If not to be eaten fresh, the sausages were dried or preserved en confit. All this bounty was then stored on high shelves or suspended from the beams in the living room, out of the reach of rats and mice. In a peasant community, the hams hanging from the beams were a symbol of the wealth of the household.
There is another story about Henri IV, who, when installed on the throne among all the magnificence of the royal court in Paris, was visited by his old wet-nurse from Pau. When she saw that there were no hams hanging from the ceiling, she exclaimed, ‘Henri! My love, you must be starving – I’ll send you a ham as soon as I get home!’
The gastronomic crown of this tradition is Bayonne ham, to which the French foodie establishment has accorded AOC status, meaning that the title can only be applied to an item produced according to a strictly defined method. Like the hams from Parma in Italy or Serrano in Spain, a Bayonne ham is salted then air-dried, so the slices are dark red and translucent.
The meat must come from a pig raised in the Béarn, the Basque Country or the Armagnac region, and cured using salt from Saliès-de-Béarn and from Bayonne. First the fine white salt from Saliès is rubbed into the pork legs over a three-day period, giving the ham its dense flavour and colour. The cured hams are then stored in boxes of coarse, greyish Bayonne salt for a year, before being rubbed with pepper and hung up to dry. Refined diners usually like their Bayonne ham wafer-thin, but the traditional slice preferred by the Bearnais is a whole lot heartier.
Recipes
I found a recipe for traditional carnival fritters, called Rats’ Tails, an enriched step up from everyday doughnuts, which are often flavoured with orange-flower water. This wasn’t difficult to buy. The small blue bottles of perfumed flavouring were in every shop and on the stalls in the markets selling nuts, olives and spices.
Orange-flower water is one of the Moorish legacies in south-west France. In Morocco, and all over North Africa, market traders still sit beside small hills of fresh orange flowers and rosebuds, heaped up simply on a cloth on the ground. The blooms are bought by the spice merchants, who distil their own essences from them. The label of the French-produced orange-flower water confessed to both natural and artificial flower essences, but it was still a delicate flavouring that instantly evoked hot summer days in the dead of winter.
In Béarnais cooking, orange-flower water is often used in desserts and pastries where an English recipe would call for vanilla. Not content with a single note of aroma, many Béarnaise cooks make up their own mixture of sweet flavourings, using orange-flower water, citrus peel, rum, Armagnac, anise and almond extract in various proportions.
Rats’ Tails
4 eggs
100g (3½oz) caster sugar, plus extra for dredging
500g (1 lb 2oz) plain flour
20g (¾oz) or a small packet of yeast
50ml (1½floz) oil
100 ml (4floz) double cream
1 tbsp orange-flower water
oil for deep-frying
Break the eggs into a spacious bowl. Beat them lightly, then beat in the sugar, flour and yeast, little by little. Add the oil, cream and orange-flower water and continue beating until thoroughly smooth.
Put the frying oil over a gentle heat. Take a generous teaspoon of the dough and roll it between the palms of your hands to make a long, thin rat’s tail. Continue until all the dough is shaped, by which time the oil should be hot enough to fry the fritters in batches until they are golden and puffed. Drain, dredge with sugar, and hand out to hungry children in paper cones.
If making Rats’ Tails for adults, add a few dashes of rum to the batter.
Crème Caramel au Fleur d’Oranger
Once in the cupboard, the orange-flower water became a compulsion. I used it to sprinkle on a winter fruit salad of oranges with toasted almonds, or on slices of grilled pineapple to be served with ice cream. It gave a wonderful lift to milky nursery puddings, and a new zing to a simple crème caramel.
My crème caramel recipe comes from my tattered, butter-splattered, first-ever recipe book, Len Deighton’s Action Cookbook. The crème caramel recipe is on page 118, and I’ve used it so often that the book now falls open there. Deighton, as well as a thriller writer extraordinaire, was a damn fine cookery writer and, after Elizabeth David, one of the best-known authors who popularized French cooking in Britain in the Sixties. He learned to cook as a student waiting tables to pay his way through art school.
850ml (1½ pints) milk
6 eggs
225g (8oz) sugar, vanilla sugar if you keep it
1 tsp orange-flower water
butter for greasing
1 orange, peeled and sliced prettily
You will need
A mould – with its dark caramel top and creamy custard-coloured sides, crème caramel looks great in any shape of mould. I use a glass ring mould or a fluted kugelhopf tin.
A water jacket – which means a shallow dish or tin filled with water. This diffuses the oven heat and stops the crème caramel cooking too quickly and getting hard and ugly, with those bad little bubbles. If you can rest the mould on something like a couple of wooden skewers, to keep it off the bottom of the container, the result is even better.
This is a very simple dish, so you will get the most luscious results with the very best ingredients – fresh organic eggs and fresh organic whole milk. If you choose industrially produced eggs and half-fat milk, you get something lighter, paler and lower in fat and calories. It’s an easy dessert to make in the morning of, or the day before, a dinner party and leave peacefully in the fridge until you need it.
Preheat the oven to l60°C/325°F/Gas3. Scald the milk, which means bring it almost to boiling point. In a bowl of at least 1.4 litres (2.5 pint) size, beat the eggs and 90g (3oz) of sugar thoroughly. Slowly pour the milk into this mixture, beating all the time. Add the orange-flower water.
Put the rest of the sugar in a heavy-bottomed small saucepan and melt it. It should go dark brown, but not black. Grease the sides of your mould with a smear of butter; don’t grease the bottom, the cooked caramel will unmould of its own accord. If you don’t keep butter, use a film of oil, but don’t resort to any kind of spread for greasing the mould, it will taste revolting.
Pour the caramelized sugar into the bottom of the mould, tilting it to coat evenly. Then pour in the custard, put the mould in the water jacket, put it all in the oven and cook for about 45 minutes. It’s better to err on the side of caution with the heat; after about half an hour, check that the crème is actually cooking. The surface should have risen a very little. If not, turn up the heat – cautiously – and check again in five minutes.
When the crème caramel is cooked, take it out of the oven and let it cool before putting it in the fridge to chill. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the custard, put the serving plate over the mould, take a deep breath, say a prayer, hold the plate steady and turn the whole thing over. The crème caramel should flop gently down into a puddle of its own sauce. If it doesn’t, give it a gentle shake. Fill the mould and the saucepan with cold water to dissolve the remaining caramel.
Decorate the plate with the orange slices and serve.
March
Golden-glazed confit pot
The snow melted. There were four different species of violets blooming in the garden: very tiny dark purple ones, bigger purple ones, blue-and-white speckled ones and pink ones. They were so abundant that it was impossible to walk across the grass without treading on them. ‘You don’t have lawn here,’ said an English woman with a wistful voice and a little house in the next village. ‘It’s more like meadow, really.’
The weather was milder, but still stormy. I began digging the vegetable garden. The original patch had been almost overgrown with grass, and nothing but some strawberry plants had survived. Being under the mimosa tree, whose gloomy overhang was taking over the ground about the rate of two metres a year, it was doomed anyway.
I’d asked for a book on growing vegetables for Christmas, a
nd Chloe had given me Monty Don’s Fork to Fork. In his previous incarnation, Monty Don had a wonderful jewellery shop in Knightsbridge, on Beauchamp Place. I still had at least two pairs of his ear-rings, including some fabulous diamante chandeliers, which I did not anticipate wearing that year.
His book is full of inspiring pictures of a vegetable garden as a jewellery designer would plan it, intricate, precise, neat square beds of velvet-black earth, hoed to total submission between little willow fences. The garden of Maison Bergez is more a piece of wilderness. Almost a mountain wilderness, since it slopes steeply. There are plenty of hazel bushes, with long straight branches, from which I could have made little fences easily, as long as I had no plans to do anything else with my life for a few weeks. But the ground is uneven and no portion of it is anything like flat. It divides into the tamer area close to the house, where the grass is finer and there are a few flowering shrubs, and the wild area beyond a geriatric lavender hedge, which gets the full sun.
I spent a wet morning drawing an ambitious plan for a semicircular plot in the sunniest position, divided into four triangles like a demi-Camembert, with a new lavender bush at the inner corners and wigwams of hazel twigs for beans and sweet peas on the uphill sections.
Sweet peas are my favourite flower. On my eighteenth birthday, the first time a man ever gave me flowers, it was a posy of multicoloured sweet peas. There’s something utterly romantic about the intense scent and the brilliant colour carried by blooms as fragile as butterfly wings. Back in London I could only manage to squeeze a few sweet peas into a pot on the patio. Now I wanted to grow them in towers of flowers, the way I remembered from the gardens of my childhood.
The downhill sections were to be devoted to tomatoes, courgettes, herbs and artichokes. I had been fantasizing about growing artichokes for years, imagining the huge grey-green fountains of foliage topped with great purple globes. In Ossages, in the terraced vegetable garden behind her house, Marie grew enough artichokes to feed an army. I once complimented her on them, and explained that in London an artichoke could cost as much as fifteen francs. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and horror, and the next time we went for dinner she treated us to a huge platter of artichoke hearts, fried in butter and piled three deep.
In December and January I had gone out with gloves, hoe and secateurs to exterminate the brambles which had invaded the beds around the house. Adding these to the dead leaves, the fallen branches, and all the sad detritus of neglect, I had made a bonfire over half the projected vegetable patch. The potters, out walking their three yappy white dogs, came in to inspect the works and offer advice. No way could I have a bonfire without permission from the mairie, they said. Rubbish, said Annabel. But the mayor was said to be very correct. So I compromised, and let the fire burn slowly on a still day. The ash was added to the heaped leaves on my very first compost heap, down on the far side of the garden. A compost heap! What joy.
The fire had done what I hoped it would do, and burned off the grass and weeds over a large area. With the beds marked out with string, I left this easy bit until last, and began digging into virgin turf. It was such hard work that I could only manage about an hour a day, which was handy since I was so impatient to start planting that I would never have got any writing done if I’d been able to dig all day.
A routine established itself. I wrote from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m., by which time it was 12.30 in London, the hour at which publishers go out to lunch and newspaper editors need their copy for the next day’s edition. I lunched à l’anglaise, on bread and cheese, then went out to dig until 3 p.m., by which time the shops in Sauveterre would be open and I could make the trip in for my newspapers and the post. I would then be back at my desk at 4 p.m., which was 3 p.m. in London. Talking to my editor was becoming increasingly important.
A red squirrel appeared in the walnut tree as soon as the icy weather gave way to milder days. Soon he was waking me up at dawn every morning by dancing all over the roof. He was extremely shy, and never came out if he thought that the cats or I were in the garden, unlike Squirrel Nutter, the grey squirrel who stops by my London yard, who runs down the tree trunks yammering insults at Piglet and the Duchess.
Fat Rabbit, however, was not shy in the least. He deluded himself that if he froze, and allowed only his jaws and whiskers to move, I wouldn’t be able to see him. He spent long periods posed like a rabbit-shaped tea-cosy, thinking that he was invisible. This worked perfectly on Piglet, who stalked importantly around the garden looking for game and never noticed that there was an overfed rodent right in front of him. Fat Rabbit had a favourite patch over by the new compost heap, and sat there, as still as a cardboard cutout, watching me at work. Since his eyes were on the sides of his head, he could turn a full profile and still keep me in view.
A Proposition
By now, dropping into la Maysou to pass on my Times had become almost a daily habit and Gerald had laid in a bottle of gin especially to tempt me over at aperitif time. Annabel cleared her throat nervously and announced that the Club International Salisien would like me to give a talk about writing to their members. On the face of it, this should have been easy. I have a standard lecture on storytelling and popular fiction which adapts to almost any occasion, even as an after-dinner entertainment for a convention of dentists.
Translating this, however, would take me about a week and I was not at all certain that my French was up to expounding my theories of narrative structure. Annabel proposed that we consult a professional translator who finds the club useful for keeping up her English.
We met in Annabel’s family room on a Sunday afternoon. The translator wore the local insignia of a professional woman of a certain age, the silk scarf of the Hermès-Gucci school. I often wondered what iconography a British design guru would ascribe to this item. The scarf is always worn with an outfit which might be called ‘classic’, and is perhaps worn in the hope of persuading people that the rest of the wearer’s wardrobe came from the same posh shop.
In British fashion history, the scarf was de rigeur for the Country Life girls-in-pearls beauty, who wore it like a man’s cravat, tucked into the neck of a hacking jacket, or tied over her hair, ideal for showing off a fine-boned jaw and keeping the ears warm. In rural France, however, there is no such thing as country-living chic and the silk scarf is supposed to evoke international A-list glamour. It is folded precisely, tied loosely in the clavicle region, and sometimes pinned down with a brooch. Women confident that they have swan-like necks also fold the scarf into a ribbon shape and knot it tightly at the throat, in the manner of Zizi Jeanmarie and other gamine beauties of the 1950s. The less confident show it off knotted around the handles of a handbag, for which, of course, you need the kind of self-standing handbag favoured by the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. The translator had decided to make her own style statement and knot her scarf around the high polo neck of her sweater, which must have been sweltering, even at the chilly end of the room.
After only a few weeks, the silk scarf thing had got to me. Back into the drawer went the pashmina and the Georgina von Etzdorf chiffon artwork, which were making my French associates nervous. I found myself digging out my own Hermès-Gucci lookalike, a heavy silk square printed with intertwined harness and snaffles and gold, which, apart from a few bank manager meetings, had seldom seen the light of day since leaving the airport shop where I had bought it a decade earlier. I was turning native.
I had turned my speaking notes, a few scribbles on a postcard, into a coherent text, and printed it out. In the section where I usually talked about fairy tales, mythology and the collective subconscious, I added the strangely similar stories of the discovery of the hot springs in the region, all legends of the universal wisdom-of-nature genre.
In Saliès, Gaston Fébus discovered the salt spring when out hunting. The viscount wounded a boar, and the animal instinctively ran to the hot spring to bathe its wounds in the curative waters. Being a magical animal, the boar could speak, and its dying words to
the hunters were, ‘If I had not died here, none of you would live here,’ or, in Béarnais, ‘Si you nou y eri mourt arres no y bibere.’ Frankly, this is one of those resonant bits of folklore that doesn’t make sense. Not to me, anyway. If the waters are so curative, why didn’t the boar get better? And the hunters were living there anyway, weren’t they? All the same, that’s the legend, and the boar’s words are carved on the fountain on the main square, so there can be no argument about them.
Other local legends are more coherent. There’s a mountain spa which was reputedly found by an old war horse whose owner couldn’t bear to kill it, and abandoned it in a remote valley. One slurp of the magical spring and the venerable charger came cantering down the valley to meet his master, as sprightly as a young stallion. In Dax, the story goes that a Roman centurion who had been called to the front threw his arthritic old dog into the river to drown it, rather than abandon it to suffer while he was away fighting. The waters worked their magic, and the centurion found his dog jumping up to greet him when he returned from the battle.
The club’s secretary, who was Dutch, had already translated the biography on the back of my last book. I sounded so much more impressive in French. My style of writing (une brillante satirique sociale) and the highlights of my career to date (elle a écrit 7 nouvelles dont la dernière, ‘Épreuve d’Amour’, est une comédie romantique. La production de Tom Cruise l’a retenue pour un film avec le star Nicole Kidman) lost the weary familiarity which an author gets after writing the guff on book jackets for fifteen years, and took on a fresh, new glamour.
Describing the actual subject of the lecture, however, had been a problem. ‘Storytelling’ is one thing, ‘comment raconter des histoires’ isn’t the same thing. ‘Narration’ didn’t quite do it, either. The words for ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’ didn’t have the same meaning, either. In fact, there seemed to be no way in French to express the idea of constructing a narrative as part of literary technique. No wonder the French New Wave authors were so mad for the deconstructed novel.
Deep France Page 11