Deep France (26 page)

A week or so later, after a few dry days, my own strawberries were much better. They were an elongated oval shape, deeply red, gorgeously soft and sweet, quite unlike the sour, cold things
bought in supermarkets at home. They were of a local variety called ‘Garrigues’, and the first commercial crop of the year got the front page in the
Sud-Ouest
. When
Andrew’s parents and his Aunt Rose came to visit, I mashed some wild and garden strawberries into Eton Mess and decorated it with crystallized petals from the deep-red rose climbing up the
front of Maison Bergez.

I also had the first cherries, a small, light-scarlet variety which suffered hardly any bird damage. This is surprising, because in most gardens the birds wait until the exact day that the
cherries are ripe and then swoop down to strip the tree, which they can do in a few hours. The children, when they were off school for one of the bank holidays, were allowed to sit up all night to
be ready to run out at dawn banging saucepans to scare away the winged marauders.

The lines of peas were flowering, but not growing very tall – I wondered why, then checked the seed packet and found I’d planted a dwarf variety. The broad beans and the runner beans
were looking good, the tomatoes were getting
under way and the courgette plants could only be called ‘
costaud
’. This was another new word which I was
enjoying. It means beefy, butch or muscular. Thus to foreign ears the famous undersea explorer, Jacques Cousteau, sounds like Jack Butch.

All the woods were laced with cream – the petals of the acacia flowers. The hill on which Andrew and Geoff lived was covered with so many of these tall, hard-wooded trees in full flower
that their scent rolled down to greet you; it was like driving into a wall of honey halfway across the valley.

The weather was operatically temperamental. For a few days it was like some caricature of good growing weather, brilliant sunshine one minute, bucketing rain the next. Then there would be
storms. One morning I woke up to see a blanket of mist in the valley below; by the time I’d made my coffee, the mist was all around the house, so thick I could hardly see the road.

When it was hot now, it was hot, over 30°C at least. The rivers were raging grey-green torrents, and Sauveterre was suddenly full of kids who’d been rafting, squelching up from the
river in their trainers, looking happy and exhausted.

Sometimes the mountains were invisible in a heat haze, but sometimes the whole range was so brilliantly clear I felt sure I could see every stone on their snowy sides. When the air was so
transparent, the mountains seemed to move closer, then drift away again as a veil of cloud came down.

One Monday, when I was just leaving Annabel’s house, we had a tornado. As I stepped out of her kitchen, black clouds rolled up from the South-West and covered the sky. By the time
I’d walked downhill to my own gate, a huge wind was thrashing the hedges. With it came a blizzard of acacia flowers, and then, by the time I’d run all over the cottage locking down the
shutters, a swirling gale was ripping
branches off trees. In the morning, the garden was full of torn-off branches of mistletoe. At Chris’s house, the wind slammed the
bathroom door with such force that it knocked a hole in the wall.

The First Cuckoo

I heard the first cuckoo, calling in the wood by the tile factory. Several pairs of blackbirds were nesting and ceaselessly combing the garden for worms. From twilight onwards
they scolded the cats non-stop, until I went and got Piglet in just for the sake of some peace. Annabel pointed out the beautiful liquid call of a golden oriole, coming from the bamboo thicket by
my gate. We also had a wren, hardly bigger than the yellow butterflies now dancing over the flowers. He was extremely aggressive, and at first poured such vicious abuse on Piglet that he took
fright and ran indoors.

At the far end of the garden, under the huge oak tree, were some sawn-off oak logs, grouped around like the table and chairs set up for a leprechaun’s tea party. As I passed by them one
afternoon, I found a woodpecker frantically chipping the oak stumps to shreds in search of the beetles which had already bored them hollow. These were the notorious
capricornes
, another
insect capable of condemning a house to death, and in a few days they had completely destroyed a section of oak trunk about two feet in diameter.

At dusk, the churring of cicadas was joined by calls from the big brown toad who lived by the stop-cock on the water pipe. Huge bugs began to fly about and a hornet came to visit my office every
evening, flying in for an inspection about six, droning around officiously for thirty seconds, then flying on his way.

After him, a cinnamon-coloured beetle about fifty millimetres long tried to get over the kitchen window sill; there was no need to deal with him, because his own clumsiness
eventually sent him tumbling out into the flower bed. In the bathroom, exquisite grey moths, some with orange eyes on their wings, lined up on the window panes.

All this delighted the cats. The Duchess went out every morning, picked the softest spot on the bank of grass beyond the catalpas, and spent all day alternately dozing and watching the
butterflies. Piglet’s claws had grown as hard as steel, and he wanted to be out all night, prowling the bamboo thicket, or sitting on the kitchen window sill watching out for game, and also
for Henri Cat, the ginger kitten, who was now to be found in the kitchen on most days when I came home from Sauveterre. He whisked out of the window and into the wood shed as soon as he heard me.
Of course, it is folly to try to domesticate a barn cat but allowing him to live in the woodshed would, I reasoned, definitely discourage the mice.

Blonde d’Osso Bucco à la Landaise

There are far more recipes for poultry and pork in the traditional cooking of the South-West than there are for beef and veal. This is, after all, a cuisine of the people, who
could only eat the cheapest and least-esteemed cuts of meat, while the roasts, steaks and chops were enjoyed by the
milords
and the bourgeois. One of the most popular cuts of veal is the
jarret
, the equivalent of the shank of lamb, which is often pot-roasted. It’s also cooked in slices, which we know in Britain by its Italian name, osso bucco.

This is my adaptation, using Jurançon wine and pine nuts, a classic Landais ingredient, with the veal shin in a sauce made with onion, celery and anchovy, rather than the traditional
tomatoes. Fear not, the anchovies dissolve and enrich the sauce undetectably – absolutely no hint of fish. The veal shank is cut through the bone; the marrow is kept intact in the cooking and
is considered a great delicacy. It’s also bursting with vitamins. But if you have to feed people who can’t deal with bone marrow, this dish is nearly as good made simply with chunks of
veal shin without the bone.

Serves 4

Preheat the oven to 150°C/300°F/Gas2.

Wash and dry the osso bucco slices, taking care to get rid of any bone crumbs. Set some butter and oil to melt in a heavy-bottomed casserole over a medium heat. Mix a handful of flour with a
pinch or two of salt and pepper – if you put it all in a plastic bag the whole process is easy and not too messy. Dust each slice of veal with the seasoned flour, and when the casserole is
sizzling but not burning, fry the slices on each side to seal them.

Chop the onions and the celery. Crush 2 cloves of garlic. Wash the anchovies, pull out any visible bones and chop them.

When the meat is sealed, remove from the pan and set aside on a plate. Put the onions and celery in the pan, reduce the heat and cook gently until the onion is transparent. Then add the garlic
and anchovies, and cook for a couple more minutes. The anchovy scraps will start to melt.

Pour in the wine and turn up the heat to reduce it a little. Put the slices of meat back into the casserole. The liquid and sauce ingredients ought to come up around the sides of the slices, but
not cover them, so if you need to, add some stock
or water to get enough liquid in the casserole. You don’t want the dish to burn.

Cover the casserole and put it in the oven for 2½ hours, checking occasionally and adding more liquid if necessary. To get an attractive golden colour on the meat, uncover the casserole
for the last half-hour and glaze the slices with a little butter.

Chop the lemon zest, parsley and remaining garlic very finely together – this topping is known in Italian cuisine as
gremolada
– and mix in the pine nuts. To serve, transfer
the meat slices to a flat serving dish. Taste the sauce and if you like add some more stock and seasoning. Pour the sauce around the slices of osso bucco, scatter the
gremolada
and pine
nuts over the top, and serve with plain boiled rice or a simple risotto.

Acacia-Flower Fritters

This is Pierre Koffmann’s recipe, which marinates the flowers in rum before turning them into fritters. This elevates the dish from a novelty snack for children to a
sophisticated dessert. It’s delicious – but it’s worth trying once without the rum to enjoy the delicate honey flavour of the blossom.

Acacia blossom grows like wisteria blossom, in long panicles of tiny flowers. You may have to break them into manageable sprays before trying to cook them.

Serves about 6

Mix together the rum and sugar and macerate the flowers for half an hour.

Meanwhile, prepare the batter. Put the flour into a large bowl, make a well in the middle, and add the egg yolks and oil. Beat gently with a wooden spoon, gradually adding a little water to make
a soft paste which will coat the back of a spoon. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold them into the batter.

Drain the flowers and stir the rum and sugar mixture into the batter. Heat the frying oil until it is sizzling. Dip the flowers in the batter, then fry them in the hot oil until golden brown.
Drain well on kitchen paper, then sprinkle with sugar before serving.

Eton Mess
Tante
Rose

I suspect that this famous English dish derived from the kind of mess schoolboys make when they mash their ice­cream to a slurry. It’s a crafty thing to do with
less-than-perfect strawberries or damaged meringues, and in this variation the gritty little wild fruits add an extra dimension to the texture while the pink peppercorns lift the flavours.

For each person

Put the large strawberries in a large bowl, mash them roughly, add a little sugar and the peppercorns and leave to infuse. Whip your cream into soft peaks in another large bowl
– don’t overdo it, or the cream will get too solid. Roughly fold the cream into the strawberry mess, then add the wild strawberries, then enough sugar to make the mixture a little less
sweet than you intend the finished dessert to be. Keep a few of the reddest wild fruits for decoration. In yet another bowl, break the meringues into chunks.

Just before serving, fold the broken meringues into the fruit and cream mixture. Pile it into
coupes
or glasses and decorate with the crystallized rose petals and wild strawberries. (To
make crystallized rose petals, choose perfect petals from the darkest, most fragrant red rose you can find. They need to be dry. Preheat the oven to its lowest setting. Beat together with a fork
the white of 1 egg and 1 tbsp caster sugar, then paint both sides of the rose petals with this mixture. Set the petals carefully on a sheet of baking paper or foil, put them on a baking sheet and
leave them in the barely warm oven until they’re dry and brittle – an hour should be long enough. When they’re cool they’re ready to use, or to keep for a few days.)