Deep France
Page 23
I took heart from John Frankenheimer, quoted in his obituary: ‘Keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep showing up, and you can turn it around.’ At least, unlike Frankenheimer, I wasn’t a drunk. My fear of degenerating into a sozzled ex-pat faded; surely if I had the ability to take to the bottle, it would have shown itself while I was dragging myself around on crutches for eight weeks straight.
Margaret invited me to dinner, having persuaded Roger to come too, and to drive through Orriule to collect me on his way. She and her husband lived in a gorgeous house in a village on the Gave, a few doors away from the French friend who introduced them to the region. The main building is painted a rich, peachy pink, very like the colour of the Beverley Hills Hotel, and the LA theme is strengthened by the giant palms in the courtyard on either side of the front door.
Peter, her husband, is a sculptor, and was an art teacher. They’ve lived in the Béarn for ten years, very successfully. One of their barns has become his studio. Peter gets up late, and takes their dogs for a long walk in the nearby forest, then comes home for an early supper and starts work in the evening, finishing in the small hours. Their daughter lives in London, and their household is completed by a shifting population of dogs and cats, mostly abandoned, like the new puppies which Peter rescued while out walking. Henri Cat was probably a survivor of the same custom.
Sometimes, Peter and Margaret take a day off to walk in the high mountains, or even drive over the Spanish border for a change of scenery. Margaret is an animation artist, and occasionally goes home to London for a few weeks when a well-paid job comes in. They have a few close friends, which is all they want, and, apart from Margaret’s attendance at the French class, they avoid the ex-pat community.
Peter seemed to want to talk about the creative process, something I hate doing because I never feel comfortable at the level of self-importance you need to reach to have this conversation. Also, I feel superstitious about examining my own mind too closely, in case too much analysis kills the whole system. Plus, I lack the requisite tradition. Writers don’t often talk about their work that way. In fact, writers, as Douglas Adams once observed, are a bit like rare birds who’re going extinct because they never meet members of the same species. Perhaps this is why so many of my friends are visual artists, whose culture is much more sociable. As a conversational hostage, I mentioned the difficulty I was having in getting the politicians’ jargon right.
‘Which politician do you hate most?’ Peter demanded. Spoiled for choice, I thought for a while, realizing that I didn’t actually hate the politicians, just what they were allowing to happen to our country. Finally, I nominated Robin Cook. Loftily, Peter announced that I obviously didn’t know enough about New Labour to write about them. Ten seconds later, he revealed that he’d never heard of Alistair Darling, which was ironic since he bore him a slight resemblance.
Later, Peter brought down his work in progress. He works in found metal, making animals out of oil drums, sardine tins, paint cans, typewriter spares and old tractor panels. They’re strong, witty pieces, and sell steadily through a couple of galleries in America. He was working on a stork with a blue body and red wings, another piece full of energy and humour. It had been devised so that it could be disassembled, by separating the long neck and head from the body, and fitted into the largest standard box which the French post office would accept. Thus packed, it would be posted to San Antonio. Margaret would write instructions, complete with Ikea-style diagrams, to help the gallery reassemble the sculpture when it arrived.
More Visitors
Since I wasn’t fully mobile, I had to accept some animal company. Henri Cat was in the kitchen every day, so in the end I gave him his own dinner dish on the window sill. Taking my cue from the Birdman of Alcatraz, I became the Catwoman of Orriule. First I got him to take a titbit from my hand. Then I threw a little caress in with the titbit. Then I persuaded him to walk cautiously onto my lap. Finally, he allowed me to pick him up. It took about three weeks.
At dusk the garden was still alive with crickets, and Piglet delighted in bringing them in to chase them all over the sitting room in the evening, which meant that when I hopped sleepily towards the coffee in the morning, a large grasshopper would often leap out from under the sofa and cling to one of my legs. This was fine when they grabbed the plaster cast, but on the good leg, their grip could be as painful as a scratch from the cat’s claws.
One evening a bat flew into the house, got confused in the narrow hallway and couldn’t find its way out. Normally, my plan for bats involves catching them with a fishing net or a swimming-pool skimmer and ejecting them gently, but with only one leg to stand on that was impossible.
Hopefully, I left the front door open until midnight, and thought I saw the bat fly out. Wrong. Next morning, I noticed something hanging from a beam in the hall. It looked like a seed pod or a giant beetle, but when I examined it more closely I saw that it was the bat, hanging upside down with the claws on its wings neatly hooked on a groove in the wood. It was sound asleep. The leathery wings enfolded its head and body completely. Later in the day, it woke up and had a wash, grooming its little furry front like a very tiny inverted cat. Amandine said she had never seen a bat at such close quarters. The housework went to hell for half an hour while we watched it.
The bat stayed for two days, by which time somebody had told me that it was a young one looking for a place to found a new colony. I was getting worried I would soon find twenty of its friends hanging from the beams in the hall. However, when Roger dropped me home after dinner with Margaret and Peter, it was zooming around the hall and up and down the stairs so indignantly that it seemed as if it had only just realized its mistake. After a couple of false starts it managed to fly over my head and out into the night.
High Culture
By the end of the month, la Maysou was empty again, having given almost a hundred London school children the chance to have extra French tuition not just in France, but in their teacher’s family home. They had had lessons in the morning, then spent the afternoon enjoying themselves on the river, on the beach or in the mountains. The donkeys had been pampered and the village had rung with curious young English voices.
Zoe has a new boyfriend. He is a young banker, the nephew of Babi who stages concerts at her house in the hills. The announcement threw Annabel into a quandary. She was ecstatic that her daughter seemed to be serious, not just about a Frenchman, but about a Béarnais, but anxious that the seriousness might lead to a wedding, and the wedding to a reception and a wedding reception to a party of such proportions it would bankrupt the bride’s family.
Matthieu, Zoe’s new boyfriend, is tall, brown-haired and fair-skinned; he looks more English than Zoe herself, who is as dark, slim and Mediterranean in looks as her mother is fair, rounded and an English rose. Matthieu’s mother is one of twelve brothers and sisters, and his grandmother, who lives in an imposing chateau overlooking the Gave, is also one of twelve. When all the cousins are counted, it could be a big wedding. If a wedding is on the cards. Zoe is giving nothing away, but she seems to have a plan. I pretended I knew nothing and tried to think of soothing things to say.
With the wheelchair in the back of Annabel’s car, we went to see a Russian folk ensemble perform at Babi’s rustic concert hall, which is at a place called Tilh, high in the hills to the east. It was here that Zoe and Matthieu met. Babi is a tall, elegant woman, the only person I saw all year wearing kitten heels. Until recently she was a music agent in Paris. Now, with her husband and the help of their six children, she runs an arts and music society from Tilh, putting on concerts several times a year. ‘The happiest and most daring of initiatives,’ according to a local writer.
The concert hall is a huge former barn, attached to the house in which Babi and her family live. The situation is stunning, almost at the edge of an escarpment which projects south from the main mass of hills. One of the local people described it to me as a ‘grande bastide’. Strictly speaking, a
bastide is something fortified, usually a town, so perhaps there was once a military building here, and soldiers patrolled the level ground in front of the house, now a neat lawn, bordered with roses, with a breathtaking view.
The concert hall is like something in a glossy magazine, with its exposed beams, whitewashed walls and eccentric stone staircases. An audience of about three hundred can fit in there, and after the performance the children and their cousins run in to set up trestle tables. Everyone turns around their chairs and a supper is served. That night, Babi had booked a group of Russian performers who were on their way home from the annual music festival at Oloron-Ste-Marie.
The stage in the bar wasn’t big enough for the dancers, so a bigger stage was built on the lawn, the chairs were brought outside and everyone prayed for the rain to hold off. It was more than a little bizarre to watch the standard export package of Russian culture, the dancers leaping into their gopak and trepak, the singers with their scarlet lipstick and false plaits, the musicians strumming their balalaikas, all with a background of grey clouds swirling over the distant Pyrenees. The swallows were flying so low their wings almost brushed the grass. Annabel was nervous, knowing that half the audience were probably Matthieu’s relatives, and were assessing us critically, wondering what sort of people were threatening to join their family.
A Leg to Stand On
The following week, Roger took me to the first great celebration in Salies, the Piperadère. Impressive as this is, it is only a dress-rehearsal for the town’s main festival, the Fête du Sel in September. In the spring, Salies had woken up from its genteel hibernation with a will and was now gay with window boxes full of flowers and bustling with tourists.
The Piperadère lasts only one evening, when a giant frying pan, so heavy that six men are needed to lift it, is dragged out of storage and used to make enough piperade for four hundred people. Marquees are put up in the main square and its nearby streets, sheltering long tables, a live band and a dance floor. A bar and a serving point had been set up on every corner, and the revellers all collected their five-course dinners, slapped into plastic trays like giant airline meals, and managed to buy their wine, all in about half an hour. At least, it seemed like no time to me, grounded on the sidelines by my plaster.
Since the streets are pretty narrow, people were soon standing on their chairs to dance, and finally dancing on the tables. This embarrassed Roger severely. ‘I’m glad you’ve got a broken leg,’ he joked. ‘You’d join them otherwise, wouldn’t you?’
One of the most popular rugby songs was about piperade, but not because it is supposed to be the breakfast of champions. The song concerns a man who’s been out drinking and who comes home and wakes his wife up and asks her to make him a piperade. Well, that’s the polite way to read the lyrics. ‘Fais moi un piperade!’ goes the first line of the chorus. The next few lines of the chorus are all the same and a bit shorter, ‘Fais moi un pipe!’ This means ‘Give me a blow job!’
I guessed that Roger had not appreciated this dimension of regional culture. It seemed best to let sleeping piperades lie.
By the end of the month, there were a lot of long faces among the International Club. The stock market had nosedived, and although every day brought more pundits predicting that the bear market had bottomed out, every new dawn brought tidings of fresh losses. Since many of the British ex-pats were retired people whose savings had been invested in stocks and shares, a mood of utter despair settled in as their pensions began to dwindle below subsistence levels. Those who still had pensions. There were many who had joyfully taken early retirement a few years ago, only to fall victim to the Equitable Life collapse. Now they commiserated grimly with the neighbours who had seemed so much luckier only a year before but had been made as destitute as they were. Having very few shares, I could maintain a philosophical attitude.
Recipes
Piperade
Piperade is one of the keynote dishes of Basque cuisine, a redolent amalgam of eggs and peppers served as a supper dish or a starter. It is absolutely nothing like scrambled egg. I hate to disagree with Elizabeth David, who first put this notion about and thereby turned generations off the dish, but it isn’t. In fact, most of what she has to say about piperade is regrettably characteristic of many British food writers who typically spend a weekend in Biarritz in a hurry and think they’ve done enough to touch base with one of the world’s great cuisines. If you make a piperade in lumpy, scrambled-egg style, it just turns watery and unpleasant. The other great lie about piperade is that it’s like ratatouille. Not really.
Piperade should be smooth and rich, like thick, dark-red cream with shreds of sweet pepper. It’s almost always served over a thick slice of Bayonne ham, but is almost equally good, and acceptable to vegetarians, poured over a chunk of bread which has been drizzled with olive oil and lightly toasted. The choice of peppers is up to you; personally, I like an all-red or red-and-yellow piperade, because it’s sweeter and prettier, but if you prefer the spicy combination of red and green peppers, you have tradition on your side. There is even a version made only with the sweet green piments of the Landes.
Serves 4 as a starter
1 onion
olive oil or fat from some ham or bacon
1 red pepper
1 pepper of another colour
1 clove of garlic
500g (1 lb 2 oz) fresh, skinned tomatoes or chair de tomates, finely chopped
6 large fresh eggs
salt and pepper
4 slices Bayonne ham, or toast
Peel and chop the onion – you want it finely chopped, and if you’re feeling lazy you can shred it in your blender. Put the oil or fat into a heavy-bottomed frying pan over a low heat, and let the onion sweat until it’s transparent. Definitely no browning.
Deseed the peppers, slice and reserve some slices for decoration if you like. Chop the rest into fine dice about the same size as the pieces of onion. Add the chopped peppers to the pan and continue to cook on a low heat until they are soft.
Crush the clove of garlic, add to the pan and cook another 5 minutes. Then add the tomato, and continue to cook until you have a red mush with no visible liquid.
Beat the eggs well and pour them into the pan. Keep the heat low, and keep stirring the whole mixture until the eggs are completely blended with the pepper and tomato mush, and cooked to a smooth, creamy consistency. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Place a slice of ham or toast on each plate and pour the piperade over it. Some cooks like to grill the ham first, some prefer it cold.
Axoa
I swear this spicy meat stew was the forerunner of chilli con carne. Think about it. The Basques got to the new world first. They grabbed the exotic hot peppers and added them to their traditional meat stews; then the Mexicans added the beans and created a one-pot meal ideal for cowboys. Subtract the beans, and there’s your axoa.
Axoa is usually made with meat from a shoulder of veal. The better the cut you use, the tenderer the axoa will be. If you have to use ready-chopped stewing veal (a last resort) it may include tougher meat from the shin, in which case it will need to cook for longer.
Serves 8
2 large white onions
3 cloves of garlic
2 red peppers
2 green peppers, or 10 piments
1 espelette pepper, or fresh red chilli to taste
1.5kg d½ lb) veal
2 tbsp olive oil or duck fat
1 bouquet garni, or bay leaf, thyme and parsley
Peel and chop the onion and the garlic. Deseed and chop the peppers. Cut the meat into small cubes, about the size of sugar cubes.
In a heavy-bottomed casserole, heat the oil or fat over a medium flame and brown the meat quickly, stirring to make sure it is sealed on all sides. Then add the onion, garlic and peppers and mix with the meat. If you have used a good cut of veal, then add the bouquet garni and allow to cook briskly for 7 minutes, then slowly for another 7 minutes, then cover and leave to simmer for a final 7
minutes more. If you’re using stewing veal, don’t try this; cook for 5 minutes, then add the herbs and enough stock or water to cover the meat and simmer, uncovered, for an hour, stirring occasionally.
Axoa shouldn’t be watery, so if there is too much liquid in the casserole when the meat is cooked, carefully pour it off. Transfer the red-white-and-green stew to a serving dish. Traditionally axoa is served with boiled or sauteed potatoes. You can also cook the potatoes in the same pot, adding them, cut into lin chunks, for the last 15 minutes of cooking.
Tuna Kaskarote
Serves 6
700g (lib 9oz) ripe tomatoes
7 piments or 1 green pepper
2 red peppers
2 onions
2 cloves garlic olive oil for frying
salt and pepper
a handful of parsley
1 bay leaf
2 branches of thyme
1 tsp espelette purée, or a good pinch of dried espelette or chili
6 steaks of fresh tuna
flour for dusting
Skin the tomatoes, discard the seeds and chop into quarters. Deseed the peppers and slice across into strips. Peel and chop the onion and garlic. Put a little oil in a large sauté pan and gently cook the onions, garlic and peppers for about 15 minutes, until they are soft and the onion is transparent. Add the tomatoes, the seasoning and the herbs and spices, and cook for another 5 minutes.
Dust the tuna steaks with flour and saute them gently in oil in another pan, turning to make sure both surfaces are sealed. When the fish is nearly cooked – probably in about 15 minutes – slide the steaks into the pan with the vegetables and allow them to cook together for 15 minutes more, until the fish and sauce have thoroughly exchanged flavours. Pick out the herbs, and transfer to a serving dish, or serve from the sauté pan.