Christmas And Food

Christmas And Food
The French traditionally do much as we do as far as Christmas fare goes, with the exception of Christmas pudding. The French don't have mince pies either although the German stöllen is plentiful in the shops. I find it rather strange that even though preserving fruit is a local speciality there appears to be no kind of local fruitcake. Even more strange, in an area covered in grape vines, grapes (raisins) don't seem to be among the preserved fruits. These latter are apples, pears, strawberries, apricots, melon and figs, plus the pineapples and papaya that come from La Reunion or Mauritius. The preserved strawberries are especially delicious.

A fowl of some sort is the favourite meat and foie gras is the prescribed starter. The shops are full of whole foie gras. The French do have Christmas cake but it is rather different from ours. Theirs is a “galette des rois” (after the three kings) and consists of a light brioche-type cake with large pieces of candied fruit on top and a small crown hidden somewhere within it. The person who gets the piece of cake with the crown in it is king for the moment and is supposed to be treated specially.
Chocolates, I assume, are also consumed in quantity since the supermarket displays of these cover at least six times more shelf-space than they normally do.

Another tradition here in Provence is the 13 desserts, the number signifying Christ and the 12 apostles. The exact nature of the 13 desserts varies considerably but must always include local produce and the colours black, brown and white. The colours represent the those of the robes of the monastic orders that prevail locally (I'm not sure what the orders are and can't be bothered to research them). Anyway, the brown is usually nuts, typically almonds in this area, and the black and white are typically nougat. The colour black can also be provided by olives. Brown, of a lighter hue, is also the colour of the fougasse, which must be included. Fougasse is a type of pastry rather like choux pastry and is available throughout the year in bakeries, usually with olives in it. At Christmas it tends to be served plain. Some preserved fruit, typically figs, is also included.

Last Sunday, the English library in Beaumont de Ventoux (BELL) had its annual Christmas get-together and launched a new version of its cookbook. The previous one had been compiled in 1995. It's one of those things that such organisations, particularly an essentially ex-pat one, do but which struck me as slightly unnecessary, particularly since publishing it works out to be relatively expensive. There are plenty of extensive and inexpensive cookbooks on English and French cooking. In the event I was pleasantly surprised. What I had overlooked was that most of the ex-pat community had travelled widely during their lives and so the recipes in the cookbook originated from all over the world. So it was a worthwhile exercise after all.

I usually take a few things back to England with me at Christmas but, at this time of the year, the possibilities are rather limited. The best of what is produced here is mainly fresh local fruit and vegetables. Honey in jars doesn't travel well in a suitcase, so it's a question of soaps (olive-oil based), flower essences and of course the local donkey sausage, which both of my kids love. Donkeys were used extensively round here up to half a century ago to bring produce from the fields into the village, which posed the question of what you do with an old and knackered donkey that is no longer fit for work. If you're English, you probably make it into a family pet; if you're French, you make it into sausages. I'm also taking back a tin of confit de canard, which is probably available in England but which I haven't noticed in any of my mother's local supermarkets. If I can find any, I may also pack some pâté de coing (quince paste) which isn't in the shops but is made by many people locally and is delicious.

How The Other Half Lives

Weather
In contrast to the reports coming on of snowy chaos in England, our weather has continued to be rather cloudy and wet and temperatures have been on the up, to 15 degrees today. On benefit of this has been the scenery, with cloud descending at times to below 1000ft. Since two of the three ways out of the village involve climbing to 1000ft, I've had the experience of driving through cloud. That only happened to me once before, when on a holiday in Tenerife. I find driving into cloud, above it into the light and then descending into it a striking experience. The cloud tends to gather in layers, at various levels against the hills, which also has some striking effects on the view. The strips of hills visible lower down are grey/brown, the strips in the middle sprinkled with snow and those at the top all white. It sometimes takes an effort of the imagination to link the three as the same hill.

Shopping
My cleaning lady, Patricia, asked me if I would take her into Vaison for some shopping. She has no car and the suppression of the midday bus run means leaving the village at around 7.30 in the morning and not being able to return by bus until after 5.00. I was happy to agree and we were back in the village in just over an hour; but I wondered how she managed generally. She said she shopped for a month at a time and, certainly, her shopping filled the car, with three 20-litre containers of diesel fuel for her heating amongst it. Coming into the village I wondered aloud how we were going to get all her shopping to her house, as she lives in the old mediaeval part and there was no way I could get the car to her house. “Don't worry”, she said, “I'll get my son”. So I parked as near as I could get and she went off, duly reappearing with her son who was pulling a hand cart the size of porters' trolleys on stations in England. We loaded it up and off they went. That was clearly her standard procedure.

Language (Again)
Two neighbours of friend Daniel have been very helpful polishing a translation I did of a short story that I wrote when doing a creative writing course just after I retired. (I did creative writing, chaos theory and conversational French). I hadn't expected to need much help but didn't appreciate the amount of idioms and double meanings I had used. Anyway, during the course of discussion a very interesting point about the past emerged. The neighbours, Jacques and Claudine, hail from Brittany and still have a house there. I was mentioning the longevity of dialects in France and Jacques agreed. He said his grandfather, who lived all his life in Roscoff, spoke two languages: breton and English! He didn't speak a word of French. I was amazed and Jacques explained that his grandfather would go over to England frequently on a boat loaded with fish to sell and then stay on selling onions and garlic. I remember French onion-sellers in Bristol when I was a student in the 1960s but have never seen them since.