Omelette and a Glass of Wine (12 page)

La Mère Brazier, from a photograph in the author’s possession

Now, for the pleasure of buying bread. I look, usually, for a bakery selling the big round loaves called
miches
or
boules
or just
pains de campagne
. Those have more character, a more interesting flavour and stay fresher much longer than
baguettes
and
ficelles
and all the rest of the tribe of long loaves. Enticing though these look and smell as they come out of the oven, I find them lacking in savour, although they certainly still compare pretty well with the factory bread which is our own national shame.

When lunchtime approaches, the question is are we near a river or lake? If so, shall we be able to reach its banks? For the ideal picnic there has to be water, and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, that it is rare not to be able to find some delicious spot where you can sit by the water, watch dragonflies and listen to the birds or to the beguiling sound of a fast-flowing stream. As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt, and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant. During one golden September in the valleys of the Corrèze, the Dordogne and the Lot, I enjoyed just such picnics, day after blazing day. The tomatoes that year and in that region were so rich and ripe and fragrant that I shall forever remember their savour. Then, one day in a pastry shop in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, we bought a
tarte aux mirabelles
made with yeast pastry. Those little round golden plums of early autumn on their light brioche-like base made an unexpected and memorable end to our outdoor feast. Another year it was Normandy, early autumn again, and daily picnics in the magnificent forests of Mortagne, Brotonne and Bellême, in clearings where foxgloves grew high amid the bracken, and water was always within sight. Once or twice we sat by the banks of the Seine, looking at landscapes and riverscapes which Corot had surely painted.

Petits Propos Culinaires
4, 1980

Confort anglais, French fare

This is a 1984 postscript to my 1977
Eating out in Provincial France
, and is more about eating in than eating out. How gloriously different a matter is French food when you can buy and cook it yourself from that offered at the restaurant meals imposed when you stay in hotels, was brought home to me most forcibly in the early months of 1984. With a friend I was lent, by another and mutual friend, a charming town house in the little south western city
of Uzès. With high ceilings, tall windows, comfortable bedrooms, a bathroom for each, blessedly hot water, central heating, simple and appropriate furniture, good lighting, a large kitchen, electric kettles wherever needed, shelves filled with weeks and weeks of reading, plus all the necessary maps and guide books, the whole place was the most engaging possible blend of traditional French building with unaggressive modern English comforts.

Two minutes walk from the house was one of those small town
casinos
, emporiums of modest size and indeed modest content, but efficiently run, open long hours of every day and providing many of the necessities of life, from butter to electric light bulbs, mineral water to toilet paper, a selection of wines, spirits and liqueurs, adequate cheeses, vegetables, fruit and salad stuffs. Next door to this general shop was a Prisunic, another small fairyland offering everything from drinking glasses and crockery to gaudy scarves, cheap envelopes and childrens’ exercise books. Across the road were the food shops, a butcher, a charcuterie, a greengrocery, the market place, the Crédit Lyonnais. Three doors down from the house a fine small bakery provided fresh bread six days a week. As well as everyday
baguettes
and other white loaves, we had a choice of four or five different varieties of brown bread, including rye and
pain biologique
, France’s version of the loaf made from organically grown whole wheat, in this case a very great improvement on the equivalent product of the English health food shop. As well as good bread the little bakery offered takeaway temptations such as flaky pastry turnovers filled with
brandade de morue
, the creamed salt cod of the region, and an old-fashioned provençal
pissaladière
baked in rectangular iron trays and sold by the slice. They call it
pizza
now. People have forgotten the old name, and will tell you it comes from Italy. I can tell them it comes from no nearer Italy than Marseille where I used to buy it when I lived on a boat tied up in the Vieux Port. That was 1939, before the war started. I used to go ashore every morning and walk up a narrow street to a bakery to buy my
pissaladière
fresh out of the oven. It was a treat to find my anchovy-and-tomato-spread
pissaladière
once again in Uzès, and even handier to the house than the Marseille bakery had been to my boat.

Market day at Uzès is Saturday morning. It was February when I was there, not the most propitious time of year for fresh produce, and on the first Saturday of my stay the mistral was blowing so ferociously that it was difficult to stand up. Even the hardy stall-
holders were shivering and anxious to pack up and climb into the shelter of their vans. Nevertheless, even on a day like that we could buy quite a good variety of vegetables and salads. Among the greatest pleasures, as always in France, were the good creamy-fleshed firm potatoes. For the thousandth time, why, why, why, I ask, do we, the English, the pioneers of European potato cultivation, now grow such uninteresting potatoes, while the French, who refused to touch them until the Revolution and Parmentier forced them into a reconsideration of the ill-used tuber, and quickly making up for that lost time, took to growing delicate, waxy yellow potatoes, and to making them into wonderful dishes like
pommes Anna
and
gratin dauphinois
, not to mention quite everyday potato salads, no easy matter to achieve with our own all-purpose collapsible English spuds. Then, even in February, there were little round, crisp, bronze-flecked, frilly lettuces, baskets of
mesclun
or mixed salad greens, great floppy bunches of chard, leaf artichokes, trombone-shaped pumpkins which make admirable soup, fat fleshy red peppers, new laid eggs, eight or nine varieties of olives in basins and barrels, thick honey and clear honey, in a variety of colours, in jars and in the comb, and honey soap in golden chunks, bouquets of mixed fresh flowers, tulips, dark purple anemones, marigolds. And then cheeses, cheeses. There are the locally made goats’ milk cheeses called
pélardons
, small round and flattish and to be bought in various stages of maturity. Is it for immediate consumption, do you wish to keep it a few days, is it for toasting, roasting, grilling? Try the
magnane à la sarriette
, another goat cheese, strewn with the savory leaves they call
poivre d’âne
across the Rhône in Provence. Or how about the St Marcellin? Or the fresh ewes’ milk cheeses? ‘They are my own’ says the lady on the stall. We buy two. They are delicious, but they are horribly expensive, as anyone who has a taste for roquefort well knows. Given the very small yield of milk, about ½ litre per milking, all ewes’ milk cheese is a luxury. Here we are not all that far from the place where that great and glorious roquefort is produced and matured, and in Uzès market, from another cheese stall, we have our pick of three or four grades. Within two or three minutes we have spent
£
7.00 and have not yet bought our parmesan or gruyère for grating on to the delicate little
ravioles
we have bought from the goat cheese lady. They are tiny, these
ravioles
, filled with a mixture of parsley and comté, the gruyère-like cheese of Franche Comté. They take
one
minute to cook, warns the lady. She imports them from the other side of the Rhône, from Royans near
Romans in the Drôme where
ravioles
have long been a local speciality.

By now we have nearly finished our shopping. We have bought as much as we can carry. But we spend another pound’s worth of francs on one of the goat cheese lady’s specialities, one of her own. It is something she calls a
tourte à la crème
, or
tourteau
. It is a light, puffy, yeast-leavened
tourte
, round, like an outsize bun, with a layer of subtly flavoured sweet, creamy cream cheese in the centre, and with a characteristically blackened top. It is deliberate, this charred top, and traditional, says the lady. (She turns out to be Finnish, this lady, her husband is Belgian, and everything she sells is of very high quality.)

Lunch is going to be a feast. Our red peppers are to be impaled on the electric spit and roasted until their skins are charred as black as the top of the
tourteau
. Then we shall peel them, cut them in strips, dress them with the good olive oil we have bought direct from the little oil mill at Bédarrides on the Tarascon road out of Fontvieille. Over them we strew chopped parsley and garlic and leave them to mature in their dressing. We shall eat them after we have had our bowls of hot
ravioles
, cooked one minute, according to instructions, in a good chicken broth made from the carcase of a spit-roasted, maize-fed chicken we had a couple of days ago. With fresh brown bread – it always has a good crackly crust – our
sarriette
-strewn
magnane
and a nice creamy little St Marcellin, plus a hunk of that excellent
tourteau
with our coffee, we marvel for the twentieth time in a week that we have such a remarkable choice of provisions here. Pâtés and terrines, large jars of freshly made fish stock, saddle of rabbit rolled and stuffed, ready for roasting or baking, good sausages and
cayettes
, green with the chard so much loved in Rhône Valley cooking, skilfully cut and enticingly trimmed lamb and beef, all the good things from the bakery, the fresh eggs which really are fresh (one stallholder was apologetic because his were three days old), all play their part in making every meal a treat as well as extraordinarily simple to prepare. And in how many towns of no more than 7,500 inhabitants can one choose, on market day, from about seventy different kinds of cheese, at least sixty-five of them French, the rest Italian, Swiss and Dutch?

I must add that Lawrence Durrell, who lives not far away, and who I hadn’t seen for a long while, reminded me that many years ago, about 1950, he and I happened to meet in Nîmes and that I complained angrily about the local food, swearing that I would
never go back to the region. The area was indeed then very poor. Now the tourists, foreign residents, enterprising wine-growers, motorways, have made it prosperous. Well, there are worse things than words to eat.

Not surprisingly, with all the good food so easily to hand, we were reluctant to go to restaurants. In three weeks we went to only two. One was the delectable Hièly’s in Avignon, a place I had not had the chance of eating at in over twelve years, and which I found, happily, was still offering fine, honest, generous cooking, lovely house wine (a Châteauneuf du Pape
de l’année
from a domaine of very high reputation), basketsful of local goats’ milk cheeses and more basketsful of cows’ milk cheeses, sumptuous ices, perfect coffee (at
£
1.00 a tiny cup so it should be but it doesn’t necessarily follow) and impeccable service. One of the luxury dishes, by the way, costing a
supplément
of 12.00 francs on top of the 180 franc menu, was a saddle of rabbit with
morilles
in the sauce. In Provence it is quite normal for rabbit to cost more than, say, chicken, and in this case it was without question worth the money. At about
£
50 for the two of us, with ample wine, our lunch at Hièly’s was hardly extortionate. Where in London at that price could you get a comparable meal in a comparably elegant and professional restaurant?