Deep France (15 page)

Once they had set a few bushes alight, the violent winds, blasting down the valleys at 100 kilometres an hour, had fanned the flames so quickly that the farmers lost control. By the end of the
day the fire had raged over thousands of hectares, burning everything from the valley above Aramitz through which I drove to the lower slopes of La Rhune in the West, and threatening to wipe out
areas of dense forest.

Every firefighter from Hendaye, on the coast, to Pau was called out and fought all night beside the local people to stop the blaze spreading. Eventually, in the small hours of the morning,
torrential rain came down and put out the flames. Six people had died in the fires, all of them elderly shepherds who had not been able to out-run the billowing smoke.

The
Monsieur

The carnival in Pau was the first lesson I had in the reverence which the Béarnais have for their blood stock. Gathering in public to honour their animals was a natural
and important element of every festival, and the finest specimens were always selected. No wonder that nothing I was or owned won me more respect than Podge, my white Chinchilla Persian cat. So, Mr
Bond, you have an animal of
pure race
?

Pure-bred cows, sheep or pigs, with bows on their forelocks, flowers round their necks or pompoms on their fleeces, were ceremonially paraded by their stockmen at a high proportion of the
festivals which were staged throughout the summer. The connection between the living animal and the eating of its meat was fully acknowledged; at the Fete du Sel in Salies, I found one sausage
maker enthusiastically grilling his products on a barbecue right next to the pen where a Black Gascon sow was lying on a bed of straw with her litter of suckling pigs.

These simple ceremonies have a spiritual quality and certainly trace their origins to ancient rituals celebrating the fertility of the animals and giving thanks for their lives. They are at the
heart of the respect which the French have for their food and its origins.

The legend of Sent Pançard is an unsubtle piece of propaganda against binge eating, teaching the restraint which is an important principle in an agricultural cycle in which famine would
inevitably follow feast. For centuries, the pig was the foundation of a Gascon family’s nutrition and a single animal, well reared, well fed and skilfully slaughtered, would provide meat for
quite a large family for a full year.

It wasn’t long before the rest of the world noticed the
special status of the pig in the agricultural and domestic economy of the region. The conquering Romans
marvelled at the local tribesmen’s skill in rearing pigs, and in the
Decameron
, Bocaccio wrote of Cornucopia, an imaginary part of the Basque Country so abundant that in the
vineyards the vines were tied up with sausages.

The Gascon pig was an honoured member of the family. Living close to his owners, he would know their voices and come when called. Nobody thought it was strange to hear people talking to their
pigs. He was always addressed respectfully, as ‘
lo Monsur
’, (Monsieur), or even ‘
lo Noble
’ or ‘
lo Ministre
’. Paula Wolfert observes,
‘There is a mystical feeling about these beasts on farms of the South-West, similar to the way bread is regarded in some parts of France.’

In another legend, the pig itself boasts that none of its body goes to waste. The
charcuterie
which the British admire so much in traditional French cuisine was originally devised as a
varied and delicious way of preserving as much pork as possible through the depth of winter, when the chickens were no longer laying, and the fields and orchards were bare. In the days before
freezers, a Béarnais housewife would set to work to preserve a year’s supply of pork, making ham,
confit, rillettes, pâtés
, terrines, sausages and puddings.

The lean meat was either preserved
en confit
, slow-cooked in fat then sealed in a large pottery jar, or cured to make ham. The trotters, the tail and the ears were treated the same way.
Small portions of ham or confit were then used in the signature dishes of the South-West: cassoulet, the bean stew, and
garbure
, the hearty soup that often comprises most of the evening
meal. A thick slice of ham is also traditional with
piperade
, the Basque dish of eggs with peppers and tomato.

The liver and some of the back fat were minced and mixed with garlic, herbs and spices, sealed in glass jars or in tins, and slow-cooked to make pâtés. The fattest cuts of
meat were rendered, drained, shredded, seasoned and potted up as
rillettes
. The intestines were carefully washed out, and stuffed with a minced mixture of fat, offal and meat
scraps, spiced and mixed with stale bread, to make sausages.

Even the blood was saved. Glynn was hugely amused by a recipe for a dish made with nothing but the fat and blood of a duck. When the pig was slaughtered, his blood was mixed with breadcrumbs,
any leftover fat and gristle, seasoned generously with
quatre épices
and poached. One recipe produced a succulent black pudding, for immediate consumption. Another method required
the pudding to be dried to make the dark Bearnais sausage which actually tastes a lot better than it looks but has never found an export market.

If not to be eaten fresh, the sausages were dried or preserved
en confit
. All this bounty was then stored on high shelves or suspended from the beams in the living room, out of the
reach of rats and mice. In a peasant community, the hams hanging from the beams were a symbol of the wealth of the household.

There is another story about Henri IV, who, when installed on the throne among all the magnificence of the royal court in Paris, was visited by his old wet-nurse from Pau. When she saw that
there were no hams hanging from the ceiling, she exclaimed, ‘Henri! My love, you must be starving – I’ll send you a ham as soon as I get home!’

The gastronomic crown of this tradition is Bayonne ham, to which the French foodie establishment has accorded AOC status, meaning that the title can only be applied to an item produced according
to a strictly defined method. Like the hams from Parma in Italy or Serrano in Spain, a Bayonne ham is salted then air-dried, so the slices are dark red and translucent.

The meat must come from a pig raised in the Béarn, the
Basque Country or the Armagnac region, and cured using salt from Saliès-de-Béarn and from
Bayonne. First the fine white salt from Saliès is rubbed into the pork legs over a three-day period, giving the ham its dense flavour and colour. The cured hams are then stored in boxes of
coarse, greyish Bayonne salt for a year, before being rubbed with pepper and hung up to dry. Refined diners usually like their Bayonne ham wafer-thin, but the traditional slice preferred by the
Bearnais is a whole lot heartier.

I found a recipe for traditional carnival fritters, called Rats’ Tails, an enriched step up from everyday doughnuts, which are often flavoured with orange-flower water.
This wasn’t difficult to buy. The small blue bottles of perfumed flavouring were in every shop and on the stalls in the markets selling nuts, olives and spices.

Orange-flower water is one of the Moorish legacies in south-west France. In Morocco, and all over North Africa, market traders still sit beside small hills of fresh orange flowers and rosebuds,
heaped up simply on a cloth on the ground. The blooms are bought by the spice merchants, who distil their own essences from them. The label of the French-produced orange-flower water confessed to
both natural and artificial flower essences, but it was still a delicate flavouring that instantly evoked hot summer days in the dead of winter.

In Béarnais cooking, orange-flower water is often used in desserts and pastries where an English recipe would call for vanilla. Not content with a single note of aroma, many
Béarnaise cooks make up their own mixture of sweet flavourings, using orange-flower water, citrus peel, rum, Armagnac, anise and almond extract in various proportions.

Rats’ Tails

Break the eggs into a spacious bowl. Beat them lightly, then beat in the sugar, flour and yeast, little by little. Add the oil, cream and orange-flower water and continue
beating until thoroughly smooth.

Put the frying oil over a gentle heat. Take a generous teaspoon of the dough and roll it between the palms of your hands to make a long, thin rat’s tail. Continue until all the dough is
shaped, by which time the oil should be hot enough to fry the fritters in batches until they are golden and puffed. Drain, dredge with sugar, and hand out to hungry children in paper cones.

If making Rats’ Tails for adults, add a few dashes of rum to the batter.

Crème Caramel au Fleur d’Oranger

Once in the cupboard, the orange-flower water became a compulsion. I used it to sprinkle on a winter fruit salad of oranges with toasted almonds, or on slices of grilled
pineapple to be served with ice cream. It gave a wonderful lift to milky nursery puddings, and a new zing to a simple
crème caramel
.

My
crème caramel
recipe comes from my tattered, butter-splattered, first-ever recipe book, Len Deighton’s
Action Cookbook
. The
crème caramel
recipe is on page 118, and I’ve used it so often that the book now falls open there. Deighton, as well as a thriller writer extraordinaire, was a damn fine
cookery writer and, after Elizabeth David, one of the best-known authors who popularized French cooking in Britain in the Sixties. He learned to cook as a student waiting tables to pay his way
through art school.

This is a very simple dish, so you will get the most luscious results with the very best ingredients – fresh organic eggs and fresh organic whole milk. If you choose
industrially produced eggs and half-fat milk, you get something lighter, paler and lower in fat and calories. It’s an easy dessert to
make in the morning of, or the day
before, a dinner party and leave peacefully in the fridge until you need it.

Preheat the oven to l60°C/325°F/Gas3. Scald the milk, which means bring it almost to boiling point. In a bowl of at least 1.4 litres (2.5 pint) size, beat the eggs and 90g (3oz) of sugar
thoroughly. Slowly pour the milk into this mixture, beating all the time. Add the orange-flower water.

Put the rest of the sugar in a heavy-bottomed small saucepan and melt it. It should go dark brown, but not black. Grease the sides of your mould with a smear of butter; don’t grease the
bottom, the cooked caramel will unmould of its own accord. If you don’t keep butter, use a film of oil, but don’t resort to any kind of spread for greasing the mould, it will taste
revolting.

Pour the caramelized sugar into the bottom of the mould, tilting it to coat evenly. Then pour in the custard, put the mould in the water jacket, put it all in the oven and cook for about 45
minutes. It’s better to err on the side of caution with the heat; after about half an hour, check that the
crème
is actually cooking. The surface should have risen a very
little. If not, turn up the heat – cautiously – and check again in five minutes.

When the
crème caramel
is cooked, take it out of the oven and let it cool before putting it in the fridge to chill. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the custard, put the
serving plate over the mould, take a deep breath, say a prayer, hold the plate steady and turn the whole thing over. The
crème caramel
should flop gently down into a puddle of its
own sauce. If it doesn’t, give it a gentle shake. Fill the mould and the saucepan with cold water to dissolve the remaining caramel.

Decorate the plate with the orange slices and serve.