Chop the lemon zest, parsley and remaining garlic very finely together – this topping is known in Italian cuisine as gremolada – and mix in the pine nuts. To serve, transfer the meat slices to a flat serving dish. Taste the sauce and if you like add some more stock and seasoning. Pour the sauce around the slices of osso bucco, scatter the gremolada and pine nuts over the top, and serve with plain boiled rice or a simple risotto.
Acacia-Flower Fritters
This is Pierre Koffmann’s recipe, which marinates the flowers in rum before turning them into fritters. This elevates the dish from a novelty snack for children to a sophisticated dessert. It’s delicious – but it’s worth trying once without the rum to enjoy the delicate honey flavour of the blossom.
Acacia blossom grows like wisteria blossom, in long panicles of tiny flowers. You may have to break them into manageable sprays before trying to cook them.
Serves about 6
100 ml (4floz) light rum
50g (1½oz) caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
12 sprays of acacia blossom
l00g (3Vioz) plain flour, sifted
3 eggs, separated 1 tbsp oil
a light oil, such as sunflower oil, for deep-frying
Mix together the rum and sugar and macerate the flowers for half an hour.
Meanwhile, prepare the batter. Put the flour into a large bowl, make a well in the middle, and add the egg yolks and oil. Beat gently with a wooden spoon, gradually adding a little water to make a soft paste which will coat the back of a spoon. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold them into the batter.
Drain the flowers and stir the rum and sugar mixture into the batter. Heat the frying oil until it is sizzling. Dip the flowers in the batter, then fry them in the hot oil until golden brown. Drain well on kitchen paper, then sprinkle with sugar before serving.
Eton Mess Tante Rose
I suspect that this famous English dish derived from the kind of mess schoolboys make when they mash their icecream to a slurry. It’s a crafty thing to do with less-than-perfect strawberries or damaged meringues, and in this variation the gritty little wild fruits add an extra dimension to the texture while the pink peppercorns lift the flavours.
For each person
about l00g (3½oz) large fresh farmed or garden strawberries
sugar to taste
3 pink peppercorns, softened in a light sugar syrup
about 2 heaped tbsp whipped cream
about 30g (1 oz) wild strawberries
1 meringue
3 dark-red rose petals, crystallized
Put the large strawberries in a large bowl, mash them roughly, add a little sugar and the peppercorns and leave to infuse. Whip your cream into soft peaks in another large bowl – don’t overdo it, or the cream will get too solid. Roughly fold the cream into the strawberry mess, then add the wild strawberries, then enough sugar to make the mixture a little less sweet than you intend the finished dessert to be. Keep a few of the reddest wild fruits for decoration. In yet another bowl, break the meringues into chunks.
Just before serving, fold the broken meringues into the fruit and cream mixture. Pile it into coupes or glasses and decorate with the crystallized rose petals and wild strawberries. (To make crystallized rose petals, choose perfect petals from the darkest, most fragrant red rose you can find. They need to be dry. Preheat the oven to its lowest setting. Beat together with a fork the white of 1 egg and 1 tbsp caster sugar, then paint both sides of the rose petals with this mixture. Set the petals carefully on a sheet of baking paper or foil, put them on a baking sheet and leave them in the barely warm oven until they’re dry and brittle – an hour should be long enough. When they’re cool they’re ready to use, or to keep for a few days.)
June
Sauveterre-de-Béarn:
le Pont de la Legende
The Blues, Real Bad
Even Gascony was ready for a French victory in the World Cup. A tractor dealership on the road to Oloron put all its blue tractors in a line at the front of its yard, under a banner reading ‘Allez les Bleus!’ All the gas stations and supermarkets were adorned with giant posters of Zinedine Zidane. The Maison de la Presse made a window of its new stock of football magazines, and the sponsored merchandise ran from the obvious footballs and jerseys to more recherche items such as tins of sardines.
These were small investments compared to the big national players who had decided, in defiance of common sense, basic instincts, expert opinion and recent history, that France was now a great soccer-playing nation. Hadn’t they won the cup the last time? Hadn’t they defeated Brazil, that race of footballing giants? Well, then, obviously they were going to win again.
To us, the foreigners from a truly great footballing nation, the proper pose was of indulgent non-involvement. ‘They don’t know,’ said Gerald in a kind voice. ‘They’ve never even been in with a chance before, and last time they won. Some of their players aren’t bad. You’ve got to expect them to go over the top a bit.’
‘They’ve got no Gary Lineker,’ said a more recent arrival from Britain who’d just noticed the bias against bad news that afflicts all the French media. ‘They never had a Jimmy Hill. They haven’t got any real experts so they haven’t got anyone to tell them how it is out there.’
The madness extended to two particularly confident advertisers, who had actually pre-recorded vastly expensive commercials celebrating a French victory.
The nationwide mood of jubilant anticipation staggered when the French lost their very first match to the little-rated team from Senegal. The commentators jabbered and the newsreaders floundered. The players gave the traditional ashen-faced interviews but to us, long-term devotees of Ron Knee broadcasting, they showed no sign of appreciating the seriousness of their country’s situation. Football was no longer a sport to be discussed by people who’d actually played it, but some new kind of reality TV, so the studios were filled with a bizarre parade of minor celebrities who twittered jaunty banalities at the camera.
When the Blues went down and out to Denmark, the nation plunged into despair. ‘This will teach humility,’ said a French friend, with the satisfaction of a non-fan reprieved from weeks of soccer mania. Adidas turned on a sixpence and whacked out a new commercial with a slogan borrowed from Kipling, ‘Losing makes you stronger!’
That was on 11 June. On 8 June, the Biarritz-Olympique rugby team had won the national championship. Their colours were red and white. In the Béarn and the Basque Country, the way forward was clear. The blue banners were pulled down, the blue tractors were driven to the back of the showroom and the blue flowers were uprooted from the municipal displays. In their place appeared red banners, red tractors and red flowers, not to mention red berets, red jerseys and red sweatbands. The glowering features of Zidane were replaced by the blond head of Christophe Milheres, on posters adorned with triumphant flashes. ‘Terre de rugby!’ ‘Allez B-0!’
‘You can’t expect them to have the same concept of loyalty as we do,’ ruled Gerald. TF1 screened a final analysis of the Brazilian victory, a sedate performance by the cosmetically perfect ‘experts’ talking in front of an audience of Disneyesque children who were dressed in brightly coloured clothes and waving Brazilian flags. It looked like a rehearsal for a vintage Michael Jackson video.
Chloe Returns
I collected the limp remains of my daughter from Dax station. She was alone. The plans to arrive with between seven and thirteen inseparable friends and head off to Pamplona in July for the running of the bulls on the festival of St Ermin had collapsed, because nobody had any money, everybody needed to work through the summer to get some and none of them had yet done the literature module on Hemingway which would have sold them Pamplona properly.
Between a month of revision and exams, and the week of partying required to celebrate the end of that nightmare, my daughter was speechless and grey in the face, ready to sleep for three days. By which time, I sincerely hoped that the rain would have stopp
ed.
As day after day had dawned grey and chilly, and squall after squall had blown down from the mountains to soak the already-sodden ground, people were beginning to get anxious. The Gaves were raging with water. Although it is rated one of the most beautiful regions of France, up there with Brittany and Provence, the Béarn is much less lavish in marketing its charms. While the Côte Basque resorts lived for the holiday season, very few inland businesses would suffer badly if the summer turned wet. On the other hand, some tourists came, and people wanted them to have a good time, especially the children. Up at La Maysou, Gerald was getting the house and garden ready to welcome parties of Zoe’s pupils, lurking indoors cursing while it rained then dashing out to weed the flower beds and paint the shutters the minute the sky cleared.
Everyone had a prediction. It would stop raining on 15 June, because it always did. It would stop raining on 20 June, because that always happened when you had a cold winter. It would stop raining on 10 June, because the shape of the clouds over the mountains told you so. ‘It will stop raining on 12 June,’ said Gerald with his usual sublime confidence. And it did, just in time to greet Chloe when she recovered. I had fixed a hammock between the walnut tree and an ash tree in the garden, and she lay in it contentedly, reading through a new supply of chick-lit from the English-language department of Amazon.fr and giggling when the golden butterflies settled on her toes.
We then enjoyed a week of perfect weather, with pure white puffs of cloud scudding across the brilliant blue sky. We went up to La Maysou one day and found Gerald taking a break, reclining on a lounger on the terrace watching the clouds as they drifted past and remembering what fun it was, when he had just got his wings as a Spitfire pilot, to fly in and out of little clouds on glorious days like these.
The vegetable garden powered into life. The first courgette flowers opened, big orange trumpets just begging to be picked, stuffed with a little fresh goat’s cheese and herbs and eaten. The peas and broad beans were ready, and were miraculously free of blackfly. Most miraculous of all, the two undamaged artichoke plants were now huge fountains of grey-green foliage, out of which thrust sturdy stems bearing purple-tipped baby artichoke buds. The one which had been decapitated was half the size of the other two, but growing energetically.
For a few days, we enjoyed the kind of dreamy domestic lifestyle depicted in Conran-inspired photographs of life in France. I couldn’t quite persuade Chloe to wake up in time to see the sun rise over the mountains, so we breakfasted late and luxuriously on a slice of leftover pastis landais with one of my growing collection of home-made jams. (Home-made, that is, by one of the market vendors.) One of the local dogs, a golden-haired mongrel with a madly affectionate nature, sometimes ran in for some extra petting, wearing half an iron chain instead of a collar.
The mornings slipped away peacefully. We discussed my ambition to keep chickens, by now a well-rounded fantasy featuring a little chicken house out by the compost heap and three birds, to be named Jeanne, Corisande and Sancie after the queens reckoned to be the good eggs of Béarnais history. Chloe was sceptical, but prepared to indulge me. I had drawings. I had costings. I had a hilarious book which Andrew had lent me, which advised that a chicken house should be trim and neat, not a ramshackle assemblage of fence posts and bits of rusty old corrugated iron. Clearly the author had never seen a proper Béarnais chicken house, since this was exactly the vernacular style. Andrew also was determined to keep chickens, but Geoff was against him. He said he didn’t like to think about eggs coming out of a chicken’s bottom.
After the chicken debate, I could get a morning’s work in while Chloe enjoyed a bath. I had sent Nick Marston, the emperor of Curtis Brown’s media department, an outline and the first twenty pages of my screenplay about the friendship between two great lovers of France, Henry James and Edith Wharton. He had sent me an email containing that kiss-of-death sentence, ‘There is some good writing here.’ Nick was not totally discouraging, and asked me to finish the work, but with this book and my new novel to complete in the coming year, I would have no time until the following September. In fact, I urgently needed to crack on with the new novel, Wild Weekend, or the schedule would start slipping away from me.
This was to be the first summer for six years that I had not had a book published. It felt more than a little strange. I had a curious sense that I was fading away and becoming invisible, particularly when I sensed that I was with one of those big-talking expatriates who was making up a false identity. My French acquaintances, although they politely asked for copies of my books to read, still seemed overawed by the idea that a real writer was in their midst. I felt happiest with Marie, who seemed to accept my explanation that writing was just a job, and so I produced books just like she produced confits.
The only publication coming out with my name on it was a short story in Magic, an anthology published in aid of the charity One Parent Families. For some years, I had been one of the charity’s trustees. Sarah Brown, wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had edited the book and gave a launch party for it at 11 Downing Street. I flew back for this, leaving Chloe in the custody of Andrew and Geoff.
Unfortunately, there is more to being an author than writing the books. I’ve never been confident of my abilities in that part of the job which is about working the room at literary parties. I have two problems with this: I feel like a hypocrite even when I’m flattering people I genuinely admire, and I can never get it out of my head that a party is supposed to be fun.
I watched nervously as other writers jostled to be photographed next to J. K. Rowling and queued up, elbowing aside their competitors, for the privilege of laughing at one of John O’Farrell’s jokes. A year ago, I realized, the fact that I just can’t behave like this would have sent me home totally depressed. Now it seemed amusing. I found a kindred spirit in Emma Donoghue, whose story of two rival boatmen in Louisiana was one of my favourites. We formed ourselves into the too-sensitive-to-live tendency and lurked at the side of the room, where we found an equally shy fugitive from the House of Lords, Baroness (Ruth) Rendell.
He’s a Vegetarian
Michèle Roberts had written a story which summed up Geoff’s predicament perfectly. It was called ‘Please Excuse My Husband – He’s a Vegetarian’, and concerns a couple who take their holidays in France. The husband, sick of watching his meat-eating wife tuck into one delicious meal after another while he is contemptuously dismissed with an omelette, says, ‘They’re so intolerant, the French, of anything different.’
‘Oh, darling,’ his wife replies, ‘it’s just not in their culture, that’s all.’ By the end of the story, the wife has acquired some of the timeless skills of the rural French carnivore, and the husband has come to a sticky end.
Andrew thought this tale was highly amusing, and Geoff did not. He was not finding life easy as a vegetarian and was struggling to master the French language. Often, he gave up on the menu when we went out to eat. Instead, he gave the waitress a flirtatious smile and hopefully mumbled, ‘Vegetarian?’ This strategy produced two choices, a cheese omelette or a mushroom omelette. Sometimes the chef, feeling embarrassed that he was sending out such a poor dish, would toss in a few lardons and ruin the whole thing. The salad makers were inclined to do the same, adding chicken livers, gizzards en confit, strips of duck breast, slices of ham and chunks of Béarnais black pudding to innocent bowls of lettuce.
Geoff had been a chef himself, cooking first for the patrons of the English National Opera and then for his own clients at the studio, but trawling through the regional cookbooks revealed very few vegetarian recipes. Most of France is still eating on the values of their peasant days, when meat was the only real status symbol, and the more meat you could eat, the richer you obviously were. Thus vegetables meant poverty, and serving a guest a vegetable dish was virtually an insult. A couple of women, lunching on their own, might get away with a little gratin, but otherwise the only role for vegetables was to garnish the meat.
&nbs
p; To make things worse, vegetables were what the animals ate. The maize, which was now 120 centimetres high and getting visibly taller every day, was intended for export and to fatten the ducks and the beef cattle. The less delicate vegetables which the British like to eat, marrows, parsnips or swedes, for example, are also considered fit only for animals by the French.
The local taste was rigidly conformist. Leeks were eaten in the winter, along with chicory. Green beans were eaten in the summer. Slices of squash or pumpkin might be contemplated in the autumn. Haricot beans were grown to be dried and eaten in the winter. A salad might be made of one of three recognized lettuce types, laitue, batavia or escarole. And that was pretty much it, a tragedy in a land where every seed that fell to earth grew as heartily as Jack’s beanstalk.
A Trip to the Cinema
Films are one of my greatest pleasures in life. It was, in fact, the discovery that foreign films were shown in repertory in the local cinemas that was a clinching factor in my decision to leave London for a year. Salies, St-Palais and Orthez all had little local cinemas which showed a wide range of films, the imports often being screened in ‘version originate with subtitles and their original soundtracks. Pau and Bayonne had real art-houses, as well as small multiplexes.
However, getting someone to come to the movies with me had been a challenge. Annabel ventured out to see Amélie with me, but our diaries never had a window big enough for a trip to Pau for something more ambitious. I had managed to catch Le Seigneur des Anneaux (The Lord of the Rings) in St-Jean-de-Luz, but had been forced to go by myself to enjoy the spectacle of Christopher Lee whirling furiously around on his computer-generated crag, snarling, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’on pent faire avec ces ‘obbits?’ (‘What can you do with these hob-bits?’). The hobbit family of Baggins had been renamed Saccin, which was understandable, since sac means ‘bag’, but Bilbo Saccin just didn’t sound as intrinsically loveable as Bilbo Baggins.
Deep France Page 19