One More Croissant for the Road

by Felicity Cloake

  Once safely installed in le camping, a lovely, if deathly quiet place at this point in the season, set around a large lake stupidly devoted to fishing rather than swimming, the ever-efficient Harry rings them all, and eventually makes contact with a man called Jean-Paul, who may or may not be able to pick us up after dinner, he says, he’ll have to see. As every other number, including something which claims to double as an ambulance service, responds with a flat no, he has us over an apple-shaped barrel.

  Fortunately, a train does run between the two places regularly enough to at least get us to Lamotte in time for our reservation without having to fall on JP’s mercy for the outward leg – but when we arrive at the station, dolled up for this very special occasion, there’s no sign of the 18.06 and, of course, no information either. A woman sweeping her steps by the level crossing notices us standing around and cheerfully tells us we’ve missed it – it came two minutes early … 10 minutes ago.

  Panicking, we rush across the road to the bus stop: mysteriously, no service appears to run to the nearest town, and a very drunk man staggering away from the station bar is unable to suggest any alternatives (actually, he’s unable to do anything but look terrified, possibly that one of us might ask him to drive us).

  We sit sadly in the bus shelter while Harry calls every number we can find (thank God, I think, for fluent Francophones on this particular leg). Jay suggests cycling and picking up the bikes by train the next morning, Caroline hitchhiking – quite the done thing in France apparently – and, seeing my mythical tarte Tatin receding once again into the ether, I just sit there miserably, kicking the dust with my sandal.

  But, from the jaws of defeat, the heroic Harry wrenches victory. A distant taxi operator says he does have an employee in this very village who might be able to help us out – and sure enough, a slightly battered estate car swings round the corner not five minutes later. I think Hélène – who explains as she moves a pile of shopping off the back seat, that she was just on her way back from the supermarket: ‘My daughter wanted pizza for dinner’ – is somewhat bemused by our effusive gratitude: I’m almost crying with joy, even when it turns out as we enter Lamotte that Harry has left all her worldly possessions in the bus shelter and we have to turn back to rescue them.

  Hélène, like many people round here, she says, is a hunter – ‘Bow and arrow, that’s my thing.’ Deer, hare, wild boar, she has a freezer full. The Hotel Tatin? No, she hasn’t been recently. Not really her kind of place, though she won’t elaborate, presumably reluctant to dampen our evident excitement. Certainly, the place doesn’t look too welcoming – the front door is still firmly closed, so in the end we find our way in round the back, up what look like they were once the kitchen stairs.

  Madame inside, all smiles, thank God, is of course expecting us – little wonder as I booked two months ago. Could we have a drink at the bar first, we ask, as we’re early. You can sit down if you like, she replies. The table’s ready.

  In fact, it’s one of the few actually laid for dinner in a rather sepulchral dining room, an odd mix of faded tapestries, heavy wooden furniture and bad art. We’re in the corner, right by the massive marble fireplace – the only other diners, two elderly couples at the window tables, eye us anxiously as we chink glasses in celebration of our achievement. Initially I put this emptiness down to the hour – it’s barely 7.30 p.m. – but to my surprise, no one else arrives all evening. On a Friday in sunny September, this ought to be a place of patisserie pilgrimage, yet tonight it’s just us and retirees here for the fishing, if the conversation I can hear is anything to go by.

  The menu de terroir isn’t terrible value, at €29 for three courses, but there’s not much of the terroir on there – no duck or freshwater fish, and though nicely presented, the chilly tomato carpaccio lacks the advertised ‘flavours of yesteryear’, unless yesteryear was last February. My tête de veau is better: lumps of soft and perfectly bland beige meat, with boiled spuds and a punchy, lumpy ravigote sauce – and far better, it seems, than the dry filet mignon of pork the others have gone for.

  We’re not really here for the savoury stuff, though: it’s a mere warm-up act for the slices of tarte Tatin that arrive naked and unadorned in obedience to tradition. ‘No cream, no,’ says Madame firmly. ‘This is how it’s served.’ I almost feel like a cliché for ordering it, but really, why else would you come here?

  Perhaps anything would be a let-down after such a build-up, but I must confess to a slight disappointment: my piece is a little burnt on one side, and missing a chunk of pastry, too. The fruit itself is soft and jammy, caramelised rather than caramelly, and the pastry – shortcrust, I note with interest – is soft and almost spongey: pleasant enough, but no patisserie epiphany.

  We quiz Madame on her return with glasses of local pear eau de vie (so excellent we persuade her to sell us some to take away in plastic cups). ‘We cook it – all together, yes, pastry and fruit – in a very low oven for about an hour, maybe a bit less, and then we put it on a high heat on the hob, just to caramelise the apples, you know.’ Everyone but Jay looks sceptical as we try to imagine this, but before we can ask any more technical questions, she’s disappeared to talk about Labradors with the remaining couple by the window.

  The Brotherhood of Tarte Tatin Lovers’ Official Recipe for Tarte Tatin

  Though the Hotel’s version is nothing like the way I’d cook a tarte Tatin, it does sound fairly similar to the closest thing we have to an original recipe, from the handwritten notes of Marie Souchon, a friend of the Tatin sisters. These cooks, however, would have used a copper pan piled with coals on top so it was heated from all sides: Souchon notes that ‘you will need equal heat from above and below to be successful’, which is not terribly practical today, and may explain the disappointing pastry on the current Hotel Tatin menu.

  A better approach, for those of us without embers to chuck around, comes from Jean-Paul Cousin-Martin, current Grand Master of the Brotherhood of Tarte Tatin Lovers, who cooks his apples for an hour before even so much as rolling out the pastry. Instead of the firm, caramel-slicked apples I’ve aimed for in the past, this yields a richly flavoured compôte much like the Hotel Tatin’s, which can then be topped with very short, very buttery pastry. Here’s my take, only modestly adjusted to my own experience. You can make it up to the end of step 3 a couple of days ahead.

  Serves 6

  8 small apples (I like Cox’s or Russets), about 725g in total

  100g sugar

  70g butter, cut into pieces

  For the pastry (or use 350g shortcrust, but it won’t be as good)

  210g flour

  100g cold butter

  1 egg yolk

  Preheat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/gas 6. Peel and quarter the apples, removing the cores. Put a heavy-based ovenproof pan about 20cm in diameter on the hob over a medium heat and add the sugar and butter. Melt together, then take off the heat and carefully pack the apples into the pan in two layers so they cover the base – I like to put the slices on their sides and arrange them in two concentric circles – remembering the sugar will be hot. Bake for 30 minutes.

  Meanwhile, make the pastry by putting the flour into a large bowl with a generous pinch of fine salt and grating the butter into it. Rub in until well coated, then stir in the egg yolk and just enough cold water (about 3 tablespoons) to bring it together into a slightly crumbly dough. Shape into a disc, wrap well and chill.

  After 30 minutes in the oven, put the pan on the hob (don’t touch the handle!) for about 20–30 minutes over a low heat until the liquid round the edges is caramel-coloured. If towards the end of this time it shows no sign of browning, turn up the heat slightly, but be careful it doesn’t burn.

  Take off the heat and allow to cool slightly. Meanwhile, roll out the pastry until just large enough to cover the pan; it should be quite thick. Once the apples are cool enough (or you can leave them to cool completely at this poin
t if you prefer), put the pastry on top, tucking it in round the sides, and bake for about 35 minutes again in the preheated oven before loosening around the edges and turning out on to a serving plate, again remembering the pan will be hot!

  Km: 192.3

  Croissants: 4, average score 7.5 (Note: I have a much nicer Yann Couvreur croissant on my return to Paris, which scores a 9/10, so possibly it didn’t like having a Harry fall on top of it)

  High: Finally making it to the Hotel Tatin

  Low: Harry nearly getting squashed before we’d even left Paris

  STAGE 7

  Limoges (Circuit)

  Clafoutis aux Cerises

  A speciality of the Limousin (a rural region with a big fruit business), it seems early clafoutis were baked custards studded with purplish fruit, though many modern recipes are batter based, rather like sweet Yorkshire puddings. I found both on my greedy travels, and can happily report that, though almost two different desserts, they’re equally delicious. The Limousin is also famous for the quality of its beef, and it even has its own breed of red cattle, which you’ll find on menus all over France.

  Backpedal, if you will, to early June in the Loire Valley where, 117km west of Lamotte Beuvron in the ancient city of Tours, I’m waving goodbye to the terrible two, Tess and Tor, who, having achieved their oft-stated aim of going big, are now going home, leaving me to my first full week on my own.

  I turn my front wheel towards the railway station. Tours, like many provincial French towns I pass through, has a stunningly grand example, in this case designed by Victor Laloux, also responsible for the Beaux Arts Gare d’Orsay in Paris – now, of course, a fine museum with an excellent polar bear sculpture. In fact, the station is so lovely and I’m so uncharacteristically early that I do a circuit of its glorious tiled murals advertising the boundless possibilities of rail travel – a daring belle-époque couple ride a tandem through snow-capped Pyrenean peaks, a woman feeds geese by a stream in the Auvergne and a family promenades along the beach at Biarritz. The images are so thrillingly evocative they make my footloose heart throb, so God knows what they did to your average fin-de-siècle peasant.

  I hotfoot it guiltily back to Eddy, whom I’ve left looking after the luggage, and make myself comfortable on the grindingly slow regional service to Limoges, including a bonus hour and a half at somewhere called Vierzon, which looks so unpromising in the pouring rain that I stick my head briefly outside and then beat a hasty retreat to my old friend the Relay café. Feeling a bit sorry for myself, I ogle a pack of Cadbury’s chocolate fingers – ‘Croquez, vous allez fondre! Encore plus de Finger!’ (‘Bite it, you will melt! Yet more Finger!’) – but instead, mindful I’m en route to the capital of the French beef industry, I grimly munch my way through a lentil salad and an enormous, unnervingly fizzy, pot of carrot vinaigrette instead.

  It’s merely drizzling in Limoges when I finally arrive and I’m disposed to like the place, until, on my way to the municipal campsite, I turn up yet another Avenue du Général Leclerc (one day I will write a fascinating thesis on why the French name things after national heroes while we commemorate local councillors) and see the road ahead climbing into the clouds.

  As I quickly discover, the city is built on seven enormous hills, and it appears my campsite is on the other side of one of them while my dinner reservation is back in the centre. Having berated myself, the relevant tectonic plates and the world in general, there’s nothing to be done but push on up and try to forget I’ll have to do it all again in a few hours’ time.

  Not only is Camping Uzurat up a mountain, but out of town, too, down a side road past an enormous hypermarket and a Roman fort; handy for all the attractions, basically. Most of it is given over to campervans and the ramshackle cabins popular with gangs of contractors working away from home, but I manage to score a space that’s only half waterlogged and comes with its own bone, half buried in the shadow of the hedge. This slightly sinister state of affairs makes more sense when a Yorkshire terrier leaps out of the Belgian-registered caravan opposite and makes straight for its treasure, ignoring the pleas of its owner, who comes running after it in a dressing gown. The dog eyes me suspiciously as it is forcibly removed from my pitch, leaving me contemplating the happy prospect of a night with half a lamb leg next to my head.

  Limoges’s promotional literature claims that ‘Arts of fire deeply mark the city’s identity, at the crossroads of artistic creation and industrial innovation,’ which sounds marvellous if you’re into floral porcelain. The capital of the old Limousin region, a mecca of metropolitan sophistication in a vast wilderness of fruit farms and cattle ranches, the city sits just west of the Plateau de Millevaches, though a thousand cows is a rather conservative estimate given that over a third of the Limousin is grazing land with one of the lowest (human) population densities in the country.

  Unsurprisingly, given its prime position, it has been a centre for butchery since the Middle Ages: indeed, their trade guild was once so wealthy that it is said to have lent money to kings, and so powerful that the butchers received Henry IV when he visited the city in the 17th century, rather than the other way round. (Possibly the King was having problems with his repayments.) It feels today like a pleasant but rather slow place, though perhaps no city is at its vibrant, multicultural best on a wet Sunday evening.

  Neither, of course, is this the best time for dinner anywhere, let alone provincial France, but a place going by the name of La Vache au Plafond (The Cow on the Ceiling) at least sounds like a safe bet for beef. Even in the tipping rain, it’s hard to miss, thanks to a life-sized model cow standing outside, placidly allowing a bickering couple to flick their ash onto its back. To my disappointment, I’m seated by the bar, so I have to go to the loo twice in order to admire its fibreglass friend rearing out of a painted grass ceiling in the main dining room, brown-and-white head stretched out plaintively towards the table below, where they’re busy tucking into steak. Reading the menu, I discover her name is Marguerite, the French for Daisy. It’s all pretty weird to be honest, but after the carrot salad, it’ll take more than that to put me off.

  PAUSE-CAFÉ – Black or Blue?

  Interestingly, it seems that the simple grilled steak is an idea adopted from the British – early French recipes are called things like ‘beeft steks à l’Angloise’. Unlike our own, rather bloodless scale of rare, medium and well done, however, the French terms for cooked meat are far more evocative:

  Bleu: very rare – lightly coloured on the outside, still mooing (or bleating) within.

  Saignant: literally, bloody – what in the UK would be regarded as rare.

  À point: medium-rare – perfectly cooked.

  Bien cuit: medium – likely to still be pink inside, though there’s always the risk, when ordering with a British accent, of receiving it incinerated instead, so proceed with caution. If you like them well done, however, emphasise the point with très bien cuit … or, perhaps more safely, order something else.

  Note that unless the cut is listed (entrecôte is rib-eye, and faux-filet sirloin; filet and rumsteck what they sound like), the steak will probably be the cheaper bavette/flank, or onglet/hanger, both of which are completely delicious but don’t lend themselves to being served anything more than ‘à point’ unless you really love chewing.

  After lingering pleasurably over the many cuts on offer, I go for the Assiette Madame La Vache, a kind of Limousin Greatest Hits compilation of (raw) carpaccio, (rare) onglet and (braised) oxtail. And because you can’t have steak without wine, and like many French restaurants they don’t, somewhat cunningly, offer it by the glass, I order a half-bottle of Haute Gravières from nearby Bordeaux as well (half, it turns out, actually means two-thirds). Just as I’m tucking into both, mopping up the shallot sauce with crispy chips and feeling pretty pleased with myself, a large British party arrives.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ one demands at the bar, with not so much as a pre-em
ptory Bonsoir. The proprietor seems to take some pleasure in mutely shaking his head, and then abandoning them to a younger, slightly more polyglot waiter, who is immediately bombarded with questions – ‘Diet Coke? Do you have Diet Coke? I want vodka and Diet Coke, but it has to be Diet, you understand?’ ‘Don’t you have any fish?’ and so on.

  Suddenly a woman pops up in front of my book and points at my plate. ‘Excuse me,’ she asks loudly and slowly. ‘Do you speak English?’ I admit I do. ‘OH MY GOD, you ARE English!’ she hoots. ‘What are you eating?’ Having explained, and recommended it, I finish my wine and do a runner – I’m sure I hear one of them order kidneys and I’m not sure I want to be there when they arrive. As divine retribution, on my way back up to the campsite, it starts raining again, and I’m kept awake half the night by a plague of noisy frogs.

  Worrying about what to do next doesn’t help: groggy and grumpy, I lie in my dark prison the next morning listening to the rain, watching cheering YouTube compilations of people slipping over on ice and pondering my options. It’s Monday, and I have to be in a little village near Carcassonne the following Saturday morning – via Bayonne, Pau, Toulouse and Castelnaudary, which is a punchy enough itinerary in itself but, satisfying as last night’s dinner was, I don’t feel like I’ve got the best of the beef yet.

  On the other hand, none of the farms that open for visitors do so on a Monday, and I really need to head south tomorrow to have even the slimmest chance of keeping to schedule. I had considered trying to get to Périgueux in the Dordogne in time for its famous Wednesday market, but as it’s neither foie gras nor truffle season, wisdom suggests there’s not much point in cycling 100km to a place I’d have to leave by 11 a.m.