Deep France (6 page)

Wash and dry the chicken, and cut into large pieces, car­cass and all. Most domestic French cooks would do this with a cleaver or poultry shears, and plan on a chicken feeding 10 to 12
people.

Put the oil in a sauté pan over medium heat and brown the chicken pieces. When they’re sealed on all sides, take them out of the pan while you turn down the heat and sweat the
lardons and onion until the onion is almost transparent. Add
the bell peppers and garlic, and continue cooking for another 5 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, the tomato paste, the sugar, the wine, the
espelette
, the herbs and the orange peel and mix well. Then put the chicken pieces back, make sure they are well buried (add
a little water if you need to), put the lid on the pan and leave to simmer very gently for at least 40 minutes, by which time the peppers and tomatoes should be melting into a rich red sauce.

Poulet Basquaise
is usually served with saute potatoes or plain rice, but it would be delicious, and perfectly authentic (as we shall see later), to serve it with polenta. I usually
serve it straight from the cooking pan, after checking the seasoning, cutting the breast and thigh portions in half and picking out the less attractive bony bits.

Pumpkin Gratin

This is a lovely and simple recipe from my all-time favourite cook book,
Memories of Gascony
by Pierre Koffmann, the founder of London’s Gascon cooking
tradition, who grew up in the Béarn, in the town of Tarbes, but spent his summers with his grandparents on their small farm in the Gers, near Lectoure.

The gratin by itself is a deliriously creamy vegetarian dish. It’s a great solution to the post-Halloween pumpkin problem, and a good side dish to serve with a roast.

Melt the fat or heat the oil in a thick-bottomed saucepan over a medium flame, then tip in the pumpkin cubes, put on the lid and let them cook gently in their own water until
they can be mashed easily – 30 to 40 minutes. Shake the pan occasionally, though if the pumpkin catches and browns in places it won’t be the end of the world.

If you haven’t already cooked the rice, you can do that at the same time. Preheat the oven to 220°C/ 425°F/ Gas 7.

Mix the rice roughly into the mashed pumpkin and bind with the cream. Season with salt and pepper and pack into a greased gratin dish. Sprinkle the cheese over the top, and brown for about 15
minutes, then serve at once.

A Moving Experience

A call from a mobile phone. A trip out to the front gate with the largest piece of paper I can find bearing the words THIS IS IT, which I fix to the hedge with clothes pegs.
Soon a massive lorry lurches into the lane outside the house, bringing the container stuffed with my books, my clothes and the rest of the things I think I need or can’t expect my tenant in
London to tolerate, the bookcases, the bicycle, the work table, the photographs, the souvenirs, Chloe’s old toys and the little bag of her baby shoes.

Oh, and the No. 1 family heirloom, a mahogany four-post bed that my father bought in an auction in Dorset, now known to be from the time of William IV. For Chloe, the bed is all about fun and
romance, and climbing up onto the billowing mattress is a nightly adventure. Our heirloom has passed to her with no argument. Luckily for all of us, the bed is a fine example of early self-assembly
furniture, and can easily be taken apart for transport.

In fact, two lorries arrived, having come in convoy from England, the younger driver leading, the older one complaining and calling his colleague on his mobile with navigation tips. The younger
driver was on only his second trip abroad, but the road to the South was extremely familiar to the older one, who has spent the past six years of his life helping the British to emigrate.

They had slept overnight at a truck stop in Castets, on the motorway near Biarritz where there had been no coffee available, so they were grateful for mine. Everything was
carried in, and the bed squeezed into the largest bedroom, by lunch time, when they drove off to Spain to make another nine deliveries among the vast British diaspora.

There aren’t any reliable figures for the number of British people who’ve chosen to live in mainland Europe. Maybe the government just can’t face knowing how uncongenial the
country has become to its citizens. There are only official European statistics, which suggest that Spain is the least popular place for Brits to settle, with a mere seven thousand expatriates.
Wrong, obviously.

Unofficially, the Foreign Office thinks there are about half a million British ex-pats in France. Many of them take care to be invisible, of course, but many more have been happy to notify
themselves to their local
mairie
, fill up their tax returns annually and apply for the
carte de séjour
, which gives them certain temporary rights to French state
benefits.

There are certainly enough British abroad to keep dozens of international removal firms in business, not to mention hundreds of international estate agencies, scores of property finders and
fixers, companies who will export and assemble an Aga for you, two Web sites from which British delicacies such as Marmite can be ordered and an ex-pat newspaper, the
News
, in which all
these industries advertise.

I’ve found many back numbers of the News in the kindling basket. Among many other gems of reportage, I read a story from Charente-Maritime headlined ‘No Rural Post Offices To
Close’, fundraising appeals for animal sanctuaries run by various dotty English ladies, a feature on tea and the report of the tenth official championships mounted at Abjat-sur-Bandiat by La
Fédération Frangaise de Conkers, at which the defending champion was a Frenchman, Claude Bernard.
There hadn’t been a British-born conker champion in France
for six years.

There’s nothing like moving house to make you want to be a Buddhist nun, with no possessions except a robe and a begging bowl. To heighten my sense of death by over-consumption, it was
clear that most of the things I thought I couldn’t live without were actually French: the table I intend to work on was knocked up somewhere in Normandy from an oak plank and cherry-wood
legs. It has the great virtue of being so ‘distressed’ (the antique dealer’s word for bashed) that no coffee spill or maladroit move with scissors can do anything but add to its
charm.

The clothes, of course, the Robert Clergerie shoes, the Agnés B skirt, the underwear by Chantelle and Lejaby, the myriad T-shirts and beach bags emblazoned with the logo
‘Elle’. I left in a hurry, so there was no time to do sensible things with the kitchen. Thus the moving men scooped out the cupboards wholesale and I found myself repatriating a
cornucopia of French items: the tart tins, the steak knives, the coffee bowls, the jar of duck fat, the apricot jam, the bottles of walnut oil, cassis syrup and Crème de Mûres.

Finally, I got to the plates. The plates are symbolic as well as beautiful. I bought them when my first novel was a best-seller, to make up for all the wedding presents I’d never had. It
had been a little hard to look on while my relatives and friends got married and were deluged with food mixers and matching china that they never used because they hate cooking, while I, who love
to cook, was still single and therefore denied such equipment. The plates are wavy-edged Provencal pottery, glazed a beautiful rich green. I put the big ones up on the mantelpiece over the
fireplace.

Tea at la Maysou

Annabel, I realized pretty soon, is the queen of the international community hereabouts. She is the vice-president of the Club International de Saliès-de-Béarn,
which is currently homeless and in crisis since the Mayor of Saliès has withdrawn the privilege of an official meeting room. Sessions have to take place in the pool room of the Café
du Temple, under the inhospitable eye of the proprietor.

She speaks very pretty and absolutely fearless French, which is a considerable asset in integrating with the community, and essential in her career as an interior decorator. She also has a
lovely soprano voice, which has allowed her to join a choir in Pau.

Annabel’s most recent clients were a South African couple, for whom she has decorated a grand chateau in the nearby village of Andrein. She invited me to tea to meet them.

‘Tea’ proves to be the total English tea-time experience, complete with cucumber sandwiches and scones. I remember from my student days how living in another country suddenly moves
you into a whole new area of national consciousness, so that experiences you might have passed on in England are suddenly infused with a nostalgic glamour. The tea is served in the primrose drawing
room, which has an Aubusson carpet, a grand piano for Gerald and six pairs of French doors leading onto the terrace, with a full-on 180-degree view of the Pyrenees.

The South Africans are planning their Christmas party, and talking about fish to a Frenchman, Christian, whose major profession is angling. Could Christian get lobsters for them? Certainly. And
prawns? Of course. And display them all magnificently in a buffet? Understood. Christian’s wife, a Russian who he met when she was his translator
on a fishing trip to her
country, sits beside him and smiles shyly.

The other guests are a young Dutch couple, lawyers in their mid-thirties, who maximized their earnings for ten years in Amsterdam then sold up everything and bought a farmhouse not far away.
They keep a lot of chickens and are very happy. Also in the party are my neighbours, the potters, an elderly couple, and their son, Benoit, a slim, large-eyed man also in his early thirties.

I have been warned that nobody else in the village talks to the potters, because they are supposed to be
pieds-noirs
, French colonists who returned to the mother country from Algeria
after the war of independence in the Sixties. They obviously know that their reputation precedes them, because the old man launches into an elaborate definition of
pied-noir
, which, he
explains, cannot possibly include him because he merely attended university in Morocco during the war. Not that he approves of all these Arabs over here, marrying nice blonde French girls. Benoit,
who attended university in New York State, hears his father with a fixed half-smile.

Goodbye to Tarmac

Tarmac died suddenly. One morning, instead of grabbing a quick breakfast before going out to patrol his new territory, he refused food and drink and went to sit on the sofa
with the decisive look of a cat who knows he is seriously ill. Having lived with Tarmac for twelve years, I respected the opinion of a noble animal with superior street-smarts who has often judged
situations far better than the rest of us. Annabel told me where to find the vet in Sauveterre.

The practice was a suite of rooms in a building on one of the main streets. I took a seat in the corridor, and read the
announcements on the notice board while we waited.
Puppies offered to a good home. Animal refuge has kittens. A two-page letter written in biro on blue paper, from a farmer thanking the vet from the bottom of his heart for saving one of his
cows.

The vet was a middle-aged man, taciturn but reactive, who took the cat box off me as if it was a heavy burden I shouldn’t be carrying. Being completely unaccustomed to small acts of
consideration from strangers, I nearly burst into tears at that point.

He looked at Tarmac’s eyes and mouth, felt his stomach, which made him squeal, and told me that there was a big lump in his abdomen and he wanted to take an X-ray. The X-ray revealed the
white mass of a tumour the shape of a cuttlefish under his ribs. This, said the vet, was almost certainly in his liver, since he was very anaemic. As Tarmac was already too ill to survive a general
anaesthetic, he proposed giving him shots of saline solution, vitamins and stimulants and hoping for the best – if he survived, he’d operate on Friday.