Return From England

Home Sweet Home
I returned from visiting my mother in England last Tuesday. After her stay in hospital she has managed to remain in her own home with carers coming in twice per day. Having witnessed the care service by an NHS assessment team I have to say that it is excellent in every way. Unfortunately they pass over to an agency shortly and I am just hoping the agency staff are as good.

My own home was just as I had left it, a few plants (plumbago, begonias, french marigolds) still blooming in the front and some gallardias doing the same at the back. The chrysanthemums there have yet to get going but are full of bud. I turned the heating on on my return and the house is now warm in the mornings and evenings as well as during the day. The weather wasn't bad while I was in England but the clear blue skies and sunny days since I've been back have reminded me of one of the reasons I opted to move here.

So it's back to boules in the afternoons, with an added bonus. The village powers that be decided to reward the boules team with a cheque for 40 euros each for putting the village on the map; I don't think that indicates a need to get myself an agent yet but it was a lovely gesture.

Structure Of A French Meal
I'm getting too old to appreciate a full French meal very often; it knocks me out for the rest of the day. When eating alone I'll generally just cook the one (main) course à l'anglaise but the full treatment seems to be de rigueur when I have guests. I'm thinking of changing that with some friends by leaving out the starter course. One incentive is that my favourite starter (figs split, goat's cheese inserted, honey drizzled over and the whole placed under a grill for a few minutes) is now out of season; the fig harvest is over. And I don't really see the need for a starter unless the main course is a bit thin. The cheese course allows any hunger remaining after the main course to be assuaged which means that the starter is superfluous unless it serves merely to get the appetite going. But that seems unnecessary in most cases.

I saw a large chunk of stewing beef on the bone for a couple of euros when I did my restocking shopping on my return and so am making my first stew of the winter. I do it over three days, leaving it in the fridge overnight to skim off the fat and allowing the flavour to evolve. I also bought a couple of kilos of shallots which I will turn into pickles onions. The French don't have pickled onions and don't know what they are missing. They don't have malt vinegar either and I find wine vinegar too strong in some cases, of which this is one. So I use cider vinegar instead, plus ginger, chilis, mustard seed and cloves in the final product. The result even goes very well with some French cheeses such as Cantal, Salers and Comté.

The Discovery Of France
I took this book by Graham Robb with me for the journey over to England and managed to find some more enlightening titbits in it. Apparently the French investigated some reluctance among their troops in the first world war and discovered (top secret at the time) a definite lack of patriotism. The problem, it seemed. Was that few troops considered themselves French; they were Normand, Breton, Marseillais, Savoyard or whatever but not French.

This somewhat parochial view explains the difficulty in translating the word “pays”. OK, so literally it can be translated as “country” but the connotations aren't covered by that. Pays is, in the first world war sense, the country of the troops but the country wasn't France; and Normandy, Brittany, etc, aren't countries, except traditionally to their inhabitants.

I'll relate more such insights as I get further into the book.