If there is a national sauce of the Béarn, it would be a thick, spicy puree of tomatoes, which turns up frequently with grilled meat and fish, and with vegetable gratins. Of course, you want to make this with real tomatoes, big red bulging monsters full of sweetness and flavour, which you don’t find anywhere in January, but tinned chopped tomatoes, enriched with some of the sun-dried kind, are just about acceptable.
25 g (¾oz) duck fat or olive oil
2 white onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
700g (1 lb 9oz) tomatoes, peeled, skinned and chopped
2 tbsp chopped sun-dried tomato
salt and black pepper
1 tsp sugar
a pinch of piment d’espelette
thyme sprigs and a bay leaf
Put the fat or oil in a saucepan over a low heat, add the onions and sweat until translucent. Add the garlic and sweat for another couple of minutes, then add all the rest of the ingredients, and a little water. Simmer, uncovered, for about an hour, adding more water if necessary, then remove the herbs and purée with the aid of a blender. Before serving, check the seasoning and see if a little more sugar wouldn’t be a good idea.
February
‘Sent Pançard – votez pour moi!’
The Big Freeze
This has been the coldest winter most people can remember. The lowest temperature recorded was 26° below freezing, in the town of Mont-de-Marsan, just north-west of here, in the Landes. Some people considered that Mont-de-Marsan is an ugly, rugby-crazed place which would only have been improved if its balls had frozen off; in Saliès-de-Béarn, however, all the fountains had frozen into icebergs and people were rolling their eyes and muttering about the cost of burst pipes and the damage to the Renaissance stonework.
The cows stood stoically in the fields, probably because the earth was just too damn cold to lie down. Their breath billowed in front of them in clouds of steam. The signs overhanging the motorway spelled out ‘PRUDENCE!’ in flashing lights.
I could have spent all morning watching the morning mist clear from the mountains, identifying the sharpest peaks and trying to make out the five separate ranges which Annabel assured me were there. In the afternoon, when the air was clear and as warm as it was going to get, the snow sparkled above the highest crags. Below, the mid-ranges did a constant dance of the seven veils, as the layers of air shifted.
A green shoulder would be revealed, prismatically clear, looking falsely close like a pebble in the bottom of a rock pool. Just as you were wondering if you really could count the blades of grass, the air turned opaque in that area, but cleared higher up, and a sharp, grey stone peak you’d never seen before came into focus. As I drove into Sauveterre for my Times every afternoon, I was in serious danger of leaving the road because I couldn’t stop watching the mountains.
In French class we were learning how to describe the way you look. Punk hairstyle – coiffé à la punk. This dress makes me look thinner – cette robe me minçit, or elle me flatte. Nobody asks how to say ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ Such relief.
Renée instructs us in a more colloquial use of the word for thin. Nobody in the Béarn would dream of using a vulgar expression like ‘Oh, shit!’ she says. Only people in New Wave films in the Sixties actually exclaimed, ‘Merde!’ And people in Paris, of whom one can believe anything. The polite usage is not ‘merde!’ but ‘mince!’ We try it. ‘Oh – thin! I’ve forgotten my keys!’ It sounds particularly odd when Chris, the Australian, says it.
We move on to ages. Je suis une femme mûre, I am a middle-aged woman, says Renée, laying her elegant hand on her girlish bosom. Literally, I’m a ripe woman. There are general gasps when Renée reveals that she is actually sixty-three. She looks at least twenty years younger. It’s cheering to figure out that by this scale of reckoning, I am merely a green girl.
Screams of laughter issue from the next door classroom, where Dominique is trying to control the beginners’ class. ‘Non, mais alors!’ protests Renée, flinging wide the door with play-acted indignation. You get the feeling that after a lifetime of imposing the rigid discipline of a French school-room, it’s quite relaxing for her to be shepherding these devil-may-care foreigners through the glories of the language.
The comedian among the beginners is Fiona, a dark-haired New Zealand girl with round glasses and sparkling eyes. In her present situation, all she can do is have a laugh. With her husband, Gordon, and their two small children, she’s living in an unheated former stables in the grounds of a little chateau at the hamlet of Berenx, and watching their life savings freeze to death.
Gordon, her Australian husband, arrived in the Béarn eighteen months ago, with a ship-load of baby tree ferns. The idea was that in the mild, humid climate of the Béarn they would grow twice as fast as in their native New Zealand, and be ready to sell in the UK within a year. In New Zealand, the tree ferns can grow to sixty feet high. In the UK, and in Europe, tree ferns anywhere between three and nine feet high are the most fashionable thing you can install in an urban patio.
Gordon had a friend who had figured out that tree ferns grown on in France would turn a quick profit, and persuaded Gordon and Fiona to buy into his business. Since New Zealand wasn’t offering Gordon a great deal in the way of a future, he and Fiona decided to sell up their house, sink half their cash into green fronds and come over to France.
Nobody expected the big chill, which had turned the green fronds brown and quite possibly killed the lot. Fiona invited me over to inspect the damage. Thousands of baby tree ferns, in eight-centimetre black pots, were bedded in the undergrowth in a small patch of woodland near the stables. At the start of the winter, she had covered the crowns with a thick layer of dead leaves, which turned out to be no protection at all against the freezing weather.
High in the treetops above are the wooden tree houses built by the chateau’s original owner for hunting palombes, the wild doves who used to fly over in vast flocks on their way south for the winter. Now the autumns bring only a few thousand palombes and their migration route is closer to the coast. When storms thrash the trees, the hunters’ hides rattle towards total dilapidation and random planks fall off to the ground below.
Their partner in the fern enterprise was building a greenhouse to protect the stock. All the outbuildings of the chateau are still in place but crumbling. Among them is an original nineteenth-century glasshouse, built on to the south side of the stable block, but between the scrolled ironwork half the panes were smashed and nobody has thought to fix it up.
In the stable building, which unfortunately faces north and has no windows at all on the sunny south side, the temperature in the sitting room is just 5°; it was as cold as a fridge. There is very little furniture. Most of Fiona’s household stuff is still packed up and stored in the cellar, waiting for the day they put the rest of their money into a home of their own. The two children, Cam, who’s nine and Margot, six, are huddled in duvets on a divan in front of the TV.
Mardi Gras – Not to Mention Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi and Samedi
‘There’s a carnival in Pau,’ I said. ‘They’re having pig racing on Friday. Why don’t we go?’ Sandy didn’t believe me. Annabel said it was too cold. Fiona had just been to Pau to take the children to the circus. Nobody else was interested, so I set off alone.
It was already two days since the Tuesday on which the festivities had started with the ceremonial arrival of the bears from the mountains. Pretend bears, obviously since catching a wild one would have been both dangerous and politically incorrect, not to mention damn tricky. The men in bear costumes were accompanied by others disguised as wild men from the mountains, and they roamed the streets indulging in a little licensed vandalism, jumping on restaurant tables and pretending to terrorize the populace.
In the mountains, the bears would be waking from hibernation around this time. There are still estimated to be a few dozen brown bears in the Pyrenees but they are not a common sight; in my year, I met only one
person who had seen evidence of them, bear prints in the snow beside a mountain trail.
By Friday, the festivities had moved on to the legend of Sent Pançard, the carnival king who gets a brief day of misrule before being captured, put on trial and ceremonially burned. In case anyone should be in doubt as to the permitted scale of Saturnalia, the programme, in French and Béarnais, contained the mission statement:
Carnival means:
dancing and singing and bopping till you drop
being kind, and funny, and tolerant;
dressing like a woman if you’re a man;
dressing like a man if you’re a woman;
wearing a mask and disguising your voice;
denouncing injustice and authority;
winding up all the self-satisfied vinegar-pissers;
cutting loose, rebelling, letting your fantasies run wild;
and being proud to be Béarnais, whether you were born here or elsewhere.
The programme also bore witness to an impressive list of sponsors, including the tourist board, the regional development agency, the newspaper La République, the radio station France Bleu Béarn, the association of charcutiers, the Béarnais language and cultural institute, Intermarché, the vineyards, many farmers and small businesses, and a bakery.
Nevertheless, it seemed at first as if the citizens of Pau were well able to resist the invitation to enjoy forbidden delights. They were tearing out of their offices in large numbers and making for the car parks, eager to get home out of the freezing drizzle. Or perhaps they were still recovering from the all-night fancy-dress disco at the students’ union the night before. Only a small knot of people, mostly with tiny children, had gathered in the small Place Gramont where the procession was due to start. Across the road, a couple of police cars were parked, their drivers standing about waiting for the action.
Quite soon, the carnival king joined us. At some point in Gascon history, perhaps when the Protestants were in charge, it was decided that the good-living population was having far too much fun with the traditional feast before the deprivations of Lent. Or perhaps the moral tale of Sent Pançard, the carnival king, has more ancient roots, and was acted out right back in pre-Roman days, when the ancient Gauls were famous pig-keepers. The character is certainly a close cousin of Gargantua, the greedy giant of Celtic origin whose exploits were satirically recorded by Rabelais in the sixteenth century.
Whatever his ancestry, the enactment of the rise and fall of Sent Pançard is the centrepiece of the carnival festivities, and in Pau the whole masquerade had been elevated into a political satire, as befits a university town and a seat of government. He had spent the week electioneering.
With a huge false belly, bright red cheeks, a tottering gold-foil crown and the essential string of sausages around his neck, an actor playing Sent Pançard worked his striped socks off pressing the flesh, kissing babies, meeting the mayor and introducing himself personally to every single member of the crowd. ‘Sent Pançard,’ he said ingratiatingly, ‘vote for me!’ The manifesto for his regime was simple: eat, drink and party on.
The carnival had been going on all week, and this was to be the final night of sacrilegious feasting, when Sent Pançard invited his fellow ruler, San Porquin, the pig king, to a night of gluttony and excess. In due course, when about a hundred people were in the square, San Porquin appeared through a gateway to a hidden courtyard. The pig king was another actor, this time in a black monk’s habit, with a string of garlic around his neck, riding on a dark brown Pyrenean donkey.
After him, a golden statue of a pig on a red-curtained palanquin emerged through the gateway, carried shoulder-high by twelve men in red and gold satin robes and black berets. As the procession formed up, various figures representing Sent Pançard’s government appeared, including a fake bishop and a Ku Klux Klan figure in red satin. In front of them came a troupe of dancers in white shirts and trousers set off with scarlet sashes and green berets, accompanied by a lone fiddler.
Finally the police got back into their cars, turned on their flashing lights and moved to block the traffic on the processional route. With the dancers hopscotching gravely in the vanguard, and a good crowd of people now in place to line the route, the procession set off uphill towards Pau’s largest urban space, the Place Verdun, where a huge marquee had been erected.
The pigs were not compelled to walk the whole route. They were waiting in a small cattle truck at the corner of the square, watched over by five marshals, in red jackets and red berets, armed with sticks. As the procession slowly drew level, the marshals ceremonially opened the tailgate of the van. Inside were nine pedigree porkers, blissfully asleep on their bed of clean straw. The crowd laughed and somebody told me an old Gascon saying: seven hours of sleep for a man, eight for a woman and nine for a pig.
The marshals respectfully prodded the animals awake. They were not enthusiastic, so the youngest man was sent into the van to heave them bodily onto their trotters, then push them out onto the ramp to take their place of honour at the head of the cavalcade. The pigs were all light-skinned examples of the local breed, the Cochon Noir de Gascogne, ranging in colour from dark ash to fresh pink with grey spots.
Now bumbling forward at the pace of a dozy pig, the procession left the road and proceeded between crash barriers towards the marquee. Halfway down this path was parked a smart vintage van, reminiscent of a Harrods brougham, but painted in red and cream, with the words Jambon de Bayonne on the side.
The van was a mobile deli, whose sides could be opened to reveal a counter, on which a massive ham was displayed on a stand, ready to be carved. Behind this, in the body of the vehicle, more hams dangled from the roof and a fresh-faced young man in a red jersey was sharpening his carving knife. His hands were covered in immaculate white muslin gloves.
As the pigs approached the van, he began to carve the ham into slices so thin you could have read a newspaper through them, piling them reverently onto a serving plate on the counter. When the pigs were level with the ham, the procession halted for a minute, to allow the carver to bow to them. The crowd cheered, the pigs looked thoroughly bored and seemed determined to get back to bed as fast as possible.
The parade continued until it reached the doors of the tent, where huge platters of fine charcuterie and crates of Jurançon and Madiran wine were waiting for the festival crowd. Beyond the aperitif area, tables were laid up ready for the promised repas gastronomique prepared by the restaurant Chez Ruffet: pâté en croûte, jellied pig’s ears, shoulder of pork with spring vegetables, prunes with Grand Marnier ice cream, for €24. Not having a ticket, I went home and made an omelette, but felt an entirely new sense of respect as I ripped open a packet of ready-chopped lardons.
Lent Will Be A Little Late This Year
Next morning, my description of the night of the pig king was colourful enough to inspire Annabel, and in the evening we set off together for Pau. The main event was to be the trial of Sent Pançard for the hideous crime of feasting in Lent, and we arrived in time to see him being dragged through the streets in a cage of bamboo, like an American prisoner of war in Vietnam. His fate was to endure a travesty of justice in front of the Law Courts, to be found guilty of causing all the social problems the citizens found most annoying, and then to be burned to death, accompanied by a firework display and dancing.
This time the whole town was in carnival mood. People were dressed as cows, sunflowers, clowns and political figures – Osama bin Laden and Jacques Chirac were popular. Sent Pançard’s cortège was escorted by huge papier mâché effigies of the mythical giants of the Pyrenees, they who are supposed to live in caves and to have set up the standing stones and built the colossal walls and houses of boulders which can be found in the mountains.
One giant had only one eye, in the centre of his forehead. Another was stuffed with straw and covered in animal skins. A third was an old man with a three-metre beard and silver hair. The legends of the Pyrenees feature so many giants that there was proba
bly one for every mountain. They are supposed to have given the Basque people all the wonderful discoveries that set Homo sapiens on the road to world domination, including fire, agriculture, metallurgy and the saw.
There was also a lady giant with a blue face and red hair, probably Mari, the Great Goddess, who was worshipped in one form or another all through Europe before the Indo-European people spread from the east with their modern patriarchal religions. Mari was supposed to travel along the chain of the Pyrenees in a ball of fire, blazing from peak to peak, accompanied by her dragon lover, hurling thunderbolts at anyone who annoyed her.
Marching along in the cold was tiring, so we sat down at a cafe for refreshment, only to be set upon by a band of students dressed as bee-keeping monks. One of them carried a pot of honey and the rest brandished wooden spoons. They were spreading the carnival spirit by going from bar to bar dipping the spoons in the honey and giving every customer a sticky dab on the back of the hand.
When we ventured into the marquee we found another Béarnais tradition in action. It is an unwritten rule of national festivities that a fête is not a fête unless at least three bands are playing at the same time. So at one end of the tent, under the red-and-yellow Béarnais flag with its two cows walking in the same direction, and a banner proclaiming ‘Le Béarn, j’y crois!’ were four musicians, satin-clad and masked, one with a tuba, one with a clarinet, and two with sheepskin bagpipes.
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