Deep France

by Celia Brayfield

  My view of what happened next was from the rubbery floor of our boat. It seemed that a pile of people fell on top of me, though Chloe says they were trying to help me up. The mother of the Irish family kindly poured arnica tablets down my throat. The raft captain called his base camp on his mobile. The most annoying of the hooligan policemen turned out to be the first aider, and climbed over to our raft to lay my ankle tenderly over his ham-like thigh, and agree with me that there was a fracture and it should be moved as little as possible.

  We sailed on for a while, until the raft put in at a spit of pebbles, where the company owner and one of the land staff were waiting in a 4x4 to take Chloe and me to the hospital in St-Palais.

  ER à la Basque

  The Clinique Sokorri had a special door for casualties arriving by ambulance, but it had no ER. Nor did it have any of the things I would have expected to find in a London A&E department: no crammed waiting area, no drunks, no nutters, no dead people lying abandoned, no frazzled and guilty nurses, no warning notices about violence to NHS staff and no medical tourists, unless I counted as one.

  A nurse appeared to assess my injury at the door as soon as I arrived. She also asked about my insurance status and accepted on trust that I had the ‘feuille E cent-onze’ (form El 11) confirming my entitlement to state health care in the EU. Then she found me a wheelchair, and I was wheeled straight into the waiting area for the orthopaedic consultant.

  Dr Suleiman, I learned later, was Moroccan. He was a man of few words. He sent me down the corridor for an X-ray, which took about twenty minutes including the developing time, then showed me my shattered fibula and chipped tibia, and said, ‘You could go home, but I’d prefer to keep you in hospital for a few days.’ He was expecting me to protest. I was expecting him to do what an NHS doctor would have been forced to do – everything possible to keep me out of hospital. The doctor, mistaking my amazement for a protest, explained that my ankle was swollen and he considered there was a risk of thrombosis, so he wanted to keep me in hospital until the injury could be plastered safely. I burst into tears and agreed.

  The main problem we had to solve was that Chloe had to go back to London the next day, to be ready for a chance-of-a-lifetime work-experience placement with a leading London casting agency. Before she could make any generous offers, I insisted that she stick to this plan, and then called Annabel to see if she could help. It was then that I discovered just what wonderful neighbours I had.

  The room upstairs was a spotless two-bed ward in which there was already one patient, a young woman who was getting ready to go home after a minor operation. Gerald and Annabel arrived in a couple of hours, bringing me nightclothes, my washbag and a couple of books. ‘Thank God this happened to you in France!’ they said, and whisked Chloe away, promising me that she would catch her train without fail the next morning.

  I passed a quiet weekend, except for the nurses, who, whether they were French or Basque, just pampered me. In fact, I hadn’t felt so pestered to need something since the last time I stayed in a five-star hotel in Marrakesh. ‘How are you this morning? Did you sleep well? Because if you didn’t we can give you something. You must ask us. And have you got any pain? No, please, you must tell us if it’s still hurting. No, really, we can give you stronger pain killers, just ring the bell. Let me show you how the bell works . . .’ They also explained every procedure very carefully, making sure that I’d understood in spite of my flawed French.

  The room lacked those tidemarks of grime that a London hospital room seems to get within months of being built. The whole building, which fairly glowed with cleanliness, was over thirty years old, and all its equipment, some of which was far from new, seemed to be dusted and polished daily. ‘It’s so clean,’ marvelled Andrew when he came to visit.

  None of the staff ever seemed stressed, either, nor did they have that sad, guilty air that I’d seen so often in British hospitals, on people who knew they weren’t going to be able to treat their patients as they wished but couldn’t do any­thing about it. The only experience of rudeness I had while I was there was from the English ‘advisers’ working for my insurers, who clearly felt I was trying to defraud them because I didn’t want to be helicoptered to Bordeaux and repatriated by air ambulance immediately. In one unforgettable conversation, the ‘adviser’ accused me of trying to cheat them by claiming I had a broken ankle when their records used the term ‘fracture’. She would not accept my assurance that these words had the same meaning. Remembering the few but traumatic visits to hospital I’d had with Chloe, I realized that to be ill or injured in Britain now often means feeling frightened, defensive and mistrustful, knowing you will have a fight on your hands just for basic necessities.

  Then there was the hospital food. It was very simple, always fresh, and delicious. Four meals a day, four courses with a little plastic glass of wine at lunch and dinner. On Sunday, we had duck à l’orange. The portions were, by French standards, ample. One day I wrote down the menus. Breakfast was fresh bread with butter and jam. Lunch was melon or soup, followed by chicken or hamburger with gravy, potatoes, petits pois and carrots with lardons, then green salad, cream cheese and bread and cassis and lemon sorbet. At tea time, they offered me a yoghurt or fruit. Dinner always started with alphabet soup, then it was fish pie and broccoli with two poached pears for dessert.

  When I’d finished the books, I watched some television, a luxury which cost me an extra few euros a day. A contes­tant on the French version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was asked a €200 question: what is the plural form of the expression for self-service, ‘libre-service’?Again, something bubbled up from the sludge at the bottom of my memory, and I got this right. The contestant did not. The right answer was ‘libres-services’ – with a compound adjective, you see, you have to add an s to both parts of it for the plural. Such a logical language, but so exacting that even native speakers make mistakes. Once a year, a professor delivers a dictation test on national television. Renée had been encouraging us to try it. Her own score, of which she was very proud, was only ten mistakes.

  By the time it was Monday, and I was lying on a trolley feeling floaty with a pre-med injection with the operating theatre lights in my eyes, trying to summon up enough vocabulary to respond to the nurse’s questions about allergies and earlier operations, I really didn’t feel too bad.

  Recipes

  Merlu Koskera

  This is one of several Basque recipes which put fish together with the new vegetables of early summer. With the white fish, green peas and shellfish, it looks extremely pretty, particularly if you can find the carpet-shell clams, called palourdes in French, which open up to look like big striped butterflies.

  Hake is probably the most popular white fish on the Côte Basque and the north Spanish coast, perhaps because cod, whose flesh is equally firm and creamy, could be preserved by drying and salting, and so was a valuable commodity to trade inland and use to provision ships for long voyages. Now of course cod is an endangered species.

  Wash and scrape the mussels and clams well so they don’t add sand to the dish. Don’t use any with broken shells or shells which refuse to shut tightly.

  Serves 6

  500g (1 lb 2oz) asparagus

  500g (1 lb 2oz) fresh peas, in their shells

  300g (11 oz) mussels

  300g (11 oz) clams

  6 hake steaks, about 115 g each

  salt and pepper

  flour for dusting the fish

  vegetable oil

  2 bay leaves

  small piece of espelette pepper or a half a red chilli, finely chopped

  200ml (7floz) dry white wine

  200ml (7floz) fish stock or water

  3 hardboiled eggs

  3 cloves of garlic

  a handful of parsley, chopped

  olive oil

  First trim the asparagus and cut into 1cm pieces. Blanch the peas in boiling water for 5 minutes, setting the asparagus in a sieve over the water to steam. Drain a
nd keep these vegetables aside.

  Dust the fish with seasoned flour. If you prefer it in small pieces, slice the steaks into chunks before coating. In a saute pan or large frying pan, fry the fish on both sides until pale gold. Add the bay leaves, the espelette or chilli, the wine and the stock or water, and allow to come to a gentle simmer. Then add the mussels and clams, and continue to simmer until they are all open. Add the peas and asparagus and allow another 10 minutes of simmering. Cut the eggs into quarters lengthways. Pick out the bay leaves and add the parsley. Serve in soup plates, decorated with the egg. Some good crusty bread or plain new potatoes are all you need to go with it.

  Stuffed Courgette Flowers

  For this, you need breadcrumbs, and for breadcrumbs you need a hearty pain de campagne. Gascon cooking has no truck with an urban frivolity like the baguette, which, when it’s made properly, will be stale in two hours. People who have work to do in the fields can’t be leaping off to the baker in the village twice a day. In a traditional household, the baking was done once a week, and included country loaves which weighed in at about 2 kg each, with plenty of soft insides and good keeping qualities.

  For this recipe, the best way to get breadcrumbs is my mother’s traditional method: letting the bread become slightly stale – overnight can be enough – then grating it or rubbing it through a sieve. Result – dry, fluffy breadcrumbs. The easier way, soaking the bread in milk or water then squeezing it out, tends to make the stuffing mixture too wet.

  If you examine your courgette plants, you will see that some flowers are on long thin stalks and some aren’t. Those which are on long stems are the male flowers, whose role is to pollinate the female flowers. Since one male flower produces ample pollen for a whole row, you can pick as many of them as you like without robbing yourself of courgettes for the following week.

  For each person, as a starter

  a little olive oil

  crumbs from a good thick slice of bread

  1 heaped tbsp fresh goat’s cheese

  1 tbsp toasted pine nuts

  1 tbsp mixed chopped parsley and chives

  salt and pepper

  3 fine, dry courgette flowers

  Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas4. Use the oil to grease an ovenproof dish. Mix all the rest of the ingredients, except the flowers, gently together.

  Pick up a courgette flower and hold it in your hand with the open end upwards. With a dessert spoon, gently pack the interior with the stuffing – very gently, or the fragile orange petals will tear. Fold the petals around the mixture, then lay the little parcel gently down on the oiled dish. Repeat with the rest of the flowers.

  Drizzle over a little more oil and put into the oven for just long enough to warm the parcels through and cook the tiny area of stem at the base of each flower – about 15 minutes. Serve in the dish, if you can, to avoid the risk of the delicate things collapsing when they’re moved.

  Pastis Landais (Raion-des-Landes method)

  When you first cut into this large, light dessert cake it releases the full aroma of the liqueurs with which it is flavoured. The other ingredients are simple to the point of innocence – flour, eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla; it’s these flavourings and the lightness of the mixture that gives the confection a luxurious feel.

  In texture, a pastis landais is halfway between a sponge cake and a brioche, traditionally made in a deep brioche tin, lightly glazed and given a crunchy topping of sugar crys – tals. Sometimes, a few stoned Agen prunes are added to the mixture. Classically, the pastis is served as a dessert with fruit and crème anglaise, which is real custard, made with fresh eggs. It keeps well and doesn’t even mind spending time in the freezer. Willingly, it will adapt to all kinds of dishes from elsewhere in the world, such as trifle or tiramisu. If you have some left over, it makes a decadent treat for breakfast and an elegant cake to enjoy with a cup of tea anytime.

  Pastis landais is always made in a paper case inside the deep brioche mould that causes it to rise into a luscious dome like the breast of a goddess. If you haven’t got a traditional tin, it adapts happily to an 18cm (7in) or 20cm (Sin) cake tin, with a lining of foil to encourage it to turn out easily. The other essential piece of equipment for this recipe is a really large mixing bowl.

  Making the pastis before electric beaters were invented must have been a real workout for the cook’s right arm. Perhaps the fact that most Landais families prefer to buy a professionally made pastis is a hangover from these labour-intensive days. I searched for months to find a recipe that worked; eventually Tony used his charm on Lucienne Dupouy, a friend of Marie’s, who remembers her mother Marguerite making thirty pastis at a time on high days and holidays. She would give them away to her neighbours. Very kindly, Lucienne reduced the original recipe for a modern cook.

  The entire process will take about 6 hours, but for most of that period the mixture requires no attention as it’s just sitting in a bowl while the yeast works. So this is a fun recipe to try on a day when you have to be at home most of the time – I tried it while I was correcting the manuscript of Wild Weekend. Don’t worry if you’re not used to working with yeast. Although the process seems elaborate, it’s almost idiot-proof. The only thing that can go wrong is that the cook may get impatient and rush the cakes into the oven before they have had time to rise to their full glory.

  A word about ingredients: I’ve specified ‘strong’ flour, which is the high-protein flour used to make bread. If you use ordinary flour, the result is a bit heartless. The liquid vanilla extract is not the same thing as vanilla flavouring; it’s more expensive but essential for its rich aroma. Amazingly, I managed to buy a vial of it in Tesco. And baker’s yeast – well, you need to buy it from a real baker. In London, I found mine at Clarke’s in Kensington Church Street. It will keep in a plastic bag in the fridge for about a fortnight. The dried yeast in sachets is much easier to find and works pretty well, but doesn’t impart the same fresh flavour. If you go with dried yeast, follow the directions and use the quantity recommended on the packet.

  Makes 3 cakes

  For the yeast mixture

  100 ml (4floz) milk

  50g (2oz) flour

  30–40g (1–½ oz) fresh baker’s yeast

  For the dough

  350g (12 oz) caster sugar

  half a wine glass of milk

  half a wine glass of dark rum

  half a wine glass of anisette (Lucienne specified Marie Brizard)

  a third of a wine glass of liquid vanilla extract

  1 vanilla pod

  350g (12 oz) unsalted butter

  8 whole eggs

  1 kg (2¼ lb) strong white flour

  For decoration

  sugar crystals or crushed cube sugar

  First, start the yeast working. Put the milk into a small bowl and mix the flour into it until you have a smooth paste. Crumble the yeast into this and stir briefly to mix it in. Put the bowl in a warm place – a radiator shelf or the back of an Aga is ideal – and leave for half an hour for it to start ‘working’ – which means fermenting, so that bubbles appear and the volume of the mixture increases.

  Put the sugar, milk, rum, anisette, vanilla extract and vanilla pod into a small saucepan, and warm over a low heat until almost at boiling point. Turn off the heat and leave to infuse. In another small saucepan, or a bowl in the microwave, melt the butter.

  Crack the eggs into a really large bowl and beat them briefly. Withdraw 1 tbsp beaten egg, add 1 tbsp of water to it, and keep aside for glazing. Then beat the rest of the egg mixture fast with an electric beater, until it is a pale yellow froth honeycombed with small bubbles.

  Slowly pour the melted butter into the egg mixture, beating all the time. Pick the vanilla pod out of the sugar–alcohol mixture, and add the mixture to the eggs and butter in the same way. Then add three-quarters of the flour, sifting it into the mixture a few tablespoons at a time and beating continuously. By the end of this process, the electric beater may be struggling. Switch to dou
gh hooks or a wooden spoon.

  Finally add the yeast mixture, with the last of the flour, while continuing to beat to obtain a smooth, homogeneous dough. Cover the bowl with a clean dry cloth and leave it in a warm place to rise until it has doubled in volume. The exact time will depend on how warm the environment is and how feisty the yeast – ‘feisty’ being originally a Yiddish word describing the general ebullience of a yeast mix.

  Butter the 3 brioche or cake tins generously and line the bottom of each with buttered foil. Divide the dough between the tins, pouring it or using a large spoon. Tap each tin smartly on the work surface to settle the dough, then return them to the warm place and leave, uncovered, to rise again for about the same period. In the traditional tin, the pastis is ready for baking when the mixture has risen up to the edge.

  When the mixture is almost ready, turn on the oven to pre-heat at 200°C/350°F/Gas6. Put in the tins and leave to bake for half an hour. Take a pastry brush and quickly glaze the tops of the pastis with the reserved egg mixture, then sprinkle with the sugar crystals. Return to the oven to finish baking for 15–30 minutes – test with a skewer to make sure the cakes are cooked through.

  Take the pastis out of the oven and let them rest for 5 minutes before turning them out of their tins. Put them to cool – right side up – on a wire rack. When they are cool, pick one to eat now and two to freeze or give away. Serve in slices, with crème anglaise or red-fruit coulis.

  Crème Anglaise

  575 ml (lpint) milk – full fat, or half milk and half cream if you’re feeling really indulgent

  4 eggs

  90g (3oz) sugar

  Scald the milk. Beat the eggs and sugar briefly in a mixing bowl, and pour the hot milk slowly into this mixture, beating all the time. Either set the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, or pour the mixture into the top of a double saucepan, or heat very gently over a tiny flame, stirring frequently to keep the mixture smooth, until it thickens into a custard. The anxious cook can blend in 1 tsp cornflour to be absolutely sure the sauce will be thick and smooth. Crème anglaise is usually flavoured with vanilla, but it’s a bit too much of a good thing when the pastis is already redolent with this spice.