Being helpless is an experience I haven’t had for a long time. Not since Chloe was a new-born baby, and I was wondering how we were going to live on my salary of £125 a week, in a damp basement flat from which the landlady was trying to evict us, with no help from either of our families. Cometh the hour, cometh the friends – thank Heaven. Andrew looks at me sometimes and mutters ‘so brave’ but when I compare these days with those, a broken ankle in a strange land doesn’t seem so bad.
We had planned a party for my birthday. It seems I know forty people who’re prepared to come to Orriule if promised drinks, dinner and the chance to meet new friends, though for the antisocial the last of those was no incentive. With time on my hands, I had hand-painted invitations and, with Annabel and Margaret to help me, I had photocopied maps. I had also begun to marinate the ingredients for Marie’s Sangria. This is nothing like the watery thirst-quencher served up beside Spanish swimming pools. A Béarnais sangria is a dark, spicy drink with a kick like a cow, and it’s a favourite to start a big celebration.
However, nobody could fix the weather, and they certainly would have done if they could by then. Each day seemed to be more dismal than the last. Grey was as good as it got, most of the time. Every now and then, I called the recorded forecast from the weather station at Pau, on which the meteorologists had been getting increasingly desperate. ‘Bonjour. This is Francois at the weather station at Pau with the forecast for the region for the next twenty-four hours. Nouvelle désolation . . .’ The question was now not whether it would rain, but only how much.
If it rained on the day of the party, forty people would not fit into Maison Bergez. I made phone calls to people who had those little plastic pavilions which are meant to keep the sun off a garden picnic, but would surely be just as good at keeping the rain off a buffet. For the big day, however, Francois’s forecast was cautiously optimistic. Possibility of a clear spell. Wow.
Yes, I am a total Mrs Dalloway, I love giving a party, even in the rain with a broken ankle. This doesn’t always go down well in the world of books, where a party is a networking opportunity or nothing. People like me, who’re always ready to put on a new dress and go out shining just for the sake of it, don’t fit the mould.
Nor does liking a party fit well with long-hours London life. I had not been able to celebrate my birthday this way for years. In August, most of my friends are away, and those who aren’t are simply too busy to get anywhere before 9 p.m., by which time they would be too shattered to enjoy themselves. The city is huge and travelling around it gets more demanding and more dangerous all the time. Relaxing in good company is a challenge in London; mostly, the best you get are occasional opportunities to apply alcohol to the pain of living.
Then I have all these theories about parties. One of them is that it is actually easier to give a buffet for forty than a dinner party for eight, because you simply cook large quantities of simple food and let people get on with it, instead of messing about with garnishes and cooking times and changes of plates and the possibility of people offending each other and the whole event going pear-shaped. For a larger party, all you need to do is organize yourself to cook ahead.
I made a big tomato tart – my vegetable plot, by now, was heaving with tomatoes and the challenge was to pick them before the giant brown slugs got them. These slugs look like mobile turds, decorated with orange frills around their flanges. They’re so monstrous that they frighten Piglet, who cautiously tiptoes round them when they meet. The hedgehog, who appears from behind the catalpa trees to trundle about at dusk, doesn’t even attempt to eat them. Since I had started writing about Suffolk for Wild Weekend, I had discovered that the population of hedgehogs in East Anglia has declined by 50 per cent since 1991, due to the destruction of their habitat by intensive farming.
Before the party, I also made a red onion tarte Tatin, a salad of green beans and yellow peppers and a dish of lentils with mint and garlic. I ordered cakes from M. Charrier, including his Mediaevale; this is pretty much like a paving slab made of rich dark chocolate mousse, and it had become an instant legend in Ossages since I had taken one to Tony’s birthday dinner a few weeks earlier. Finally, with Gill’s help, I added cold spit-roasted chicken with tarragon, an oriental salad with marinated pork and a big dish of prawns. With potatoes, green salad, bread and cheese, the menu was sorted.
Gordon came over to spruce up the garden. He had been a really great friend, despite having spent the summer going from one fête to another and doing justice to the aperitifs. He was still living in a caravan, with electricity at last, and the purchase of the property at Bellocq had finally come through, but Fiona and the children went home in June, and he was angry about it. Every now and then, I floated the suggestion that she had crashed into a depression, and that this wasn’t an unreasonable reaction to having no roof over her head, no table to put the children’s food on and no chance of getting back their life savings from the treefern disaster, all in a non-stop downpour of rain. Since Fiona could only speak a few words of French, professional help wasn’t an option. I didn’t blame her for baling, but he did.
While they were living in the caravan, the children were out on the street every night, which Gordon saw as a good, healthy way of life. Fiona, for all her language skills were limited, could see that the only other children on the street in a law-abiding village like Bellocq were the ones from other marginalized families. Cam’s constant companions were two much older boys. One of them looked after his mother, who was a paraplegic. She had been abandoned by her family and shunned by the villagers, who left the child to care for her and his younger sister as best he could. The three of them either hung about by the river side in Orthez with young toughs of almost twenty, or sat in and played violent video games all night. When their home was only a tiny caravan, it was impossible to keep the children off the street.
Gordon had a new French friend, another marginalisé, a big, good-natured, open-faced man who had been promised a job as a bouncer at a casino in Dax, but it was always going to start the next week. Meanwhile, the two of them were making short work of small building jobs in the foreign community, and the owner of the little bar-auberge in Bellocq was thinking of getting them to manage the place when she went over to Montpellier to see her family. Gordon was trying to talk himself into seeing this as a great business opportunity.
Amazingly, François in Pau was right about the weather. The day of the party was dry. Willow came to lend a hand, and my two good mates transformed the garden of Maison Bergez into an open-air pleasure dome. Remembering the lobster challenge at Christmas, they set up tables covered in lacy cloths under the trees. Cushions were tucked invitingly into the hammock and the bar was set up outside the kitchen window.
Roger arrived with his French girlfriend, Reine, who was slim, blonde and sparky. The widow of an artist, she lived in St-Jean-de-Luz and spent the weekends with Roger, either at his house in Salies or his studio on the sea at the surf resort of Hossegor. She regarded me as a threat to be seen off – in the most charming possible way, of course. This she tried to accomplish by darting to my side every time an unaccompanied man arrived at the party and demanding to know if this was my petit ami. Each time I explained that I had no petit ami and didn’t actually want one at this point in my life, but she seemed not to understand. Reine was seventysomething, so from her viewpoint a luscious young fiftysomething like myself was obviously on the pull.
It must have been a good party. We encouraged the stragglers to leave sometime around 2 a.m. The next day the friend who stayed over staggered down to the bottle bank by the pottery and was there for half an hour, disposing of the evidence.
Meanwhile, I had the childish pleasure of opening presents and the adult satisfaction of receiving compliments. People rang to say thank you, then casually asked for a recipe. The most popular dish was the sticky pork salad, which had simply vanished. ‘I’m so glad you did all that,’ said one English woman. ‘That’ll show the French, always going on
about how we can’t cook.’ Marie flattered me by asking how I had cooked the potatoes, but I suspect she was just choosing safe ground on which to be nice.
Pining Away
Andy wanted to find more beaches, to show the fashion editors and photographers among his non-stop guests at Maysounabe exactly what stupendous locations they would be able to use next year. We had explored the chic, urbanized strands at St-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz, so now it was time to venture further north, and check out the surf beaches of the Landes.
Once again, the unearthly flatness of the land and the endless kilometres of bracken, gorse and pine trees made us feel first tranquil, then sad, then peculiarly detached from the world. The coast was another kind of hallucination, with golden sand stretching to the horizon in both directions and the waves rolling in so uniformly they seemed unreal.
The Landes, just as much as Manhattan, is a monument to human ambition. It’s hard to believe, since the trees and the dunes seem to stretch away to infinity without any sign of human life on them, but the landscape is entirely man-made. The name, landes, means simply ‘moors’, but don’t think Wuthering Heights. The sense is of a desolate kind of a place overgrown with scrubby heather and gorse, but no altitude is implied. The Landes is flat. Absolutely flat. Flat as far as the eye can see. Most of the ground is covered with pine forest, and as you pass through it in a train or car the flickering light between the great tree trunks puts you in a trance. This is a man-made landscape. In fact, it’s a reclaimed swamp, which explains the strange character of the endless golden beach and the endless dark forest behind it.
The River Adour was the first force to shape the Landes. In prehistoric times, dozens of mountain torrents gushed down from the Pyrenees and joined to run to the coast in a single deep channel. As the centuries passed, the river began to silt up and choke itself. Then it started to meander across the flat plain of the Landes, changing course every couple of hundred years.
The Adour was always a huge waterway and easily navigable, so it was a valuable resource to the people of the region, especially those who lived near the point where it reached the ocean. However, the river mouth was moving constantly, so no sooner was a port established and in business than the docks turned to sandbanks and the river wandered off. The towns of Bayonne, Cap Breton and Vieux Boucau all enjoyed a burst of prosperity when the Adour was flowing their way. The boats came down from the interior bringing brandy, wine, wool and salt for export, and the boats from the ocean brought cloth, fish and the treasures of the New World. Then the Adour changed its course and these flourishing ports suffered a miserable decline.
The vast plain of the Landes was nothing but a swamp and not a healthy environment. Epidemics of malaria and fevers added to the misery of the inhabitants. The region was impassable, and so became a refuge for outlaws, criminals and Protestants making for the port of La Rochelle, from which they sailed to America, no doubt feeling right at home when they got to the bayous of Louisiana. Eventually the central government decided to intervene and try to reclaim the land. In 1569, the King, Charles IX, ordered that the Adour should be tamed and Louis de Foix, the architect of the Escorial in Madrid, was hired to begin the operation.
The first phase was to fix the river mouth and stabilize the port at Bayonne. To do this, a sea wall was planned and the sand dunes, which shifted easily, were turned into solid ground. A dyke twelve metres high was built, and the dunes were anchored by sowing marram grass, known in French as ‘gourbet’, which has thick, mat-forming roots. The engineer in charge, Bremontier, also ordered the inland ground to be stabilized. Seedlings of the pines, broom and gorse which are now so characteristic of the region were imported and raised under cover of brushwood. The sandy ground was perfect for these hardy species and in two years the gorse was two metres high.
It took generations of toil, but by 1867, three thousand hectares of sand dunes on the coast were covered with gourbet, and eighty thousand hectares of inland ground were planted with pines. The Landes problem wasn’t fixed, however. There was still a large area of marsh inland.
A geological survey revealed that about fifty metres below the swamp water and the reed beds was a layer of brown limestone, material from the Pyrenees which had been washed down by the river millions of years earlier and compacted into an impermeable layer that prevented water from draining away and formed a barrier to the roots of plants.
In the days of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie, an engineer called Chambrelent came up with a plan to drain the marshes and plant a mixed woodland – pine again, alternated with shallow-rooted cork oaks and holm oaks. He succeeded, and the Landes was finally converted to dry land.
The conversion isn’t complete, however. There are still dozens of lakes and a labyrinth of little waterways left, a unique environment which is extremely rich in wildlife. There is a little terrapin found nowhere else in the world, masses of birds and freshwater fish including eels, pike and shad.
The pines became the Landes’ fortune, making the department at one time the richest in all France. They are grown not only for their timber, but also for their resin. In modern times the sap is gathered from each tree every twelve days by a process involving sulphuric acid, which doesn’t damage the bark too badly. In Eugénie’s time the foresters still milked the pines by slashing deep cuts in the bark, and letting the sap bleed out into a little conical pot. Theophile Gaultier found the sight so upsetting that he wrote a poem about it.
The Pine in the Landes
The only tree you see, travelling through the desert of the Landes
The French Sahara, dusted with white sand
Springing suddenly with dry grass and puddles of green water,
Is the pine, with its wounded side,
To drain it of its tears of resin,
Man, that avaricious torturer of creation
Who lives on the blood of his victims,
Has opened a great crack in its grieving trunk
Without complaint, its blood running drop by drop
The pine pours out its balm and its seething sap
And holds itself straight at the edge of the road
Like a wounded soldier who wants to die standing up.
The poet is in the Landes of the world
Even though he is unwounded and can keep his treasure
He must have a deep cut in his heart
To pour out his words, his precious golden tears.
Recipes
Sangria
Serves between 20 and 60, according to taste
6 lemons
6 oranges
2 cinnamon sticks
10 cloves
small piece – about a quarter – of a nutmeg
1 bottle of rum
1 bottle of Cointreau or Grand Marnier
1 bottle of Armagnac
6 bottles of light red wine
soda water or lemonade and sugar to taste
fruit to decorate
Two weeks before you want to drink the sangria, marinate the fruits and spices in the spirits. Cut up the lemons and oranges, pour the spirits onto them, and leave them to steep in a covered jug or jar.
When you want to make the sangria, strain the infused spirits into a large jug or bowl, add the wine and dilute to taste with soda or lemonade. It must be said that the Béarnais host may not dilute the mixture significantly at all. If your guests have a sweet tooth, stir in some sugar. Decorate with sliced red apples, orange, lemon and strawberries if you must, but all that fruit salad takes up an awful lot of room in the glass.
Tomato Tart with a Polenta Crust
This is a wonderful celebration of the tomato glut of high summer. If you’re lucky enough to have the great bulging tomatoes found in gardens and markets all over southern Europe, you can make a rustic, lumpy tart with thick slices of them piled deep. If you’d like something more elegant, you can make individual tarts packed with whole cherry tomatoes, or a big tart filled with halved plum tomatoes.
; This recipe is adapted from one in Cuisine Grand-Mère, Marie-Pierre Moine’s affectionate book of traditional French home cooking. The essential principle of the dish is that the grated cheese under the tomatoes makes a barrier between the tomatoes and the pastry, and so keeps the crust crisp in spite of the juicy filling.
Polenta, or maize semolina, is every bit as typical of Gascon cooking as it is of Italian, if not more so. The maize, after all, must have travelled from Spain and through France before it reached Italy. Along with the peppers, tomatoes and chocolate, it is an integral part of the New World heritage in the cooking of the South-West.
Serves 6 as a starter, 4 as a main course
For the filling
about 800 g (1 lb 12oz) big tasty tomatoes
salt and sugar to taste
60 g (2oz) grated Parmesan
60 g (2oz) grated Gruyère or other hard cheese
sprigs of thyme
olive oil
For the pastry
150g (5oz) plain flour, sifted
75g (2½oz) fine polenta
1 tsp thyme leaves
1 tbsp grated Parmesan
120g (4oz) cold diced butter
1 large egg
olive oil
To serve
rocket leaves
parsley and basil, or ready-made pesto
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas6. Slice the tomatoes, sprinkle lightly with salt and leave to drain in a colander.
Start the pastry either by mixing the dry ingredients, including the Parmesan, in a bowl, then rubbing in the butter, or by processing the dry ingredients briefly in a food mixer and adding the butter in small pieces. Next beat the egg and work all but a little of it into the mixture, then add enough oil to get a stiff, workable dough. Wrap in clingfilm and rest in the fridge for a short while. Butter a 28cm (11 in) tart tin, or some small tins.
Roll out the pastry and fit it into the tart tin at about 5mm {¼ in) thickness. The pastry will be very crumbly but don’t worry if you make a bit of a bodge of getting it into the tin, it will all bond nicely in the cooking. When the tin is lined, rest it in the fridge again.
Deep France Page 25