Deep France
Page 28
Yoga was also permissible; Denise, the elegant young Englishwoman who taught Andrew and Geoff French, was one of the yoga instructors, as was Kathy, the French partner in McGuire’s Irish Pub. Chatting was an important feature of the yoga class, too, and doing the tree pose on my recovering ankle was a strain. But popping into les Thermes for a few lengths a couple of times a week was just what the doctor ordered.
Recipes
There is probably a different garbure recipe for every citizen of Gascony, since every woman, and quite a few of the men, make it and most people have at least two versions, one for a simple, hearty family supper and one for a festive one-pot meal. It can be a very simple dish of meat, cabbage and potato or a very elaborate one with every winter vegetable and several kinds of meat.
People who aren’t part of the garbure tradition – like, say, a British ex-pat – tell you that it’s just a soup made of boiled-up leftovers. Perhaps on a Monday night, when the weary stand-in cook at a run-down auberge looks out of the kitchen and sees a large party of British heaving through the door to put an end to his hopes of an early night, the garbure may be padded out with cold second-hand vegetables and any old bit of whiffy sausage, but in a private home it is always freshly made. For public consumption, it’s the sort of dish that’s done best at simple main-square restaurants like La Terrasse in Saliès or the Auberge du Foirail in St-Palais, where almost every single diner will order it.
Chloe tried several recipes and they came out a bit watery. Renée had given us the best part of an entire lesson on garbure, when the textbook challenged her Béarnais nationalism by mentioning such infinitely inferior dishes as Quiche Lorraine and Gratin Dauphinois. She had emphasized quite passionately that it was absolutely essential to include a piece of confit, of pork, goose or duck, whatever you had, but confit was essential. This Marie confirmed. You started with fresh water, never stock or bouillon, she said, and you added a piece of confit. If there were only a few of you, it was the way to use all those odds and ends which were preserved, like the wing tips and the spare ribs.
Finally, we worked out the magic formula. For a garbure to be what it ought to be, silky but chunky, and delicately savoury, so that the steam off the dish brings the most appetizing aromas to your nose before you even pick up your spoon, you need to use a little confit fat early in the cooking, and then add the meat en confit at the end. The confit process imbues the fat with the flavour of the meat and so, in an age before the curse of monosodium glutamate, the fat then adds its meaty savour to the whole soup. So, should you want to try this recipe when you haven’t got any confit of anything in the cupboard, you could cheat by using some meat stock and a bit of good dripping. It’ll be quite good, but it won’t be the same.
Simple Garbure
Serves 8
20 g (¾oz) confit fat
5 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 kg (2¼ lb) potatoes
3 nice purple turnips
a chunk of green cabbage, about 250g (9oz)
1 piece of confit, preferably pork or goose, of about 200g (7oz)
salt and pepper
Bring 3 litres (5¼ pints) of water to the boil in a large saucepan and add the confit fat and the garlic. Peel the potatoes, cut in halves or, if they’re huge, into quarters, and add to the pan.
Let the potatoes simmer while you quarter two of the turnips and cut the cabbage into strips as fine as you can. Discard the tops, tails and cabbage stalk. Keep back a couple of cabbage leaves, and add the rest of the cabbage and turnips to the pot. Simmer for a further 40 minutes.
Slice the third turnip into thin sections – these will be used to make the dish look pretty, something few Gascon cooks would feel necessary. By this time the potatoes will be starting to break up in the pot. Add the meat en confit, and the reserved cabbage and turnip slices. Simmer for a further 5 minutes, breaking up the meat gently as you stir.
Some people serve their garbure with the potato mashed into it, so you can stand up a spoon in the thick mixture, and some people like to leave the broth clear and the vegetables whole. The choice is yours.
Garbure de Fête
Serves at least 8, as a whole meal
l00g (3½oz) confit fat
2 large onions, quartered
l00g (3½oz) Bayonne ham, cut into lardons
l00g (3½oz) salt pork or streaky bacon, cut into pieces
2 bay leaves
2 branches of thyme
4 stalks of parsley
1 clove and 10 peppercorns, tied in a scrap of muslin
10 cloves of garlic
l00g (3½oz) dried haricot beans, soaked for at least 2 hours
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 turnips, quartered
2 leeks, sliced
about 300g (11oz) green cabbage, shredded
lkg (2¼lb) potatoes, peeled and halved
2 large or 4 small Toulouse sausages
2 good pieces of pork or goose en confit
a good slice of pumpkin, without peel or pips, cut into chunks
Put the confit fat into a heavy-bottomed saucepan over a low heat, and sweat the onions until they start to get soft, then add 3 litres (5¼ pints) of water, the Bayonne ham, salt pork or bacon, herbs, garlic and dried beans. Simmer for 2 hours, which gives you plenty of time to prepare the other vegetables. Top up the water so the ingredients are always covered.
Add all the vegetables except the pumpkin and a few shredded cabbage leaves, and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Then add the sausages, and simmer for 10 minutes more, then add the meat en confit, and simmer for another 10 minutes. Add the pumpkin chunks and shreds of cabbage last, and simmer the whole thing for a final 5 minutes. Taste the soup before you serve it – it will probably not need salt. Pick out the bay leaves, thyme, parsley and spices. Extract the cooked sausages, slice them and return them to the pan.
A hearty garbure like this is served heaped in shallow soup plates. Salt, pepper, vinaigrette dressing, country bread and gherkins – the little sweet cornichons – are the traditional accompaniment.
Tarte aux Noix
We discovered that fresh walnuts are absolutely delicious, quite unlike the sour, dusty things you buy in shops. Nicola collected a small mountain of them which we dried off in the sun and heaped up on a tray by the fireplace. Cracking them became compulsive, and soon a big dish of kernels was begging to be employed. I bottled a large quantity with honey. The walnuts bleed a little oil into the honey, thinning it and giving a smoky flavour. The result is delicious spooned into yoghurt or poured over ice cream, vanilla or coffee.
This is another of Pierre Koffmann’s recipes, for a deliciously rich and crunchy nut tart that rounds off a winter meal to perfection.
While the full-sized tart is sumptuous, the mixture also works wonderfully in very small moulds, which results in exquisitely luscious bite-sized morsels. You can vary the flavour by using Armagnac instead of rum, or with a strong-flavoured honey like heather or pine. If you’re condemned to using store-bought walnuts, rinse them in milk while the pastry is resting and leave them wet to regain the shadow of their youthful plumpness.
For the sweet tart pastry
250g (9oz) plain flour, sifted
l00g (4oz) icing sugar
pinch of salt
1 whole egg and 2 egg yolks
l00g (4oz) butter, warmed almost to melting
For the filling
120g (4½oz) softened butter
150g (5oz) honey
300g (11oz) shelled walnuts in pieces
150g (5oz) sugar
5 egg yolks
100 ml (4floz) double cream
50 ml (2fl oz) rum
a spoonful of icing sugar to decorate
Make the pastry by mixing the dry ingredients, heaping them on a work surface and making a well in the centre, into which put the eggs and butter. Draw the flour mixture into the wet ingredients and gradually mix to a soft dough (or chuck the lot into a food processor and blend briefly)
. Move the dough to a floured board and knead briefly with the heel of your hand. Roll into a ball, wrap in clingfilm or a cloth and leave to rest in the fridge for an hour before rolling out and using to line a well-buttered 22 cm (9in) flan tin.
Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas 5.
Warm the butter and the honey. Gently mix all the filling ingredients together in a bowl, pour into the flan case and bake for 40 minutes. Leave to cool, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve.
October
Ahetze – brocanteurs at lunch
It was time to get going. I picked a date, 2 November. I called the moving firm; they were a bit startled to be asked to move somebody back. People didn’t come back from France, as a rule. The human traffic was definitely one-way. I could have my pick of collection dates, and chose one just a couple of days before I planned to leave.
I began to pack Chloe’s room first; the summer clothes, the old school books, the even older cuddly toys, the bag of baby shoes. After that, my own souvenirs: the Ossie Clark mini-dress from the sixties, the sequinned bustier from the seventies, the striped blazer from the eighties that I’m wearing in Glynn’s portrait. Did I need these things? No. Did I want them? Yes. I had examined my past lives and chosen my memories. Some unswept corner of my character had been aired and accepted.
The boxes which had contained my books were still in the abri, the lean-to with a tiled roof which was originally designed to store firewood – those I hadn’t given to Fiona to take back to New Zealand or to Sandy-and-Annie to help them with their move. Thus there were ninety-eight coming out, and there were going to be seventy-nine going back. Fortunately the last vide grenier of the season was looming, and it was going to be right on my doorstep, in the salle multiactivités in Orriule, sponsored by the Club International de Saliès-de-Béarn.
With so many British people involved, this event inevitably took on the feel of an English village fete, an institution that endures even in the London suburbs, like Chiswick, which are famous for their ‘village atmosphere’ and take care to replicate a few events of a rural community calendar. Annabel, who had accepted responsibility for the catering, had dutifully researched the lower links of the antiques food chain and visited several vides greniers over the summer. Nothing, however, could persuade her that it was necessary to offer alcohol and bacon sandwiches. She had issued an appeal for home-made cakes, and I, still enjoying a barrage of walnuts, dutifully cooked Margaret’s wonderful walnut sponge and took it over in the glass croissant-keeper which I’d bought at a sale earlier in the season.
It was a roasting hot day, especially out on the fronton, where there was no shade. Inside the hall I found Annabel installed at the serving counter behind a tea urn, already drawing startled glances from the handful of villagers who had ventured into the hall to witness their new amenity being colonized by foreigners for a Sunday. There is no tradition of noblesse oblige in France. The lady of the manoir is not required to go slumming for the good of the community. Aristocrats are expected to stay in their chateaux – or, more often, in Paris – and get on with their lives of unearned luxury, not descend from their great height of privilege to rub shoulders with ordinary people and perform ritual acts of humility, like an archbishop washing the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday.
Gracienne, the prime mover in the event, was perhaps as much of a foreigner as any of us. She tripped about with her metropolitan poise, collecting the exhibitors’ fees of €6 per metre of stall frontage, and then retiring to preside over her own stall, where she was selling off the least desirable stock from her antique shop.
Roger arrived in his Mini Moke, loyally accompanied by Reine, who helped him set out an enticing array of items he has scavenged from the town dump over the years. Having a surprisingly fine eye for bric-a-brac, he saw his stall picked bare by the dealers in an hour. However, right opposite his pitch was a young man from a strange religious community in the valley, who did his bit to support himself there by buying up army-surplus goods and selling them in the markets. He also sold old electrical fitments. Roger’s eye was irresistibly drawn to the flak jackets, the camouflage nets and the spools of brightly coloured electrical wire. It seemed likely he would go home with more stuff than he’d brought.
Reine seemed to have relaxed about me. I noticed her circling my stall with a discreet expression of amazement in her eyes while I was selling half a rack of size-sixteen clothes to a well-built young woman from Orthez; perhaps that was what finally reassured her that I had no designs on her petit ami.
Apart from the Club’s members, the event was not well attended. The Mayor looked in, stood about awkwardly for ten minutes, then made her excuses and fluttered back to her own house. The jolly farmer with the fish pond planted himself in front of the tea urn and was resolutely gallant about the non-availability of aperitifs. Most of the rest of Orriule stayed away. All the same, I managed to sell all my surplus English books and magazines, and all my out-of-style clothes.
The dealer next to me, a woman about my own age who was selling antique textiles from some old trunks, struck a bargain with me to watch her stall while she went outside to chat. She had not bothered to unpack most of her goods. At the bottom of one of the trunks, under a pile of old lace curtains and ragged tablecloths, was a huge and perfect wolf-skin rug, the sort of accessory which might be seen in a picture in Elle Decoration for a price tag of about £600. I sold it to Annie for the price the dealer had marked on it – €60.
The Future of Henri Cat
Would a Béarnais wild cat enjoy chasing sewer rats around Hammersmith? I didn’t think so. Not for all the Whiskas in Tesco. Besides, the pet-passport regulations required any animal being imported into Britain to have been micro chipped and vaccinated six months before passing through customs. Six months ago, Henri Cat was so wild he wouldn’t come within two metres of a human.
Now, however, he was a sleek, well-covered, affectionate young cat. The nights were getting nippy, and he was getting used to curling up on the sofa after I’d gone to bed, and strolling into the kitchen in time to have his breakfast biscuits on the window sill. Piglet, having been thoroughly bribed by me with duck scraps and extra cuddles, had decided to tolerate him. The Duchess, on Planet Pedigree as usual, was barely aware that he’d become part of the household.
Henri Cat was on my conscience. True, he still vanished for two or three days at a time, but he never went far. I could usually find him lying comfortably on a patch of dead oak leaves by the washing line, surrounded now by a sprinkling of wild cyclamen flowers and purple autumn crocuses. Gerald was issuing daily sermons about the unfairness of getting an animal used to love, food and comfort and then letting it down. There was such an emotional edge to his lectures that I began to wonder what had occurred in his own life to make him empathize so passionately with a seduced and abandoned house pet.
However, when he was a kitten, Gerald had tried to catch Henri Cat, who scratched him and, in his frail state of health at the time, caused a nasty wound. So Annabel had set her face against Henri, and wouldn’t consider adopting him. Instead, they had a new kitten of their own, an adorable young Birman who was doing a fine job of being a surrogate grandchild.
I confessed my guilt to Andrew, who immediately offered to adopt Henri. He was now a born-again cat lover, having been converted by the two ginger kittens he acquired shortly after moving into Maysounabe. They were called Patsy and Edina, and they made short work of their owners’ intentions that they should sleep in the kitchen and be seen and not heard. However, the Béarn wasn’t going to be enough for Andrew and Geoff for twelve months of the year. They planned all sorts of migrations – to Spain, to Florida, to anywhere there isn’t snow in the winter. Earlier in the year, when they took off to Bordeaux for the weekend, Sandy-and-Annie were left in charge of the livestock; Edina immediately left home and set herself up in the woods above the house. I doubted not that if Henri went to Maysounabe, he would join her there almost immediately. Better he should
stay on his own turf.
One morning, Henri let me off the hook. He was snoozing on the car bonnet at usual, and as usual I went to talk to him before I shooed him off and started the engine. He was tame enough to pick up by now, but as I took him into my arms I caught a strong whiff of scent. It was not my scent. It was Guerlain’s Shalimar, a great classic fragrance which I can’t wear. Henri Cat had found himself another admirer. I felt I could leave him in Orriule with a clean conscience.
La Vie en Mince
Zoe had announced her engagement to Matthieu. La Maysou was in a state of exalted rapture and high anxiety. The date! The invitations! The ceremony! The reception! The cousins! The caterers! The dress! The photographs! Oh my God, the photographs!
Annabel decided that, as the mother of the bride to be, whose image would be immortalized in the photographs for generations to come, it was time for her to lose weight. I had come to the same conclusion on my own behalf, since spending six weeks in a wheelchair testing recipes had done nothing for my figure. Furthermore, it is a sad truth of a writer’s life that a new novel will put anything between ten and twenty pounds on the writer’s frame, unless he or she is a chain-smoker. And even then, the combination of anxiety and inactivity can obliterate a waistline in fifty thousand words. Wild Weekend was up to that size already. I’d gained weight in proportion, and I had been quite big enough before I even left England. In London, I had been steadily shedding the stubborn deposits left by unhappiness, HRT, literature and the love of cooking with the help of Weight Watchers.
I started with Weight Watchers after Chloe was born, and dropped thirty-six pounds in six months. I also learned more about self-motivation than I learned in the whole of the rest of my life; back then, the basic diet, which is totally flexible unless you want to flex it in the direction of a cream-cheese Danish every morning, was supported by a motivational programme devised by a genius. Nowadays, the psycho-dynamic element disappeared, and a dreary emphasis on selling diet products replaced it. It’s a shame. I still use some of the tricks to get me through writing a book, since a curious, butterfly-brain such as mine isn’t naturally inclined to sit still and concentrate for months on end.