Deep France (22 page)

Salade des Deux Asperges ‘Belle Auberge’

Roast, steam or microwave the asparagus until just tender, toss in a little oil and leave to cool.

Fold most of the chopped herbs into the
greuil
or
fromage frais
and season with salt and pepper.

Make a light vinaigrette with the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Use half of it to toss the salad leaves, and heap them in the centre of the plate. Arrange the asparagus spears on top like the
spokes of a wheel, tips to the centre.

Boil some water, take a teaspoon, dip it into the hot water to warm it briefly and use it to mould the herb mixture into 3 egg-shaped mounds and put them on the plate between the ends of the
asparagus. Finally, sprinkle with the remaining chopped herbs and drizzle with the remaining dressing before serving.

Asparagus Omelette

A lovely thing to do with white asparagus, and an excellent scam for making it go further if you have only one bunch and a lot of people to feed. It’s also a good way to
use up asparagus stems if you have a lot left over after making a posh starter.

Break the eggs into a bowl, season with salt and pepper, and beat very lightly, hardly more than mixing the yolks and whites. If you’re stuck with the sad, pale, gutless
eggs that result from industrial-scale farming, add the Parmesan now to give the dish a better flavour and colour.

Slice the asparagus thinly, keeping any tips intact. Chop the chervil, but not too finely, so that some of the pretty leaves remain whole.

A proper French omelette is nothing like the neat, turd-shaped item which the British call by the same name. It’s a loose, fluffy thing, a mere cloud of protein with not much shape –
Marie’s famous
omelette aux piments
is much more like scrambled egg. To make one, you need to be chivvying the beaten eggs around the pan all the time, just allowing them a few
seconds of peace before you tip the finished omelette onto a plate.

In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, then add 1 tsp butter. Saute the asparagus until tender – it happens very quickly. Pick out the tips and keep them safe on a plate. Then, working as
fast as you can, turn the heat up to maximum and pour in the eggs. Using a spatula, muddle the eggs about with the asparagus as they set, aiming to distribute the asparagus evenly in a creamy
omelette that will have only a bit of shape.

Help the omelette out of the pan onto a serving plate and decorate with the reserved asparagus tips.

Marie’s
omelette aux piments
is one of Tony’s favourite dishes. She makes it with the long, thin, mild, green peppers which are a speciality of the Landes,
which she simply chops across into bite-sized chunks, then sautés briefly in the pan before adding the eggs. Myself, I’d prefer to slit the peppers lengthways, scrape out the seeds and
chop them finely, but that’s probably why my
omelette aux piments
just doesn’t taste as good.

Pedigree Blondes at St-Palais

The Blondes Next Door

Last week, there was nothing to hear but the buzzing of insects and the rustling of growing grass. Now there is bellowing. It’s the cows. If they’re not bellowing
because they’re calving, they’re bellowing because their newborns have been taken away to be vaccinated and tagged. The hillside rings with the noise of bovine outrage all day.

In Britain, the calves would also be dehorned in their infancy, but these are the most beautiful cows in the world, the Blondes d’Aquitaine, and nobody wants to put them through that. The
worst they do is to wait until the horns are grown and saw off the pointed tips, to remove the possi­bility that a cow will accidentally disembowel her cowman, or one of her sisters, with an
idle toss of her head.

The Blondes were . . . well, blonde. All over. Any colour from the palest cream to the darkest butterscotch. Long before the breed was officially recognized, there had been cattle with creamy
coats, light-brown noses and pale eyelashes in the South-West of France: the Blonde’s close family look strikingly like cattle in the cave paintings at Lascaux, the prehistoric
Bos
aquitanus
.

The Blondes’ favourite occupation, even more than munching the sweet new grass, was lying down comfortably in the warm sunlight and looking out across the valleys with their big,
long-lashed eyes. The major task for the stockmen
who had to parade the pedigree bulls at the summers’ fetes was stopping them from taking the weight off their hooves at
the first opportunity and settling down to ruminate in the middle of a main street.

My farmer neighbours kept these gentle beasts in family groups, a bull, his cows and their calves all together. The bulls were mere four-legged toy boys, usually younger than their mates,
because by the age of about eight they got grumpy, then aggressive, impossible to manage and doomed to the abattoir. They were massive and muscular, with superb definition reminiscent of the young
Arnold Schwarzenegger, and despite their bulk they were nimble enough to give an exhibition of natural insemination at any time, even pausing for a shag while they were being herded through the
village to a fresh field.

The Blondes are exceptionally docile because they were in part bred from the old Béarnais cattle, who were all-purpose farm animals reared principally to pull carts or ploughs and provide
milk. Their meat was a great luxury, seldom con­sumed by their owners. They lived, not in vast herds, but in twos and threes, kept by the thousands of small farmers in the South-West. In the
Landais farmhouses, they were also part of the heating system, being stabled in winter on one side of the building while the family lived on the other. The old photographs show a half-door between
the living room and the barn, through which the cows were occasionally allowed to put their horned heads and breathe warmly over the family.

Even in the nineteenth century, only farmers in the north of France were rich enough to keep shire horses to work their land. In Gascony, the draught animals were cattle. They were looked after
just as the members of the family which they almost were, and sent to work with a crocheted fringe over their eyes to keep off the flies, and often a linen smock
over their
backs and forequarters to protect them from insect stings. Theophile Gaultier, travelling down to Spain in 1840, noticed them as soon as he reached the Landes.

‘Around here you meet the first vehicles drawn by oxen. The chariots looked quite Homeric and primitive; the oxen were harnessed by the head to a single yoke, decorated with a little frill
of sheepskin; they had a soft, serious and resigned air, truly sculptural and worthy of an Egyptian frieze. Most of them wore trappings of white cloth, which protected them from midges and
horse-flies; nothing was stranger than to see these oxen in shirts, who slowly turned towards you with their wet, shining muzzles and the big dark-blue eyes which the Greeks, those connoisseurs of
beauty, found so remarkable that they described the goddess Hera as having “cow’s eyes”.’

The Blondes are also wonderful parents. The cows get pregnant readily and the shape of their pelvis makes it par­ticularly easy for them to give birth. A Blonde cow will produce six to eight
calves in her lifetime, which means she can still be a productive farm animal up to the ripe age of fifteen.

Another of the breed’s useful characteristics is that the calves are born very small-boned and slim, so their survival rate is very high. They bulk up quickly and when it comes to be sold,
the veal is proudly labelled ‘
élève sous la mère
’. The label often has a picture of a calf diving for its mother’s udder, reassuring the purchasers
that this is free-range meat, not the product of a cruel and unnatural rearing process.

The breeders created the Blonde in 1962, when it was clear that tractors had replaced ox-ploughs and the northern beef cattle, the Charolais and Limousin, were going to take over unless the
Gascons took steps to stop them. They described the process as a ‘reunification’. The registered Garonnais and Quercy breeds were crossed with the pale
Pyrénéen cattle, among which many separate strains were recognized including the toffee-coloured Béarnais.

Their mixed heritage shows in their crazy horns; some just look like the nursery-rhyme cow with the crumpled horn. Some of them have incurving horns carried almost over their eyes, and some of
them develop the wonderful lyre-shaped horns which are characteristic of the old Béarnaise cow.

The Blondes turned out to be terrific beef cattle, muscular, lean and light-boned. Their hides also turned out to have a unique type of hair which stopped them sweating excessively in hot
weather. By the Seventies, the Blonde had been exported not only to Northern Europe, America, Canada and Australia, but also to Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

While the new Blonde was taking over the world, however, the old mountain breeds were dying out. Only three Béarnais bulls and a few dozen cows survived by 1981. Béarnais
nationalism came to the rescue and by 2001 the numbers were up to fifteen bulls and 112 cows. The rare cattle were celebrities: when a couple of prize specimens went to the Paris Show, the
Sud-Ouest
put their picture on the front page. So we were honoured that two lyre-horned Asturian cows and their calves were sent to meet the public at the opening festivities of the
Château at Laàs.

From Caravan to Château

By 1 May, it was, as the Gascons say, raining like a pissing cow. Fiona and her children watched the black clouds and the dripping trees with dismay, since the family had just
moved into the smallest caravan any of us had ever seen, just about big enough for the four of them to lie down to sleep if all their possessions were stuffed under the bed.

They had been thrown out by their business partner, who decided that he needed the whole building as a ‘party house’, and that the children would just cramp his
style when he arrived with his guests. Their partnership in the tree-fern nursery had thus been terminated.

The guests for whom the family had been evicted were allegedly to be major investors interested in underwriting their ex-partner’s scheme to create a Disneyworld-style dinosaur theme park
on the outskirts of Salies. It was not a total fantasy – Roger, in his round of chats with the mayor, had seen the plans for it – but it seemed unlikely that international financiers
would go for it.

The caravan was on what should, by then, have been their own land. The
notaire
, the lawyer handling the sale, had promised them that the process would be completed by May Day. The
transaction showed no sign of emerging from the various committees who have to approve it, but the owner of the property had graciously allowed them to be squatters on the land.

The caravan was in a little village called Bellocq, uncomfortably close to the RN117, and mostly made up of rather urban nineteenth-century terraced cottages. Although it’s not typically
rural, Bellocq is still not completely devoid of romance, having also some vineyards, a wine-making cooperative and an imposing ruin which is the oldest
bastide
, or fortified town, in the
Béarn, built around 1200.