Deep France (12 page)

Who cares about going bust, when a man has
panache
? Dumas immediately wrote his way out of debt, producing another forty-three novels, eleven plays, travel books, history books and his
six-volume autobiography over the next ten years, all while travelling, lecturing, supervising foreign productions of his plays and planning to open a restaurant. Finally, in 1870, he suffered a
stroke in September, lingered on in the care of his son for a couple of months, and died on 5 December.

Dumas was eulogized by Victor Hugo, the literary lion-king of the day, and his works sold a further three million copies over the next twenty-three years alone. Once the cinema was invented,
they inspired over two hundred films. Such popularity cannot be entirely forgiven. At the time I first drove through Aramitz on my way into the mountains, Dumas’s remains lay in an obscure
cemetery north of the capital, not in the Panthéon in Paris, where most great French writers are interred.

Poule au Pot Henri IV
(or, in Béarnais, our Henry,
nouste Henric
)

Occasionally, you find an ironic version of this recipe, featuring nothing but the liver and giblets of the chicken, chopped and mixed with breadcrumbs, then wrapped in cabbage
leaves or sausage casing and poached. This was the
poule verte
, the poor man’s chicken, which, so the legend goes, was all that the peasants could afford until good King Henry
brought peace and prosperity to the land. A quick glance at the subsequent history of France suggests that the poor peasants were probably stuck with
poules vertes
until well after the
Revolution, but hey – why spoil a good story?

The full version, with a real chicken, is a classic Sunday lunch dish in the Béarn. Pierre Koffmann remembers it as the traditional dish for the harvest supper, finished off with a
blanket of poached
brioche
dough, and served between the charcuterie and the roast. It is one of those accommodating recipes that can stretch to feed dozens and wait a reasonable time for
latecomers without spoiling, and is in every way a dish to share, because the preparation can be a bit fiddly, especially for cooks of the River Café, buy-it-and-grill-it school. Its great
flaw is that the poached chicken looks a bit pale to a modern eye accustomed to ready-meals glazed with caramel. The Béarnais solve this simply by serving the meat with a good, piquant
tomato sauce.

First make the stuffing. Fry the chicken livers gently in a little fat or oil, drain and mash them in a bowl big enough to hold all the ingredients. Chop the
ham finely, as in the blender, and add to the livers. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix thoroughly.

With half the stuffing mixture, stuff the cavity and breast of the chicken and sew up, or skewer, the opening. If you haven’t bought a trussed chicken, tie the legs together at this point
to keep it whole while it cooks.

Put a saucepan of water on to boil. Break off a large, outer leaf of the cabbage for each person, and plunge the leaves all together into the boiling water for 2 minutes. Then drain them,
refresh under cold water, drain again and pat dry. Spread each leaf on the chopping board and cut out the thick part of the central rib. Put a spoonful of the remaining stuffing on each leaf and
roll it up into a parcel. Tie with the string and set aside.

Peel and halve the onions and carrots. Stick each half-onion with a clove – this stops them getting lost in the saucepan when you want to fish them out. Tie the
bouquet garni
and
the peppercorns in a small piece of muslin for the same reason. Scrape the celery, and wash, trim and halve the leeks. Cut the remaining heart of the cabbage into portions, trimming away most of
the stalk but leaving just enough so the sliced leaves remain attached.

Put the chicken into the pot, followed by all the vegetables except the cabbage, and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes, then skim the surface carefully to remove
any scum. Then add the veal bones, if you managed to find them, and the seasonings, and continue to simmer, uncovered, for about 2 hours, which will give you plenty of time to prepare the baby
vegetables.

At the end of this time, take the chicken out of what will
now be a delicious broth, and lay it on a carving board or plate. Strain the broth and return it to the pan,
keeping the ugly boiled vegetables as a soup base for another day. Put the cabbage parcels into the broth and simmer for about 10 minutes, then add the baby vegetables, for 5 more minutes, and
finally the cabbage slices, which should be barely cooked and still green. Meanwhile, cut the chicken into serving pieces and arrange it on a serving plate. Moisten with a little broth and keep
warm in a low oven.

Pour off, into a tureen if you have one, enough broth to serve first as a clear chicken soup. Then assemble the serving plate with the chicken, the cabbage parcels and the vegetables, drizzling
a little tomato sauce over the white meat if you like, or scattering some chopped herbs over it. Put the dish on the table and let everyone help themselves. Serve with some country bread or plain
boiled potatoes, and the rest of the sauce on the side.

Béarnais Tomato Sauce

A word about the classic Béarnaise sauce, that aromatic confection of tarragon, vinegar and egg yolk. It’s a great thing to go with steak and chips, and would,
indeed, go well with a poached chicken, but there’s nothing very Béarnais about it, the restaurants of the region rarely offer it and the master works of regional cuisine never mention
it.

There is a Basque recipe for a sauce to go with trout that is made on the
sauce Bèarnaise
principle using mint instead of tarragon, but I’ve never found a reference to
sauce Béarnaise
in the traditional cuisine of the region. The whole thing was cooked up in the 1830s, in the Paris suburb of St-Germain-en-Laye, by a chef called Jules Collinet who
named his creation ‘Bearnaise’ because his restaurant was
called Le Pavilion Henri IV. He counted on the Béarnais being so far away, so unaware of events in
the capital, and anyway so contemptuous of all things Parisian, that they would never know, and, if they did find out, never bother to show him up by protesting.

If there is a national sauce of the Béarn, it would be a thick, spicy puree of tomatoes, which turns up frequently with grilled meat and fish, and with vegetable gratins. Of course, you
want to make this with real tomatoes, big red bulging monsters full of sweetness and flavour, which you don’t find anywhere in January, but tinned chopped tomatoes, enriched with some of the
sun-dried kind, are just about acceptable.

Put the fat or oil in a saucepan over a low heat, add the onions and sweat until translucent. Add the garlic and sweat for another couple of minutes, then add all the rest of
the ingredients, and a little water. Simmer, uncovered, for about an hour, adding more water if necessary, then remove the herbs and purée with the aid of a blender. Before serving, check
the seasoning and see if a little more sugar wouldn’t be a good idea.

‘Sent Pançard – votez pour moi!’

The Big Freeze

This has been the coldest winter most people can remember. The lowest temperature recorded was 26° below freezing, in the town of Mont-de-Marsan, just north-west of here,
in the Landes. Some people considered that Mont-de-Marsan is an ugly, rugby-crazed place which would only have been improved if its balls had frozen off; in Saliès-de-Béarn, however,
all the fountains had frozen into icebergs and people were rolling their eyes and muttering about the cost of burst pipes and the damage to the Renaissance stonework.

The cows stood stoically in the fields, probably because the earth was just too damn cold to lie down. Their breath billowed in front of them in clouds of steam. The signs overhanging the
motorway spelled out ‘
PRUDENCE!
’ in flashing lights.

I could have spent all morning watching the morning mist clear from the mountains, identifying the sharpest peaks and trying to make out the five separate ranges which Annabel assured me were
there. In the afternoon, when the air was clear and as warm as it was going to get, the snow sparkled above the highest crags. Below, the mid-ranges did a constant dance of the seven veils, as the
layers of air shifted.

A green shoulder would be revealed, prismatically clear, looking falsely close like a pebble in the bottom of a rock
pool. Just as you were wondering if you really could
count the blades of grass, the air turned opaque in that area, but cleared higher up, and a sharp, grey stone peak you’d never seen before came into focus. As I drove into Sauveterre for my
Times
every afternoon, I was in serious danger of leaving the road because I couldn’t stop watching the mountains.

In French class we were learning how to describe the way you look. Punk hairstyle –
coiffé à la punk
. This dress makes me look thinner – c
ette robe me
minçit
, or
elle me flatte
. Nobody asks how to say ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ Such relief.

Renée instructs us in a more colloquial use of the word for thin. Nobody in the Béarn would dream of using a vulgar expression like ‘Oh, shit!’ she says. Only people in
New Wave films in the Sixties actually exclaimed, ‘
Merde!
’ And people in Paris, of whom one can believe anything. The polite usage is not ‘
merde
!’ but
‘
mince!
’ We try it. ‘Oh – thin! I’ve forgotten my keys!’ It sounds particularly odd when Chris, the Australian, says it.