Deep France

by Celia Brayfield

  Jospin had polled only 16.1 per cent of the votes, and so the final race for the Presidency was between Chirac, with 19.8 per cent and Le Pen with 16.9 per cent. On the television, sobbing students, clutching handfuls of their pre-Raphaelite hair in despair, were interviewed outside the Socialist Party HQ. Le Pen was filmed at a rally of his supporters, unwisely leaping around a thrust stage decorated with mock flambeaux, which made him look like an elderly demon capering arthritically in the mouth of hell.

  Overnight, Le Pen posters appeared on a hoarding around a municipal building site in Saliès. The mayor immediately directed a workman to scrape them off, a task he performed with great ceremony before the approving eyes of the whole town. A single graffito for the Front Nationale appeared on the bridge carrying the slip road to the motorway, and was officially painted out the same day.

  Jospin had carried only eight departments, seven of them in the South-West, so Gascony as a whole could hold its head up. The maps which quickly appeared in the local papers showed that the Landes and the Gers were solid Jospin country. Our department, 64, had voted Chirac but that, it was generally agreed, was only the fault of the Basques, who were notorious diehard conservatives.

  By the weekend, over two thousand students were on the streets in Pau, demonstrating against ‘hatred and racism’ with hastily hand-drawn placards and red-and-yellow Béarnais flags. Naturally, a complement of Béarnais singers and musicians were among them, with an African drumming club to underline the mood of the meeting. Those who had voted for the minority candidates openly blamed themselves for the disaster.

  They soon had their own slogan: ‘first, second, or third generation – we are all the children of immigrants’. ‘That’s the end of the bof generation,’ said a more mature onlooker, meaning that none of the demonstrators would ever let themselves sink into apathy again. However, they went home in an orderly fashion, unlike the mob in Paris who had to be dispersed by riot police with tear gas. The cops shouted, ‘Ça suffit’ before they fired, an exclamation normally heard from kindergarten teachers at the end of their tether.

  A Night on the Town

  It was Gordon’s birthday, so a party of us convened at a local restaurant. It has an atmospheric little garden, a playroom with a TV for children, a reasonable menu and an owner, Laurent, who makes up for all the rest of the miserable sods running restaurants in Gascony by his gentle, witty character. He’s gentle with the gypsies and the migrant workers as well. As every other bar, cafe and eatery in the region had banned them, they were in there every night, which means that the only other customers were foreigners, tourists and people from out of town.

  ‘Why does everyone hate the gypsies?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘People think they cause trouble,’ said her French friend, Françoise.

  Elegant, cosmopolitan and an exemplary mother, Françoise was nevertheless as marginalized in her village. ‘I’m going crazy,’ she said bluntly. ‘I can’t wait to leave.’ Her crime was to be temporarily without a husband. He is a world-famous maker of violin bows, and he had been head­hunted by an American orchestra. He was in a state capital in the Midwest, setting up a bow-making school, and Françoise was waiting out the school year before the whole family went out to join him.

  Perhaps Françoise’s neighbours didn’t believe this story. Or perhaps it never occurred to them that Françoise, on her own with two children under five, could stand a little company from time to time.

  Françoise therefore had no friends and neither did her children, except for Fiona, Cam and Margot. They met through the village school. Fiona was struggling to master French, but Françoise was almost bilingual, and could explain the expectations of the French school system.

  Whatever her age, a single woman hereabouts, whether divorced, widowed or simply never married, was expected to be content to devote all her time to her family, no matter how far away they might be living. Women did not have friends, they had sisters-in-law and cousins. Women were not expected to have lunch or dinner together, they cooked for their families, and entertained women friends for elegant little teas only. Women were not expected to have interests, except those passed down to them by their husbands. Even a discreet affair wasn’t likely; single Frenchmen over the age of thirty were as rare as hen’s teeth and husbands preferred the safety of other men’s wives. The only men who took up with these dangerous creatures were the foreigners. Thus Roger had not been lonely for long.

  I soon appreciated the enormous leap of understanding which Robert and Marie had made in realizing the importance of the procession of friends who arrived at Willow and Tony’s house. The idea of friendship, let alone of an urban family, was completely alien in this community, where life was conducted at home, behind closed shutters, the way it had always been, and no deviation was accepted.

  The other guests were two young English ex-pats, second generation now since they arrived here as children and went to the local schools. They too were both bilingual but they spent most of their time with the English-speaking community, which was just big enough to keep them in work.

  The evening did not start well. There were a bunch of men by the bar who were so pissed that they were acting like Charlie Chaplin playing drunk in a silent movie. Even Laurent was eventually provoked to the point of asking one of them to leave. In the garden, the drunk turned and started to argue. Laurent, who had just taken our order, patiently stood his ground. Eventually Gordon and his English friend, a huge young man of around 6ft 5in, went to see if he needed help.

  The drunk then reeled out of the gate. Laurent came over to our table, not to thank his two supporters, but to tell them that their intervention really wasn’t necessary and they should have let him sort the affair out by himself.

  An hour or so later, when our food finally arrived, the men at the bar were getting noisier and more animated. One of them had rolled a gigantic spliff and sat smoking it, defiantly waving it in the air between each puff. The rest were arguing among themselves.

  The argument began to move, up the bar, down the bar, up the bar again. People began to wave fists. Suddenly, a big man at the far end of the bar pulled out a pair of pruning shears and slashed at the air.

  The rest backed away, and the fight – it was definitely a fight now – spilled into the playroom. Fiona and Françoise, as one woman, screamed and leaped up to grab their children.

  The fight surged back up the bar, and now the man facing the hulk with the shears had a knife in his hand. When they saw it, all the rest of the women in the restaurant screamed, and their menfolk, seeing a fine excuse to run out on their bills, began to get up and leave. Within sixty seconds we were out on the street, with the young Englishman carrying Margot and Gordon still in the bar, standing beside the patron like a good Aussie mate.

  After a while, the drunks spilled out into the street and staggered away, two of them to the camper van which seemed to be permanently parked outside the restaurant.

  We collected up enough money to cover the bill. When Gordon finally joined us, we stuffed it into his hands to give to the owner, who then appeared, carrying a gigantic bottle of Ricard. With a wan smile, he apologized for the ruined birthday, pressed the bottle into Gordon’s arms and refused to take the money.

  Gardening News

  I had artichoke plants. Three artichoke plants. I bought them as seedlings in the market in Orthez. They were only a few centimetres high, but growing so fast you could almost see them bulking up by the minute. The wisdom of Monty Don warned me that I couldn’t expect an artichoke big enough to be worth eating in the first year, but, I reasoned, the climate round here was much kinder than his in Herefordshire and I might just be lucky.

  I also had infant beans, peas, courgettes and tomatoes. The sweet peas had got their tendrils around their wigwam. I thought my vegetable garden was looking good, but my guests disagreed.

  ‘You’re letting the weeds take over. You’re not out there every day, are you?’ Penny C said, at 2 a.m., after dinner
with Roger, who had been so entertaining that our faces were stiff from laughing. In the morning, she went out and started hoeing. Within half an hour she was back, looking sheepish, having hoed the top off one of my artichokes. One down, two to go.

  To make amends, Penny put her skills as a wicker sculp­tor to good use and built me a bamboo screen to hide the compost heap. By now, this was a teeming hillock of bio-degradation, alive with insects of every possible kind. The screen was much appreciated by the birds, who sat on it in dozens, taking their time in picking out the fattest beetles and the tastiest ants before fluttering down to start feasting.

  By the end of the month, the cicadas had started, churring away around the clock. Their sound, bringing memories of hot summer holidays, suddenly made Orriule seem glamorous and exotic. Soon afterwards, the first bats appeared at twilight, swooping around the garden as soon as the sun started to set behind the acacia trees.

  Recipes

  It was asparagus time. Was it ever asparagus time. Andrew and Geoff found that there was so much asparagus in their garden that they had to give it away, which, since it was the green colour which the French despise and the British prefer, made them extremely popular even with people who startled visibly upon meeting a gay couple.

  In the markets, the stalls were suddenly heaped with bunches of white asparagus, while the green was often just sold by weight from a great heap of stems. It was surprising to see the despised green asparagus on sale at all – maybe people were only growing it because they’d always grown it, ever since the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  To the taste of the rest of Europe, the green asparagus which the English like has an overpowering flavour, makes your breath smell and has a nasty diuretic effect. The white asparagus, which the English consider insipid, is achieved by blanching the stems, rendering them succulent and delicate.

  It’s possible that class also creeps into the question because only the smallholders in the markets were selling green asparagus, while it was almost impossible to find in smart greengrocers or in the supermarkets. It was, clearly, a peasant taste. And happily available at a peasant price.

  To my mind, it is better to roast green asparagus than do anything else with it if you intend to eat the spears whole as a starter. The flavour is more intense, the texture just as toothsome and the likelihood of getting the tips to the table intact is much higher with roasted asparagus than with the traditional poaching or steaming.

  To roast your asparagus, line a roasting tin with foil and oil it liberally with a light olive oil. Rinse the raw aspara­gus, drain it and cut off the dried-out ends of the stems, evening up the length of the spears in the process. Pile the asparagus into the roasting tin, sprinkling with coarse salt and more oil as you do so, cover loosely with another piece of foil and roast in a medium oven for about 10 minutes. Serve hot or cold, probably with the aid of barbecue tongs, so useful for picking up unmanageable food.

  The Belle Auberge in Castagnède served an exquisite starter made with asparagus in both colours, accompanied by herb-flecked spoonfuls of greuil. The name for this white, light, very slightly sour dairy product is pronounced almost like the English ‘gruel’. Greuil is another peasant taste. It’s sloppier than fromage frais, thicker than yoghurt and tarter than curd cheese, and much enjoyed in the Béarn and Basque Country, as is caillé, curdled sheep’s milk which is sweetened to make a satiny junket. In this recipe, low-fat fromage frais, sharpened with a squeeze of lemon, would be a good substitute for greuil.

  Salade des Deux Asperges ‘Belle Auberge’

  For each person

  6 fat asparagus spears, 3 green and 3 white

  light olive oil

  1 tsp each of chopped fresh chives and chervil (chervil, having a lighter flavour than parsley, is a better choice for this delicate taste combination, but it can be hard to find and a small amount of minced flat-leaf parsley could be used instead)

  1 tbsp greuil or fromage frais

  salt and white pepper

  white-wine vinegar

  a handful of mixed salad leaves – mache, sorrel, baby spinach, rocket, flat-leaf French parsley, whole chervil sprigs and any kind of lettuce would be good, plus, for a pretty colour contrast, some tiny red chard leaves with scarlet spines

  Roast, steam or microwave the asparagus until just tender, toss in a little oil and leave to cool.

  Fold most of the chopped herbs into the greuil or fromage frais and season with salt and pepper.

  Make a light vinaigrette with the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Use half of it to toss the salad leaves, and heap them in the centre of the plate. Arrange the asparagus spears on top like the spokes of a wheel, tips to the centre.

  Boil some water, take a teaspoon, dip it into the hot water to warm it briefly and use it to mould the herb mixture into 3 egg-shaped mounds and put them on the plate between the ends of the asparagus. Finally, sprinkle with the remaining chopped herbs and drizzle with the remaining dressing before serving.

  Asparagus Omelette

  A lovely thing to do with white asparagus, and an excellent scam for making it go further if you have only one bunch and a lot of people to feed. It’s also a good way to use up asparagus stems if you have a lot left over after making a posh starter.

  For each person

  2–3 eggs, according to size, as fresh as you can get salt and white pepper

  1 dsp grated Parmesan (optional)

  2 fat or 4 thin asparagus stems

  some chervil

  light oil

  unsalted butter

  Break the eggs into a bowl, season with salt and pepper, and beat very lightly, hardly more than mixing the yolks and whites. If you’re stuck with the sad, pale, gutless eggs that result from industrial-scale farming, add the Parmesan now to give the dish a better flavour and colour.

  Slice the asparagus thinly, keeping any tips intact. Chop the chervil, but not too finely, so that some of the pretty leaves remain whole.

  A proper French omelette is nothing like the neat, turd-shaped item which the British call by the same name. It’s a loose, fluffy thing, a mere cloud of protein with not much shape – Marie’s famous omelette aux piments is much more like scrambled egg. To make one, you need to be chivvying the beaten eggs around the pan all the time, just allowing them a few seconds of peace before you tip the finished omelette onto a plate.

  In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, then add 1 tsp butter. Saute the asparagus until tender – it happens very quickly. Pick out the tips and keep them safe on a plate. Then, working as fast as you can, turn the heat up to maximum and pour in the eggs. Using a spatula, muddle the eggs about with the asparagus as they set, aiming to distribute the asparagus evenly in a creamy omelette that will have only a bit of shape.

  Help the omelette out of the pan onto a serving plate and decorate with the reserved asparagus tips.

  Marie’s omelette aux piments is one of Tony’s favourite dishes. She makes it with the long, thin, mild, green peppers which are a speciality of the Landes, which she simply chops across into bite-sized chunks, then sautés briefly in the pan before adding the eggs. Myself, I’d prefer to slit the peppers lengthways, scrape out the seeds and chop them finely, but that’s probably why my omelette aux piments just doesn’t taste as good.

  May

  Pedigree Blondes at St-Palais

  The Blondes Next Door

  Last week, there was nothing to hear but the buzzing of insects and the rustling of growing grass. Now there is bellowing. It’s the cows. If they’re not bellowing because they’re calving, they’re bellowing because their newborns have been taken away to be vaccinated and tagged. The hillside rings with the noise of bovine outrage all day.

  In Britain, the calves would also be dehorned in their infancy, but these are the most beautiful cows in the world, the Blondes d’Aquitaine, and nobody wants to put them through that. The worst they do is to wait until the horns are grown and saw off the pointed tips, to remove the possi­bility that a co
w will accidentally disembowel her cowman, or one of her sisters, with an idle toss of her head.

  The Blondes were . . . well, blonde. All over. Any colour from the palest cream to the darkest butterscotch. Long before the breed was officially recognized, there had been cattle with creamy coats, light-brown noses and pale eyelashes in the South-West of France: the Blonde’s close family look strikingly like cattle in the cave paintings at Lascaux, the prehistoric Bos aquitanus.

  The Blondes’ favourite occupation, even more than munching the sweet new grass, was lying down comfortably in the warm sunlight and looking out across the valleys with their big, long-lashed eyes. The major task for the stockmen who had to parade the pedigree bulls at the summers’ fetes was stopping them from taking the weight off their hooves at the first opportunity and settling down to ruminate in the middle of a main street.

  My farmer neighbours kept these gentle beasts in family groups, a bull, his cows and their calves all together. The bulls were mere four-legged toy boys, usually younger than their mates, because by the age of about eight they got grumpy, then aggressive, impossible to manage and doomed to the abattoir. They were massive and muscular, with superb definition reminiscent of the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, and despite their bulk they were nimble enough to give an exhibition of natural insemination at any time, even pausing for a shag while they were being herded through the village to a fresh field.

  The Blondes are exceptionally docile because they were in part bred from the old Béarnais cattle, who were all-purpose farm animals reared principally to pull carts or ploughs and provide milk. Their meat was a great luxury, seldom con­sumed by their owners. They lived, not in vast herds, but in twos and threes, kept by the thousands of small farmers in the South-West. In the Landais farmhouses, they were also part of the heating system, being stabled in winter on one side of the building while the family lived on the other. The old photographs show a half-door between the living room and the barn, through which the cows were occasionally allowed to put their horned heads and breathe warmly over the family.