherever the Moors traded almonds. Jurançon wine, from the vineyards near Pau, comes in sweet and dry versions. The dry is a favourite aperitif, while the sweet Jurançon, chilled, is the proper accompaniment to foie gras. It is a delicate, fresh dessert wine, incapable of cloying, neither as complex as Sauternes nor as perfumed as Beaumes de Venise, though you could use either as a substitute in this recipe.
For the cake
175g (6oz) unsalted butter
175g (6oz) caster sugar
1 medium orange
3 large eggs, separated
90g (3oz) self-raising flour
85 ml (3½ fl oz) Jurançon wine
90 g (3oz) ground almonds
For the sauce
1 medium orange
1 lemon
30g (1 oz) granulated sugar
a pinch of espelette or chilli powder
3 tbsp Jurançon wine
Allow the butter to soften to room temperature. Preheat the oven to l60°C/ 325°F/ Gas 3. Grease a 20cm (8 in) cake tin. The sort with a loose base are almost idiot-proof.
Tempting as it will be to make the cake in a mixer, it would not be as light as it will be if you start it off with a wooden spoon and elbow-grease. By this method, cream together the butter and caster sugar until pale and fluffy. Grate the orange zest and fold into the mixture, then gradually beat in the egg yolks, followed by 2 tbsp of flour and the Jurançon wine. Next, take a metal spoon and lightly fold in half the almonds, then half the remaining flour, then the rest of the almonds, and finally the last of the flour.
Whisk the egg whites until firm and peaky, then, with the metal spoon, fold them into the mixture. Spoon it into the cake tin and bake in the centre of the oven for about 50 minutes, or until you can stick a skewer in the centre and pull it out unsmeared.
While the cake cooks, make the sauce which will turn it into a wickedly sticky dessert. Pare off the peel from the orange and lemon and slice into fine strips. Put the peel, the sugar, the espelette or chilli powder and 100 ml (4 fl oz) of water in a small saucepan and stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer for 10 minutes, then leave to work up more flavour.
Squeeze the juice of the orange and the lemon. When the cake is ready, turn it out of its tin and place on a wire rack to allow the bottom to cool a little without getting soggy. Take the strips of peel out of the sauce, add the fruit juice and the Jurançon wine, turn on the heat and simmer until reduced by half. Carefully transfer the still-warm cake on its serving plate, make some tiny holes all over it with the skewer, and drizzle the sauce over the cake until it is all absorbed. Make a pile of the candied peel in the centre, and allow to cool before serving. An orange sorbet, ice cream or creme fraiche is a good accompaniment.
January
Alexandre Dumas, Béarnais at heart
Happ
y New Beret
Glynn needed to buy a beret. This was to go with his corduroy suit, which he had made by a tailor in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, and wore with co-respondent shoes, into whose origins I have never enquired, and a tweed overcoat outdoors. Whereas the proper topping for this rig in England would be a flat cap, Glynn asserted his Francophilia with a beret, and could be seen bustling round his home turf of Fitzrovia, the former Bloomsbury territory in central London, gazing keenly about from under the overhang of his favourite accessory.
A good beret is a vulnerable piece of headgear. Many a moth had got a good start in life from one of Glynn’s berets during the summer break, stuffing itself into a pupa on the high-quality wool and leaving large holes to be discovered with howls of anguish round about the beginning of October. Glynn’s last beret was stolen on a TGV somewhere, the price you pay for only buying the best.
He had come to the right place, because the French beret certainly originated round here, and was adopted by the Basques as a symbol of their nationalism about a hundred and fifty years ago. Therefore, I suggested, the best place to look for a beret shop would be in Bayonne, the capital of the Basque Country in France.
Bayonne was in a festive frenzy, which is its preferred state. Architecturally, it is a dignified and prosperous city built on the rising ground around two majestic rivers, the Adour and its tributary, the Nive. The river embankments and behind are terraced with handsome half-timbered Basque townhouses, their exposed beams painted blue, green or the signature colour of Euskadi, ox-blood red. The shady cobbled streets rise steeply to the walls of the double-spired cathedral.
Deep France Page 6