by Mary Moody
The specialities of Périgord and Quercy are duck and goose, pork in all its various forms, walnuts and walnut oil, mushrooms including the sought after cepes and giroles, precious truffles and a dark red wine that is produced extensively around Cahors. Also included in the traditional diet are apples and pears that grow on gnarled old trees all around the country lanes; succulent prunes from the southern city of Agen which are often cooked with pork and wine; chestnuts that cover the floor of the woodlands in autumn; a soft and fragrant goat cheese called cabecou as well as a blue known as Bleu des Casses which is similar in taste and texture to Roquefort; flavourful fresh strawberries in the spring and summer; and vegetables and fruit including small but brilliant orange-fleshed melons and rich pumpkins at the end of the season. The open markets reflect the availability of produce and although, like any modern part of the world, you can visit the supermarket and buy bananas or pineapples most of the year round, the most popular cuisine is really based upon what is grown or raised locally.
In the autumn the chasse or hunting season gets underway, and white vans parked along the sides of all the roads combined with the sound of dogs barking and the ring of gunshot all weekend mean that wild boar and venison will soon be available. These can be bought at the marketplace but they are also served up at traditional chasse dinners or fêtes where the menu has nothing but wild foods. The idea of eating a sumptuous banquet from foods hunted or gathered in the woodlands is very appealing, although I will not be around in February when these fêtes are generally held. People assure me it’s hard to get up from the table after the three- or four-hour-long eating ‘ordeal’.
One of the features of the cuisine is the use of goose fat for sautéeing and frying. Fat from confit is always reserved and used for sautéeing crisp potatoes that are served as an accompaniment to the melting duck. Snowy white goose fat is also sold in glass jars in the supermarket for all manner of frying—the secret is not just the flavour it imparts to the food but the fact that it cooks hotter than most oils, and therefore the results are wonderfully crisp. I still don’t believe, however, that frying batches of potato in goose fat is a healthy option, no matter how tasty it is.
The alarming factor in adjusting to French eating is learning to cope with the sheer number of courses that are served at each meal. Normally I only eat one course, especially at a restaurant, because I know that I won’t be able to get through the quantity of food on offer. Here over days and weeks and months I have insidiously become accustomed to a more leisurely pace of eating that stretches over several hours and routinely includes six or seven courses. Time plays a big part in this ritual. No longer the fast snack of Sao biscuits with a thin slice of tomato eaten at the kitchen sink, or the quick one-course meal washed down with a glass of wine before a concert or a movie. Here I have all day and all night to enjoy lunch or dinner, and it’s an easy habit to fall into. I guess my stomach simply stretches to accommodate the extra food.
There are hundreds of small restaurants around that specialise in traditional cuisine. Most of them are far from expensive—indeed the daily set menu is extremely reasonable considering that there are at least four or five courses, and that wine is generally included in the price. These restaurants are frequented during the week by truck drivers, road labourers and office workers who, in true French tradition, anticipate a large hot meal in the middle of the day. Many businesses and local councils issue their workers lunch vouchers so they can get their meal at a considerable discount, and this forms part of their pay package. At the weekends the customers are slightly different. Saturday lunch is popular with shoppers returning home from the markets at various small towns and villages. Sunday is the day for families to go out for a slap-up meal, and the menu varies accordingly. Instead of the set weekly menu, there are usually a few choices of main course and dessert at the weekend.
Our closest favourite restaurant is the only thriving business in Pomarède, and Jock is nervous about me broadcasting too many details of its existence, lest the good word spreads and it becomes too popular. His greatest fear is turning up for lunch and being told there are no tables left. Known as Madame Murat’s, it is little more than a simple cottage by the side of the road that has been open for more than forty years, first run by Madame Murat’s mother, currently by Jeanne Murat with the help of her daughter Sylvie, who will no doubt take over in ten years or so when Madame Murat runs out of steam. Madame Jeanne Murat is a short stout woman in a blue floral apron who produces vast quantities of excellent food at reasonable prices for her appreciative customers six days a week. The restaurant closes on Monday—the quietest day in rural France—but for the rest of the week it’s packed every lunchtime. There are always a couple of pigs out the back waiting to be turned into roast pork, pâté and sausage, and everything on the menu is made in the small but well laid-out kitchen—all the soup stocks and pastries and sauces. During the busy summer months the kitchen throbs with heat and activity as groaning dishes are carried to the tables and extra bottles of wine are endlessly produced.
Carole, a bright, lively Englishwoman also works in the restaurant and, like most English-speaking locals, she is also a great mate of Jock. With her cockney husband Bob, Carole is an escapee from dreary 1980s London, who has adapted brilliantly to living and working in France. Bob and Carole’s story is one of survival against the odds. They managed to buy a farmhouse within their limited budget but within weeks of settling in Bob fell head first over the handlebars of his bicycle, badly fracturing his skull. He nearly died and was in a critical condition for many months, leaving Carole and their two small sons with little savings and no prospect of an income. Although she spoke very little French, Carole managed to get a job in the kitchen of Madame Murat’s and now, eight years later, she is an indispensable part of a team that keeps both the regular working population and holidaymakers supplied with mountains of terrific food. And now her French is fantastic. At the weekends she works with Bob on the continuing task of restoring their beautiful old farmhouse. Like all renovations it seems endless, and one that consumes every spare centime of their hard-won earnings.
At Madame Murat’s, the traditional meal begins with a steaming bowl of potage or soup. A large soup tureen is brought to the table so that patrons can help themselves, and it’s implicit that if the bowl runs dry there’s always more. There is seldom a request, however, because people know what’s coming next. In summer the soups are light, based on chicken stock with just a few fine vermicelli noodles and some tomato to flavour. In winter they are thicker, containing a range of hearty ingredients like turnips, broad beans, pumpkin, sorrel and sausage. At the village meals and fêtes, this soup may be a garlicky white broth with rough slices of bread thrown in at the last moment, and often containing a few eggs, the whites whisked and added separately from the yolks. It’s not rich but very satisfying, and in truth, if combined with perhaps a second course of cheese, it would be more than enough for the average lunch or dinner appetite. At Madame Murat’s the soup is even more satisfying. But it’s only just the beginning.
The entrée, often called the charcuterie course, can take many forms. Slices of dark pink ham served with a cube of unsalted butter and melon or dill pickle; rough terrine or pâté of foie gras; omelette with mushrooms; warm salad of duck gizzards; chunks of various sausages combined with mounds of grated carrot and other salad vegetables; ravioli with foie gras; goat cheese pie; or potato and ham pancakes. At this point you really should get up from the table and leave, quite satisfied. But you don’t because the main course is looming.
Chicken or duck, veal or beef, lamb or rabbit, wild boar or pork. You name it and Madame Murat’s has developed a mouth-watering way of cooking it. The plat, or main course, is generally a meat dish with potato, or occasionally couscous or pasta, and maybe one lone vegetable dish. The concept of a dinner plate piled with a range of vegetables accompanying the main recipe is absolutely un-French. I have even seen diners at Madame Murat’s serve themselv
es the vegetable—in this case a juicy tomato stuffed with pork and herbs—onto the side plate, eating the meat and potatoes first, then eating the tomato separately. It’s as if the three dishes could not possibly be combined on one plate. Sauces are always rich and tasty, and bread is used throughout the meal to soak up all the juices and gravies, and to help shovel the food onto the fork which in turn is shovelled into your mouth. It’s a good idea to undo the top buttons of your pants at this stage.
To cleanse the palate a salad is usually produced after the plat. It can be quite plain—just green leaves and dressing—or enriched with crisp leaves of endive or whitlof or various grated vegetables. Pause for breath because the cheese is about to arrive, with more crispy bread, par naturellment.
What can I say about French cheese? It’s difficult not to eat a lot of it. I keep thinking that if I skip the cheese course I might stop putting on weight, but sometimes it’s impossible to let the platter pass by. Madame Murat’s, like most restaurants, arranges a variety of soft and hard cheeses on a bed of vine leaves, and the aroma when it is placed on the table is irresistible. But I find even the mass-produced supermarket cheeses mind-blowingly good. The cheese wagons at the open markets can be a bit daunting—literally sixty or seventy varieties to choose from—but if you can learn and identify just a handful of good varieties you will be happy for life. I wonder if I perhaps skip the other courses and the wine and just eat the cheese I will be okay. But without red wine the cheese is nothing, so what the hell.
By the time dessert arrives I have generally stopped caring, and listen intently to the choices. Crème brûlée with its creamy custard and crust of toffee is hard to pass up, as are the various ice-creams and sorbets. Rich pastry tarts are always divine, with the fruit varying according to the season—plums in spring and in late summer, apple. Clafoutis is another regional speciality, basically fruit covered with a rich cake-like matter that is then baked in the oven. There is also a pastry pie called pastis which I try not to miss.
My regular restaurant and café lunches are generally instigated by my small group of single male friends which includes Claude, a retired English photographer with an interesting, if chequered, background. Claude is Polish by birth and Italian by descent, but educated in England where he worked for forty years as a fashion photographer before coming to live full time in the Lot. Claude has one of the best houses I’ve seen in these parts—a renovated millhouse over a stream with a fantastic converted barn which he lets out as a holiday rental in the summer, plus a sumptuous adjoining house for himself. His garden is also to die for—it’s been designed by Margaret Barwick and is planted and maintained by Philippe and Jan. It includes a formal garden and a croquet lawn; wild areas planted with colourful deciduous trees; a natural pond and a swimming pool; an orchard and a near-perfect small potager adjoining a glass-house.
Claude also has a small flock of wild ducks that have settled permanently in the mill stream that flows along the side and then underneath his house. He feeds them daily with grain and carefully chopped cubes of bread, to the point where they have become dependent on his generosity. When he travels, Claude needs a duck-sitter—a task which I cheerfully volunteer to perform for ten days while he is holidaying in northern England. Living in his spacious house after months of being in my tiny room with a loo is luxury indeed, and I revel at suddenly having a dishwasher, a washing machine and a television that gets more than fifty international channels. Claude also has a terrific stereo so I can play loud classical music and opera as I sip wine and gaze at the sun setting over his dappled woodland, or watch the antics of the ducks through the floor-to-ceiling picture windows.
All the luxuries that I take for granted at home somehow seem more appealing after several months without them. Yet, living without them hasn’t been at all difficult, in fact I have thoroughly enjoyed paring my life back to a few simple basics. Now, while I’m finding a house filled with modern conveniences enjoyable, I realise it’s by no means essential for survival. And in many ways Claude’s house seems alien to me, being so large and luxurious with six bedrooms, five spacious bathrooms and numerous living and dining areas. Claude lives here on his own for most of the year, rattling around from room to room, and I can’t help but recall how our family of seven, including my mother and four children, survived quite cheerfully with one bathroom and one toilet for more than twenty years. Quite primitive by comparison.
The day before Claude returns from his holiday I am awoken at 4.30 in the morning by loud banging and crashing at the front door, followed by repeated ringing of the electronic bell. It is raining heavily. Through the glass doors I see a group of agitated men dressed in heavy black wet-weather gear, totally drenched and looking rather pathetic. I quickly realise that it’s the Pompiers as they shout through the door that they need to use the telephone to get assistance to the scene of a nasty car accident a little further down the road. They have a mobile phone, but this stretch of road is somehow out of the network’s range and they have been unable to get a connection. They enter, dripping across Claude’s beautifully polished floors, and once the lights go on they take in the splendour of the house, especially the gorgeously decorated kitchen. There are many ‘Oohs’ and ‘Aahs’ and ‘Très jolie cuisine, Madame’ as they admire their surroundings while one of them makes the life-saving phone call. As quickly as they arrived, they troop soggily out into the rainy dark of early morning, and after I snuggle back into my bed, I wonder if I dreamt what just occurred. When I see the wreck of the car at the local garage later that day, I realise that I didn’t.
When Claude returns we grab Jock and go to Madame Murat’s, of course, for a reunion lunch. I laugh at how easily I am persuaded to join the boys in this huge midday feast, but rationalise my weakness by saying that I am only trying to live the life of a local. After all, eating wonderful food is one of the main reasons why people from all over the world visit France, and it seems crazy to resist while I am here. Those who have been around for a while and those who now live here full time say that eventually you get over the novelty of such large meals and settle back into a more normal eating pattern so that balance is restored. I certainly like to think I would.
21
ALL THROUGH MY LIFE MY body size and shape has fluctuated according to what I am doing at the time. When flat out and stressed I trim down; when relaxed, pregnant or on holiday and feeling cruisy, I plump up. This time I have plumped up big time. Seven or eight kilos in a couple of months, and people are starting to comment.
My more polite friends say, ‘You’ve changed quite a lot since you arrived.’ The more direct, like Margaret, say, ‘Just look at your thighs and hips.’
I haven’t got a full-length mirror in Villefranche which is just as well, but I can notice the extra chin I am now carrying. And when I look downwards I can see a sizeable belly. A middle-age spread. A French roll. The dramatic change of lifestyle—no work, not a lot of gardening and wicked five-course meals—is the obvious cause and I am faced with some grim alternatives. Diets are a waste of time. It’s either get into an exercise regimen or just cut back on the eating and drinking. I opt for the exercise.
To my mind walking is the least painful way of exercising, but it can be boring if you walk the same way day after day. Here, of course, there is so much of interest to see that walking will be a pleasure and I plot several routes out of the village that will give me an hour of pounding the roadside every day. The weather is still blazing hot, so early morning is the best idea. I have some good walking sandals and shorts, even though I have to expose those flabby bits around my knees. Like most bastide towns, Villefranche is set on a hillside so I can walk down towards the market gardens, where the local women are harvesting vegetables before the sun rises high in the sky. They wave as I stride past, looking a little curiously at my determined gait. I am walking on small back roads which are paved but narrow, and if a car or white van comes by, I must step into the roadside ditch. Not really a problem.
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br /> The last part of the walk, up the steep hill into the lower side of the village, brings me out in a healthy sweat so I arrive home bright red in the face and ready for a meagre shower in my tiny cupboard. I also do some stretching exercises, some full knee bends and sit-ups. It all helps a little, and although I don’t actually drop any kilos, I seem to reach a plateau.
I begin to wonder if losing weight at this stage of my holiday is really so important anyway. Is it just that I am feeling uncomfortable in my clothes, or is there a deeper reason for my feeling anxious about this sudden change of shape? I have always had rather an ambivalent attitude towards my body. In truth I have never regarded it as my best asset. During early adolescence I was teased by my father about my emerging shape, being the classic Irish female with a flat chest, broad hips and generous backside. I was terribly jealous of my slim-hipped, large-breasted girlfriends, especially at the beach where they looked so gorgeous in their skimpy bikinis. Not only did I not have the prerequisite bosom and boyish hips, but my pale skin simply burned, blistered and freckled, creating an overall effect that was a long way from the sixties surfie beachgirl image I so desperately desired. Those friends who had mousy brown hair simply bleached it blonde to complete the scenario, while I was stuck with a tight frizz of bright red curls. It was all too humiliating.
Having a poor body image helped me to remain a virgin for much longer than my contemporaries. Not only did boys not compete to conquer me, I was reluctant for any of them to actually see me naked, so in one way being ‘unattractive’ in my own eyes did have some long-term benefits. While my girlfriends were busy sneaking out their bedroom windows at night for illicit trysts in the backseats of cars with spotty members of the local football team, I was not even vaguely aware that such activities were a possibility. I didn’t have my first period until I was sixteen, so I remained quite naive and childlike long after other girls around my age were embarking on their sixth or seventh serious sexual affair. When I finally did become sexually active, not long before my eighteenth birthday, I still felt very uncomfortable about my flat chest and lumpy hips. I had a series of unsatisfactory relationships which I am sure were the result of my insecurity about my body. I was not particularly sporty, but I loved swimming and sailing and was always active, getting enough exercise at the weekends to remain reasonably fit and trim. My shape was pure genetics, not the result of too little exercise or too much fatty food. I just had to live with it.
