One More Croissant for the Road

by Felicity Cloake

Impulsively, I log on to the SNCF site from my sleeping bag, book a morning train from Limoges to Bayonne for the following morning and immediately feel a lot better – thank goodness, I think for the hundredth time, for the abolition of European mobile roaming charges. That done, ice videos exhausted, I decide to spend the day hunting for some Limousin cattle, which feels like a pleasant enough plan if the sky ever stops leaking.

  I literally cannot convey how great it feels to pedal off without my panniers, leaving the tent standing in its puddle of rainwater. Despite the weather, I have a glorious morning in the saddle, though I quickly regret snootily dismissing the one shopping centre bakery I pass early on, as this empty landscape is not replete with breakfast options.

  It’s not long before I spot my rusty red prey and stop to take a long-distance fuzzy pap shot of them, which proves unnecessary as soon they’re everywhere. I even surprise a couple in an intimate moment, though neither of them seems that into it, if I’m honest.

  I’ve scouted a promising-sounding lunch venue, Le Boeuf Rouge, from a little booklet put out by the French Association of Master Restaurateurs, and given to me by my friend Christophe the crêpier back in Brittany. Maître Restaurateur is a state-awarded title guaranteeing that the holder has the appropriate culinary qualifications, and that their food is cooked from scratch, using fresh ingredients, in an environment that meets national health and safety standards. The FAMR’s website makes much of the fact that membership is ‘VALIDATED, RECOGNISED AND CONTROLLED by the State’. Theresa May can’t even work out the right meat for a lasagne.

  The clouds are almost lowering themselves onto the church spires of Saint-Junien as I bowl down the hill and I only just make it into the squat Inter-Hotel, situated handily on an unprepossessing roundabout on the main road into town, before the heavens open in earnest again. Once more, I’m surprised by the lack of eyelids batted at a woman tipping up on her own for lunch on a Monday in full Lycra and gratified to find I’m by no means the only solo diner: there are several smartly dressed people already installed who look like they’ve just stepped out of their offices for lunch. I blend right in.

  The menu exceeds my highest hopes, with an entire section devoted to le boeuf de race Limousine Blason Prestige – I go for a sirloin, which comes punctured with a little flag showing it to be a pure-bred bovine aristo, some slightly soggy, deliciously potatoey chips and a generous pot of homemade béarnaise sauce, and, of course, it’s delicious. Like the onglet the night before, however, it has the pale beige exterior of a piece of seared tuna – master restaurateurs or not, I reckon they could do with turning up the heat a bit underneath their pans.

  I ask the waitress about what makes the beef so special. She replies as if it’s completely obvious: ‘Well, it’s the very best, Madame. The flavour’ – hands spread as if mere words are inadequate to describe its qualities – ‘you won’t taste better. The Limousin, it’s the king of beef.’ I tell her we have some pretty good stuff in Britain, too, and she generously acknowledges that she’s heard of Scottish beef, but perhaps the spectre of BSE still hangs heavy, for she denies ever having tried it. Maybe one day, she smiles, somewhat unconvincingly. I say she really should and, having done my bit for the British beef industry, sit back to finish my lunch.

  Earwigging on the next-door table as I eat the remaining béarnaise with a spoon, I’m delighted to hear her mention the magic word clafoutis while reeling off the list of desserts – they’re another local speciality, and I’d feared I was too early in the year for the classic cherry variety, but it seems not. It’s an unusual one, too, like a crisp Yorkshire pudding in texture rather than the usual wobbly flan, topped with berries and Chantilly cream.

  As I polish off a double espresso to fortify me for the afternoon ahead, I get chatting to the men opposite, who work in an office nearby. ‘Do you always come out for a proper lunch?’ I ask, curious. They laugh; oh yes – ‘Normally,’ the younger one says, ‘we have champagne, white wine, red wine, Cognac, the works.’ Then straight back to work, his companion adds, chuckling.

  ‘No, seriously, though, sandwiches, fast food, they’re no good for you. You need a proper lunch. It’s normal here.’ I tell them that when I worked in offices in the UK, most people would eat lunch at their desks, Tupperware by the keyboard. They visibly shudder at the prospect, delighted by this tale of barbarism across the Channel.

  The coffee feels like necessary fortification: seeing that I’m in Limoges from my endless cow photos on social media online, several people have strongly recommended a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, the site of a Nazi massacre in June 1944 – and, according to one friend, ‘a place everyone should visit once in their lifetime’. To be honest, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the idea of including such places in a tourist itinerary, but to swerve it now feels cowardly, so I set off, dragging my pedals with reluctance to face the horrors ahead.

  I’m not wrong either – this isn’t the right place to even try to sum up the experience, but I’m glad I went; the village has been left exactly as it was at the end of the war by order of General de Gaulle, as a permanent reminder of the barbarity that happened there, the entrance marked by a huge stone plaque bearing the words, ‘Souviens Toi. Remember’. Beyond sit roofless houses, tangles of rusted bicycles and cars, a baker’s shop with powdery coals still in the oven, melted telegraph wires, and streets marked by familiar blue-and-white enamel signs. There’s no real need for the notices requesting silence: it’s impossible not to come out deep in brooding thought.

  The cycle home proves a good time for reflection; the lush, almost-mountain pastures and gentle wooded hills round here are kind on the mind, and I’m so deep in thought that I don’t see the snake basking in the sudden sunshine ahead of me until I almost run over it. I yelp with fear, it accelerates with what I assume is similar emotion and disappears into the bushes, though I catch a glimpse of black and yellow, and fancy it fairly large, perhaps a foot or so long. A few villages further on, I see my first lizard on a stone wall while trying to take a photo of an enormous cat lying supine in the middle of the road. By the time I make it back to Limoges, having not passed a single place selling Orangina in 27km, I feel ready enough for human company to brave the hypermarket in search of drinks and dinner.

  As usual, food shopping cheers me right up. Who could fail to be happy in a place with maroon bananas from the French Caribbean, Breton intestine sausages and 75 varieties of espadrille? I buy a monstrously ugly tomato the size of a guinea pig for dinner along with a hunk of tomme de Limousin cheese, stick in a bottle of local cider and a packet of paprika crisps for a civilised aperitif, and leave feeling quite perky again – I even consider calling in on the Roman remains next door, but they’re closed. Perhaps I’ve had enough history for one day.

  Not quite enough drama, however: as I’m attempting to pay for my extra night at the campsite, loftily ignoring the group of workmen sitting around in reception staring at my Lycra-clad bum, there are sudden shrieks of alarm, and the young man at the desk immediately evacuates us all, indicating what looks to me very much like a hornet. ‘Non, non, c’est vraiment dangereuse!’ a woman tells me seriously as she cradles a small white dog protectively in her arms. We watch Monsieur enter stage left with his T-shirt held over his nose and mouth, and pursue the hefty insect across the room with some sort of spray before it visibly drops to the floor and we all excitedly cheer its demise. He opens the door again, and there’s much head-shaking and hand-wringing from the assembled company, all of whom are clearly enjoying the theatre immensely.

  As I study the feebly twitching corpse, the receptionist comes to drop a box over the evidence – explaining it’s an Asian hornet, though this one, which must be two inches long even in death, is a mere tiddler. ‘We are getting them more and more here: last year, we had a nest of over 1,000 of them on this roof!’ he complains. ‘One time, I went camping with my girlfriend and got stung by one and had to go to ho
spital – my whole arm swelled up.’ Plus, he adds with some venom, they kill my bees. ‘These things are not natural,’ he concludes with force, selling me a washing-machine token. ‘Man-made. MUTANTS.’

  With which sobering thought I return to the tent, giving any flying objects in my path a wide berth, to begin my picnic. Though the bone has disappeared, I have new neighbours in its place: a middle-aged couple sitting around a camp stove on what look like proper chairs, though how they got them here on the two bikes propped against the hedge is a puzzle.

  The man comes over to chat, and I feel briefly ashamed of myself, sitting on the wet grass eating crisps and drinking cider straight from the bottle while his wife barbecues sausages next door – for a moment I think that they might be about to invite me to join them, and then feel faintly aggrieved when they don’t. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have an exchange that doesn’t peter out when I forget a vital piece of vocabulary, and I discover they’re South Africans on a clockwise tour of France. They did a similar trip 30 years ago, he tells me, with a lot less luggage – he glances at my tent, which is about the same size as their porch. ‘This is a lot more comfortable, though. If I sit down like you, I’ll never get up!’

  What with the excitement of conversation, cider and a fresh load of clean, dry washing, not even the frogs can keep me awake, though they do wake me up about 10 times between midnight and 5 a.m. instead.

  Having packed up, eaten about three pounds of cherries straight from the bag and waved goodbye to my intrepid friends already busy frying bacon on their stove, I head back down the Avenue Leclerc for the final time to pay Limoges’s old butcher’s quarter a visit before I get on the train. The half-timbered Rue de la Boucherie is immediately identifiable by the fact that it’s blocked by workmen engaged in stringing a banner across its narrow width, welcoming tourists to what is currently a building site, and the 15th-century Maison de la Boucherie, the only surviving example of the traditional butcher’s dwelling (shop at the front, abattoir at the back, accommodation jutting out above), which is very much out of action behind safety barriers.

  Squeezing past the scaffolding, I push Eddy round the corner and find myself in a little square, facing a stubby chapel standing all on its own, with the kind of Frankenstein-ish architecture that suggests extreme age. The sign outside identifies it as the chapel of Saint Aurélien, patron saint of butchers, and still the property of his Brotherhood, formed after the powerful medieval guilds were outlawed in the aftermath of the Revolution. Membership was once restricted to a group of six families, who guarded this power so jealously that they obtained special dispensation from the Church to intermarry within themselves, rather than admit outsiders; and until the 1960s, it was still limited to male, Roman Catholic butchers and their sons or sons-in-law.

  Inside, the chapel is pleasingly gloomy, the better to show off the dramatically lit altar, with its flying saints and hanging cherubs suspended beneath a ceiling painted the brightest shade of sky. The Brotherhood’s green-and-white processional flag hangs to one side, overlooked by a statue of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus, who’s clutching something rosy red to his mouth that I initially take to be the sacred heart but is, according to the church guide, a kidney – traditionally given by butchers to customers as a children’s treat, the way my butcher never lets me leave without a bone for the dog.

  As I’m tragically four months too early for the annual Frairie des Petits Ventres, the Brotherhood’s charmingly named ‘Festival of Little Bellies’, my next stop is Les Halles, the city’s indoor market, which, I discover, is currently a building site too. The traders have moved temporarily into a collection of Portakabins next door, which don’t have quite the atmosphere of the late-19th-century original, with its decorative tiling of fish and fowl, but wandering round, the variety of meat specialists – from the inevitable triperies to the chicken and rabbit merchants, the pork butchers and the many businesses proudly displaying the Limousin Label Rouge alongside photos of happy red cows – give me a flavour of the place … and that flavour is flesh.

  Having had enough of that for a bit, and finding the bakers opposite inexplicably out of croissants at 9 a.m., I pick up an enormous slab of more familiar-looking clafoutis for the road: absurdly cheap, at €2.30 for about half a kilo, it’s a dense yellow flan of a thing and (I can’t resist a bite before cramming it on top of my panniers) almost like a chewy custard, with a slightly caramelised underside. This recipe, based on some hurried questioning of the girl behind the counter, comes pretty close.

  Clafoutis aux Cerises

  This creamy, chunky version is very much in the same flan tradition of those I saw in bakeries in the region, rather than the crisp clafoutis served hot for dessert in restaurants and after dinner: sturdy and surprisingly portable, it’s a good choice for a picnic at the height of cherry season … though make sure you warn people to watch out for stones. Leaving them in may seem like the height of laziness on my part, but in fact adds to the fruit’s flavour as well as making life considerably easier for the cook. (The demerara sugar isn’t something I came across there, but a tip from fellow food writer Sarah Beattie, who lives in the south-west of France.)

  Serves 6–8

  Butter, to grease

  3 tbsp demerara sugar

  600g cherries

  4 eggs

  100g caster sugar

  A pinch of salt

  100g plain flour

  500ml whipping cream

  150ml milk

  A dash of vanilla extract

  50ml rum or brandy

  Grease a deep roasting dish about 25 x 20cm wide with butter and sprinkle with the demerara sugar. Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/gas 4.

  Remove the stalks from the cherries, but don’t bother to stone them unless you’re feeling very energetic. Put them in the base of the dish – they should cover the base in a single layer. Eat any extra.

  Whisk together the eggs, caster sugar and salt well, then whisk in the flour until smooth, followed by the cream and milk. Finally, stir in the vanilla and rum or brandy.

  Pour on top of the cherries, carefully put into the hot oven and bake for about 50–65 minutes, until firm on top with a slight wobble in the middle.

  Allow to cool to warm before serving – though it’s also very good cold.

  Km: 95.6

  Croissants: 0 (but not for want of trying)

  High: My first lizard!

  Low: Oradour-sur-Glane would take some beating

  STAGE 8

  Limoges to Bayonne

  Chocolat Chaud

  Hot chocolate may seem an odd choice on the Franco-Spanish border in midsummer, but Bayonne is the historic capital of the French chocolate industry – and this isn’t any old hot chocolate.

  Limoges station is just as impressive the second time round – so much so, in fact, that I lose my footing on the stairs as I’m gawping at the cupola, and fall painfully onto Eddy’s sharp left pedal, the clafoutis in my pocket bouncing merrily to the floor before it can cushion the blow.

  When I assure the guard who kindly helps me up that I’m honestly fine, just in a hurry, he directs me to platform 3 in pure Brummie; apparently, my accent needs work. Sadly, I don’t have time to investigate why he swapped the stygian gloom of New Street for the stained glass of Limoges-Bénédictins, because I have a train to catch down to the Spanish border, via Bordeaux, world capital of wine.

  I spend a grand total of seven minutes in this cité du vin, all of them stressful; the French may build beautiful stations, but their signage is no work of art, and I end up hauling Eddy and panniers up and down four further flights of slippery steps before practically hurling myself onto the Bayonne service, swearing under my breath.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, I sit back, get my book out and am immediately accosted by a group of Americans who, in that lovely open fashion so suspiciously foreign to us northern E
uropeans, are keen to offer the hand of friendship to a lone traveller. They’re from Chicago, over for a month on a vacation to celebrate their retirement, and they make me feel both extremely daring, especially when I mention camping (I do point out that there aren’t many bears wandering around provincial France) and cycling. ‘My, you are brave,’ one says. ‘I’d be terrified on these roads.’

  Apart from the traffic, however (so fast!), they’re enjoying themselves. The people are so nice, and the food – well, the pastries – the older man whistles through his teeth in quiet admiration. They kindly tell me if I ever decide to do a similar ride in the States, I should look them up. A vision of an 18-wheeler truck whistling past me on a lonely freeway as coyotes howl in the distance passes before my eyes. I shiver involuntarily. Sure, I say. I will definitely do that.

  As we chat the train whips through the endless flat pine forests of the Landes, and when it finally pops out, it’s into steep, almost fortified architecture of the Basque country, all whitewash and timbers and overhanging roofs in the same vivid red as the local spice, piment d’Espelette, and the traditional Basque beret. Sadly, it’s still raining, though.

  As I reluctantly wheel Eddy in the direction of the deluge, a man stops me and points to a small train on the far platform. ‘That one!’ he says. Whatever expression my face assumes at this point prompts him to add, ‘Saint-Jean?’ and then, more uncertainly, ‘Are you a pilgrim?’ and I realise my bedraggled appearance and air of beatific serenity has led him mistakenly to assume that I’m about to embark on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across the Pyrenees, and I start hooting with laughter, at which point he backs away nervously.

  In truth, I had seriously considered walking the ancient Way of St James to Santiago de Compostela with a friend a few years ago, excited by the idea of bringing Wilf along as a tiny pilgrim, but then got put off by the idea of 10kg of Scottish fluff being eaten by a Pyrenean shepherd dog along the way. Right now, however, another train is a tempting prospect given the weather outside, and I regret my hasty ‘Non, Monsieur!’ even more when I step out of the station and realise that Bayonne is currently undergoing the same extensive programme of civic remodelling as Limoges and Nantes.