Salers, the people

Where are all the people in these Auvergne villages? That's the question that Melinda asked in a comment yesterday. It's true that the villages we visited were not crowded. We weren't there in tourist season, but just after it ended. And it was rainy, which doesn't encourage people to go out unless they absolutely have to.

It's not just in the Auvergne where you drive into French villages that look completely deserted, though. The same thing happens in the Loire Valley. I remember the day we drove back to Saint-Aignan from Paris. It was August 31. We drove across the Loire at Beaugency and headed into the Sologne forest, on our way to Chambord.

A park in Salers on a foggy Wednesday morning in
September — where is everybody?

The villages looked shuttered and empty of life. Maybe it's because not a lot of houses have front yards, or front porches. Especially in the towns and villages. So you don't see people, and you don't know if they are in a hidden courtyard somewhere, inside their houses, or just not there at all. Where is everybody?

One thing that really gives you the impression that the villages are deserted is the closed shutters. In villages and towns, the streets are often very narrow. If your house has windows on the street side, especially on the ground floor, you probably keep the shutters closed a lot of the time. Otherwise, people walking by can look into your rooms, and cars driving by can be loud and stinky. Pollution dirties you windows.

As lunchtime approached and the sun broke through the fog,
people started appearing in the streets of Salers.

So you keep your shutters closed on the street side and live on the courtyard or back yard side of the building. But it's also true that a lot of the villages are underpopulated these days. In other words, a lot of the houses are occupied only seasonally, by people who live and work in cities but enjoy spending vacations in the country. The shutters on those houses are nearly always closed.

The time of day and the weather also have a lot to do with making a village look deserted. When it's lunchtime, all activity stops. Unless you happen upon a café or restaurant with outdoor seating, you don't see anybody. People are inside, eating. Most are eating at home. In France, people still eat their meals on a schedule, and they sit around a table — unlike what happens so much in America. Here, lunch is at noon, or at 1:00. Not at 3:00 or 4:00. Dinner, a light meal, is at 8:00, more or less. Not at 5:00.

Still, you couldn't say the streets were bustling.

One clue to look for is windowboxes full of flowers. If there are flowers, there is somebody there to water them. The building is not abandoned, even if the shutters are all closed up.

I remember once going to visit the little town of Noyon (pop. 15,000), north of Paris and near Laon and Soissons, with a couple of American friends. I believe it was a Saturday in September 1994, and the weather was nice. (It hard to believe it was 15 years ago.) We drove into the town at noontime, maybe 1:00 or close to 2:00, thinking we would have a picnic somewhere and see the town's fine cathedral. We had packed a lunch.

And yes, the church in Noyon is a cathedral, which is surprising. Most churches are not cathedrals, but a lot of Americans don't realize that. I hear the term misused all the time, or read it on travel forums about France. A cathedral is a church presided over by a bishop. It's the seat of a bishopric. Saint-Aignan doesn't have a cathedral. Blois does. Tours does.

Windowboxes full of flowers are a clue.

Cathedrals are usually in big cities. That's why it's surprising that Noyon has a cathedral — it's a small town. But Charlemagne was crowned King of the Francs there, in 768 — more than 1,200 years ago.

When we got to Noyon, our friends looked around and asked: "Is this a ghost town? It's completely deserted." When they said that, I realized that the streets did seem almost spookily empty. There were cars parked around, not not a cat was to be seen. That's a French expression: « Il n'y avait pas un chat. » It means there's nobody around. I thought about it and told them: "It's because it's lunchtime." I don't think they believed me.

By the way, these American friends had rented an apartment on the top floor of a building right off the Place Monge in Paris. They said they thought the building was basically abandoned. They never saw or heard another person the whole week they stayed there. Walt and I walked up the apartment at least once, and on every floor there were doors with doorbells labeled with last names. People definitely lived there. They were just very quiet and very discreet, not wanting to disturb each other. And during the day they were probably at work, having left early and getting home fairly late in the evening. It was a nice building, and typically Parisian.

In Salers, a tour bus had apparently come in. We tried
to avoid getting tangled up in this crowd, and
I didn't want them in too many of my pictures.

But back to Noyon — that September day, we went into the cathedral and looked around. We found a bench on the church grounds where we could eat the picnic lunch we had brought with us. It was getting to be 4:00 p.m. or so by the time we went back to the car to continue on to Laon, where there is a more famous cathedral to see.

In Noyon at four o'clock, the streets were suddenly crowded with people. Couples strolled arm in arm down the town's main pedestrian street. Some pushed strollers or baby carriages. Children played and rode bicycles. There was an atmosphere of merriment. Shops were open for business.

The contrast with the scene of desertion that had greeted us a couple of hours earlier was astonishing. Lunch had been eaten. It was time to go out for a walk and enjoy the nice sunny weather. In September, you never know if you'll have another sunny weekend day before springtime.

There is always one suspicious-looking character
lurking down a side street.

So take all that into consideration when you drive into a French town or village that seems eerily quiet and empty. Maybe it's just not the right time of day, or the right day of the week. If it's a Monday, most towns will be quiet. Many have a market once a week, and on that day you will see people out and about. But most days the place will be quiet.

When we drove into the Loire Valley on August 31, it was surprising to us to see whole villages where there was not a soul in sight. You can't help but wonder if anybody really lives in them. But we were out early in the afternoon. People were probably finishing their lunch, but another factor was surely at play. It was really hot. I mean the sun was beating down and the temperature must have been in the 80s.

Typical street scene...

So all the people were indoors, digesting and maybe napping during the heat of the day. And one way you keep your house cool is to close the shutters to block out the hot sun. It was also a Monday. That's the real day of rest in France, after the shopping on Saturday, and on Sunday morning, and the cooking and eating of Sunday dinner. The shops are mostly closed on Mondays. People who work all weekend take the day off, and rest up.

One more thing about my pictures — I try to avoid taking pictures of people. And sometimes if there are people in the pictures that I don't want you to see, I just take them out using Photoshop.

Picturesque Tournemire

There are so many picturesque towns and villages and landscapes in France that the picturesque is almost ordinary. We struggle not to get too jaded.

Earlier, I said that Tournemire, near Salers in the Cantal, was picturesque so I thought I ought to post a few pictures I took as we walked through the village. The main street runs east to west toward the château, on the side of a ridge overlooking a very green valley.

Views from the main street in Tournemire

Meanwhile, I've been re-reading The Food of France, a 1958 book by Waverly Root. Root was the food columnist at the International Herald Tribune for many years. I recommend his book as a source of information about regional cooking in France — and as an overview of French geography and history, for that matter. Right now, I'm reading Root's chapter on the food of the Auvergne region.

All these were taken from the main street in the village of Tournemire

Here is what he says about la truffade, which he calls by its name in the Auvergne dialect, truffado:

Truffado is the most typical potato dish of the Auvergne, but there are differences of opinion about how to prepare it. In the Aurillac region, the potatoes are mashed and mixed with fresh cheese. In some other regions potatoes fried with lard and perhaps seasoned with garlic have little cubes of fresh cheese added to them at the last moment.

At Tournemire, overlooking a farmhouse
down in the valley

Aurillac is the main town in the Cantal département, and it's half an hour south of Salers by car. Root continues, mentioning Mont Dore, which is a ways north of Salers:

There are other variations, both within the Auvergne and in surrounding provinces, where the basic potato-fresh-cheese combination may turn up under the name of aligot, alicot, or aligout, depending on regional dialect. At Mont Dore, grated cheese is beaten into liquid mashed potatoes, more grated cheese is sprinkled over the top, and the whole is then covered with melted butter and browned in the oven.

The church tower in Tournemire

I bet you think I might as well change the name of my blog to Living the Life in the Auvergne, no?

Lace curtains and worn steps on Touremire's main street

Along with The Food of France, I'm also reading a book about the whole Auvergne region. It's called Auvergne & the Massif Central, written by Rex Grizell and first published in 1989. It's fairly entertaining and very informative.

The dark church at Tournemire

Of course every village has its church. In fact, that's the definition of the term village in French: a place with a church and some houses. If it doesn't have a church, it's not a un village but a un hameau, a hamlet, like the one we live in near Saint-Aignan.

Tournemire is a village with both a church and a château. It's in the Cantal département, which is in the Auvergne région, which is in turn part of the French geographical zone called Le Massif Central — the central highlands.

Maisons à Tournemire, l'un des plus beaux villages de France

When we got to Tournemire, on little winding roads with steep drop-offs, the rain let up for a few minutes. We all had raincoats or umbrellas, and there was no wind to speak of, so we decided to park on the edge of the village — at one end, actually — and walk through the main street over to the château, which we had seen from above. The sky cooperated.

The village from above. That's the church on the right.

The village seemed pretty much deserted. It was early September, and a Wednesday. And it had been raining for a day or two, after all. There were maybe two or three other cars in the parking lot near the tourist office, along with our two. One of the first places we saw on our walk was the Auberge de Tournemire, the Tournemire Inn, which operates a crêperie/restaurant.

A heart with a dagger through it, no?

That sounded like a good place to have lunch after our walk. I stopped in and made a reservation for five at 12:15. No problem. We looked at the menu. One of the house specialties was the regional specialty called La Truffade (here's my topic about this potato dish). It was served with a salad as a light lunch, or with meat or sausages and salad for something a little more substantial. There were crêpes, but just for dessert.

"I am the Immaculate Conception."

The village was so picturesque you might have thought you were on a movie set or in a theme park. But the houses are massive, stone constructions, built out of the local black lava — this is in the middle of the Parc des Volcans d'Auvergne, after all. The village has to be a thousand years old, or older.

We didn't see any more dining establishments as we walked through the main street, so we were glad we had made a reservation for lunch when we did. We were headed out into the volcano park, and I doubted we would find any other place to eat. There was one café in Tournemire, with a sign and a couple of tables out on the sidewalk, and with a beautiful view out over the valley down below. But it seemed to be shut up tight.

We liked this stained-glass knight.

Soon we came to the church. The door was wide open, so we went it. It was very dark inside, being built, like the houses, of that black lava stone. And remember, the light was gray and dim outside that day too.

The interior seemed very primitive; that was probably the darkness, which gave you the impression that there were probably spider webs and dust balls in all the corners. Who knew what was hiding in there. The chairs that took the place of pews were not arranged in straight rows. They were kind of a jumble, as if people had left in a hurry. On the positive side, I guess that means the church is used.

L'Eglise de Tournemire en Auvergne
(I had to lighten up the picture in Photoshop.)

According to a book I read, one of the treasures of the church in Tournemire is a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns, brought back from the Holy Land by a crusader in the Middle Ages. We didn't see it, but that's not surprising. It was too dark in there.

At the end of our little tour I found Jesus. Oh, that doesn't sound right. I mean I peered into a corner and noticed a figure reclining in a low cranny, near the floor, in darkness. It was a representation of Christ in his tomb. I used my flash to snap a picture.

Salers and Tournemire

The first morning we were in Auvergne, in early September, we decided to start the day by taking a walk through the little town of Salers. It was foggy and even misty, and when we first got there the streets were nearly empty. Obviously, the town was just opening up for the day.

In our walking we passed by a little gallery selling paintings of local scenes by local artists (I assume). It was warm and inviting, but we didn't go in. I snapped a picture through the front window of the shope, and then I noticed a particular item in the window display.

An art gallery in Salers

The "caption" on the artwork I was looking at said it represented the Château d'Anjony, in the village called Tournemire. I had seen Tournemire on the map, and I had seen an article about the Anjony family in old old edition of the Michelin Green Guide for Auvergne that my Paris friend CHM let me read.

This piece caught my eye — a preview
of Tournemire seen in Salers

I had scanned some pages from that old Michelin Guide — Salers, Val, some maps — but I didn't get to the one about Anjony, so I didn't know much about it. Just that CHM said that it was worth a visit and that it wasn't far from Saint-Chamant. About the village Tournemire, CHM had said something about his mother being acquainted with a member of the old Tournemire family. That family's château is no longer standing.

We arrived in Tournemire from the north, through fog
and mist on tiny winding roads. Stopping on such a
curve was probably not smart, but we couldn't resist.

What reminded me of all this today is the talk of rain we heard on the TV and radio weather forecasts yesterday. (By the way, not a drop has yet fallen in Saint-Aignan, but it is cloudy.) The day we went to Tournemire, it was rainy. The valleys over which Salers, Saint-Chamant, and Tournemire have panoramic views, were emerald green.

Looking down from the road over the castle and the valley —
this is why we stopped on the road to take photos.

Tournemire was a magical-looking place that rainy morning. Unlike the Château de Val, which is of the same style but has a boat basin full of tour boats, sailboats, and other yachts at its base, the Château d'Anjony seems to be lost in time and floating in space. It was so quiet and still in the village. And the streets were empty.

A closer view with a nice « flou artistique » —
that means it's artistically out of focus

Walt has written about Tournemire. I have some pictures of our visit there that I want to post. Walt was walking with Callie, so he didn't go into the church, but I did, and I took pictures inside. We all walked the length of the village, which is « L'un des plus beaux villages de France », as is Salers. The rain let up long enough for us to do so.

P.S. It started raining this morning at 8:00, just as I was going out (of course) for the morning walk with Callie. Earlier it was too dark to go. The moisture was only mist and then drizzle for about an hour, but now it's coming down pretty steadily as bigger drops. Nice.

La Truffade — Auvergne-style potatoes

Now that I've cooked this and looked at the pictures, I realize it looks like an American breakfast. I mean the kind of breakfast you might make if you were out in the woods on a camping trip and cooking over a campfire. And you know everything tastes better outdoors.

That's what the Auvergne is like, I guess. It's high mountains and deep valleys. When you're there, you feel like you might be out camping somewhere, even if you are staying in a very big, nicely furnished house. It's something about the weather. Or the smell of the fresh air. The dampness. All those cows, maybe.

Potatoes, bacon, onions, and diced cheese in a pan

So yesterday I cooked truffade again. I think it's only the second time, or maybe the third, in the month since we got back from our brief trip to Saint-Chamant and the Pays de Salers. Blame SuperU: the store has had potatoes on sale for a month now.

They're nice spuds of the Agata variety, which make good fried or sauteed potatoes, and the first bag I bought was only 1.75 € for 5 kg (11 lbs). When we had gone through that bag, I went back to SuperU for something else and noticed that they had the same potatoes, same quantity, on sale for 1.00 €. I can't resist prices like that — at least not when we're talking about an excellent fresh product.

Here's another picture of the tome fraîche cheese.

I published the French recipe for La Truffade a couple of days ago — here's a link to it. The essential ingredients are thinly sliced potatoes; a good melting cheese, like Tome fraîche from Auvergne; bacon (smoked pork lardons); salt and pepper. Optional ingredients are onions and garlic. Here's how I ended up translating (adapting, really) the recipe:

La Truffade auvergnate

Serves 8

butter or vegetable oil for frying

3 lbs. potatoes

1½ lbs. cheese

½ lb. diced smoked bacon (lardons)

onions and/or garlic (optional)

In a large non-stick skillet, cook the bacon with a little bit of butter or vegetable oil until browned. If you're using onions or garlic, saute with the bacon. Remove from pan, leaving the fat, and set aside.

Cut the potatoes into thin slices and put them in the skillet with a little more butter or oil as necessary. Let them brown a little on the bottom and then cover them for a few minutes until they cook through.

Grate the cheese or cut it into little pieces. Add cheese and the cooked bacon lardons to the pan and toss or stir the potatoes around. Cover the pan again so that the cheese will melt. Let the potatoes brown on the bottom. Then turn the contents of the pan out onto a serving platter.

Serve with bread, red wine, and a green salad.

The cheese melts right into the sauteed potatoes.

Adding onion to the truffade is unconventional — but it sure is good. The famous French chef Joël Rebuchon, who specializes in potato dishes, has published a recipe for truffade in which he cooks the potatoes with garlic. I even found one recipe that includes diced tomatoes in the mixture!

I think Jack cheese or young white Cheddar would be good cheeses to make the truffade with. Instead of bacon, you could use little chunks of ham, or even chicken or turkey (especially smoked varieties). The amount of salt you need depends on the saltiness of the cheese and meat you use. Don't forget pepper.

La Truffade. Can't decide which picture I like better...

We ate sausages with our truffade yesterday. That was a little rich, probably, but then we are doing a lot of work outside right now. When Bill from NH was hear a few weeks ago, we had truffade with a stuffed tomato for lunch, and that was a good combination. Fried eggs would certainly be good alongside.

...so I'm including them both.

I guess Idaho russet potatoes would be the best U.S. variety for truffade, but I'd also have to try it with Yukon Golds or new red potatoes if I were making it over there.

Have truffade for breakfast if you want, but substitute coffee for the red wine. Then sit around the campfire and enjoy it. Don't forget to chop some wood or go on a long hike afterwards to burn off the calories.

Salers, the cheese again

This is France, the land of human rights, high fashion... and wine and cheese. Salers is no exception when it comes to wine and cheese. Well, wine isn't made in Salers, or even just outside, but there is good and interesting Auvergne wine. The cheese, of course, is made all around what is called the Pays de Salers, the outlying hills and valleys.

Cheese. I've already written a lot about it, and published a lot of pictures of Salers cows. But here, to add to all of that, is a photo of the market stand on the main square in Salers where we bought our first Auvergne cheeses.

Buying cheese and ham at the market in Salers —
"Welcome to the farm," the sign says.

The woman in the little market coach had a good selection of cheeses made on a farm just outside Salers, as well as cheeses from a little farther away. She was also selling jambon d'Auvergne, like the ham I showed yesterday with the Pounti recipe (link to photo). I think — I'm sure — she was also selling Pounti, in fact. But I didn't know what it was, and I neglected to ask.

The back cover of the brochure we got
at the cheese stand in Salers...

What we did ask about was the cheese. There was Salers, there was Cantal, and there was Tome Fraîche. What were the differences? The woman explained patiently — enthusiastically, actually — to me, Evelyn, and Linda. I was translating and enjoying myself. The woman was willing to spend some time talking to us.

...and the front cover

She had "young" Salers cheese, made last May. We tasted and bought some of that. There was a more mature Cantal from last January, and we tasted and bought some of that too. And then there was a 2008 Cantal that had recently won a gold medal at some Paris food event. We tasted that one too, but I don't think we bought any — compared to the two others, it was pretty crumbly and strong. It was a little too sharp for us, but would have been good with a dark red wine.

The recipe from the brochure

Linda noticed the tome fraîche and wanted to buy some of that. The woman selling the cheeses quickly pointed out that tome is not a cheese to eat the way you eat Cantal or Salers — it's cheese to cook with. Melting cheese. It hasn't been salted, and it is pretty bland. I knew about it, but at that point I didn't know about the cheese-making process and the salting that fresh tome gets before it becomes Cantal. We tasted and bought some tome too.

I mentioned aligot to the cheese woman — aligot is a dish consisting of mashed potatoes made with tome fraîche and garlic — a local specialty. Walt and I had some in Paris a couple of years ago, in a restaurant called Aux Ambassadeurs d'Auvergne, near the Pompidou Center. It seemed like a lot of trouble to make, because you have to beat the potatoes and cheese until the mixture will form long strings when you lift it out of the dish with a wooden spoon.

There was goat cheese on sale in the market in Salers, too,
but we had brought some with us from Touraine.

The cheese woman told me another way to use fresh tome is in something called truffade. It turned out that truffade has nothing to do with truffles, the expensive fungus balls that pigs and dogs are trained to sniff out in the Dordogne and in Provence. In Auvergne, truffade is a dish of potatoes sauteed with lardons (salted or smoked bacon, again) and tome cheese. Onions and garlic are optional. I told you Auvergne food was rustic and filling.

To finish our shopping at the cheese vendor's, I also bought some Auvergne ham and pieces of two other local cheeses, Saint-Nectaire and Bleu d'Auvergne. All that was going to be our dinner.

We made truffade at the gîte that night, and it was excellent (if I do say so myself). We had a big green salad with it. And some of the cheeses and some Auvergne ham that I bought. The next day several of us had truffade at lunch in a restaurant in the village called Tournemire. We all agreed that our home-made truffade had been more delicious.

Tome Fraîche de l'Aubrac, made with raw milk

I'm going to make truffade again tomorrow, using some tome fraîche that I bought at the market in Noyers on Sunday. It's not Tome de Cantal, but Tome de l'Aubrac, a similar cheese from the area just south of Auvergne. Then I'll translate the recipe and take some pictures too.

Pounti, a savory cake from Auvergne

The food of the Auvergne is rustic and filling. It's the kind of food people living in a chilly climate need, especially when their life requires spending a lot of time outdoors. Cabbage, potatoes, cheese, bread, and cured pork products — hams and sausages — are staples. Soupe aux choux, cabbage soup, in various forms, has always sustained the local people.

One specialty I didn't know about when we went to spend a few days in the Cantal department was Pounti, a savory cake made with local country-style ham, the smoked pork chunks called lardons, Swiss chard, prunes (dried plums, that is), and cheese. I saw Pounti in the market in Salers and in food shops, but I wasn't sure what it was.

A shop in Salers selling regional specalties —
sausages, pâtés, honey, and Pounti, among others

Then back in Saint-Aignan I was looking through a recent edition of a French cooking magazine (thanks to Peter Hertzmann) and came across this recipe for Pounti. I made it a couple of days later. By the way, I haven't found any information about the origin of the name.

Translation/adaptation below...

This version of Pounti might be "cakier" than many, but that makes it a good food to serve with an apéritif, especially what is called « un apéritif dînatoire ». That's a light dinner of finger foods that people here in France serve when they want to spend an informal and convivial evening with friends. Savory cakes are popular for such occasions — our version of American zucchini bread, for example, has been a hit in our neighborhood (we reduced the amount of sugar).

Auvergne Pounti cake

The Pounti I saw in Auvergne seemed to be heavier and wetter than this cake. I read on a couple of Internet pages that one way to eat Pounti is to fry slices of it until they are lightly browned and crispy. Then eat it with a knife and fork as a filling supper dish. I can't see doing that with this Pounti cake.

Here's the recipe in American English:

Auvergne Pounti cake

3 eggs
1 cup flour
½ tsp. baking powder
¼ cup vegetable oil (or more)
½ cup warm milk
½ lb. grated cheese
½ lb. cured ham (prosciutto)
¼ lb. smoked bacon
15 pitted prunes
½ lb. chard, spinach, or lettuce leaves
1 medium onion
salt and pepper

Preheat a convection oven to 350ºF.

In a mixing bowl, combine the eggs, flour, and baking powder. Gradually stir in the vegetable oil. Warm the milk briefly in the microwave and gradually incorporate it into the batter. Mix in the grated cheese, a little salt, a good amount of pepper.

Chop the onion and saute it lightly in a pan with the bacon (or lardons). Meanwhile, cut the country ham into strips. Chop the chard or other greens roughly, and cut each prune into two or even four pieces.

When the onions and bacon have cooled slightly, mix all the ingredients into the cake batter.

Cook the batter in a buttered or non-stick loaf pan for 45 minutes. Let it cool for 15 or 20 minutes before taking it out of the pan.

Some notes on the ingredients — Prunes these days are not dried to the degree they used to be. Drying allowed them to keep for a long time; these days, you buy them at the supermarket in plastic or cellophane bags and they are still pretty moist and soft. Use them as they are, without soaking them, unless they seem very dry and tough.

Pitted and chopped prunes, unsoaked,
and a piece of Salers/Cantal cheese

For cheese, the recipe says to use Gruyère. That's classic Swiss cheese, and I'm sure it would be good. But this is an Auvergne recipe, so why not use an Auvergne cheese? I had a piece of Salers cheese left from our trip, and that's what I grated and put in the batter.

If you can get Cantal, good. Otherwise, cheddar would be good. White cheddar is similar to Cantal in flavor and texture. I think the next time I make Pounti I'm going to use a blue cheese from Auvergne, maybe Fourme d'Ambert, in it.

At any rate, after all that, I have to say that cheese is an optional or unconventional ingredient, according to a lot of the Pounti recipes I've found.

This is cured ham, called jambon cru (raw ham),
jambon sec (dry ham), or jambon de pays ( country
ham) in France, where there are many regional versions.

Prosciutto, or Parma ham, is fairly similar to the cured hams of the Auvergne region. It's salt cured, lightly smoked, and not cooked. If you buy it in very thin slices, you don't need to cook it before you put it in the cake batter.

Bacon is the other meat in the Pounti cake. The recipe doesn't say to pre-cook it, but I decided to, along with the onion. If you can get smoked bacon, that would be the best. American bacon is often sugar-cured, but I think that would be good in the Pounti. Get thick sliced bacon, cut it into small pieces, and saute it lightly before putting it in the cake batter.

You can vary the quantities and proportions of the meats. Altogether you want 6 to 8 oz. of ham and/or bacon. Chunks of cooked ham would be good, and strips of sandwich ham might be too. You can also adjust the number of prunes to your taste.

Chopped cured ham slices can go into the batter
without needing to be pre-cooked.

Swiss chard is the preferred leafy green vegetable for the Pounti, but fresh spinach would be very good too. I'm not sure about using frozen spinach, but I might try it one day soon. The recipe says you can use lettuce, but if you do, choose a dark green leaf lettuce, not iceberg.

Finally, the French recipe says to use 2% milk in the batter, but I think whole or skim would be fine too. If you have skim milk, you can always add a tablespoon or two of cream to it.

Did you ever crack an egg and have the whole thing
spurt right out of the shell onto the work surface?

A slice or bite-size piece of Pounti cake is really good with a glass of wine, be it white, red, or rosé. The salty, smoky meat; the melted cheese; the slightly sweet prunes; and the just-cooked greens give it a good taste and texture. Pounti is a pre-dinner treat, or it can make a light meal with a green salad. One recipe I saw on the Internet says you can serve it heated up and topped with a little tomato sauce. I'll have to try that combination before I can recommend it.

Salers, the pronunciation

Salers is one of those place names in France that has two pronunciations. Yesterday, for example, I went to the outdoor market over in Noyers-sur-Cher, across the river, to buy some cheese. My goal was goat cheese, and I got three nice pieces, along with a slice of the Auvergne blue cheese called Fourme d'Ambert.

Then I noticed a shrink-wrapped piece of tomme fraîche like one we had bought in Salers. It's cheese to cook with and I'll make something with it later this week (truffade — stay tuned). The wrapper says it's good cheese to put on pizza.

The old post office in Salers

I told the cheese vendor, who is starting to get to know me after two or three years of seeing me occasionally on Sunday mornings, that I had just come back from the Cantal. He asked me where I stayed, and I said Saint-Chamant. He didn't appear to be familiar with that name, so I said it was not far from Salers.

Walt and Callie taking a picture in Salers

His face brightened and he starting singing the praises of the Salers area. How beautiful it is, how green, what good food, especially the cheeses, he said. I told him we had visited a dairy farmer and watched him make Salers cheese late one afternoon. I think he was impressed — or envious. At the least it called up good memories for him.

Here's what I meant when I said flowers add color to gray Salers.

Anyway, every time he said Salers he pronounced the final S, saying something like [sah-LEHRSS]. I used to pronounce it that way too, when I lived in Paris. There are a lot of French place names that end in an S where the final S is silent, and a lot where it is pronounced. Everybody knows that Paris is [pah-REE] and Tours is [tour] — those are often-used names. But how many people are sure how to pronounce names like Tournus, Carpentras, Alès, or the Rhône wine villages Gigondas and Vacquéras? S or no S at the end?

The church tower in Salers and a coq

Once Walt and I went for lunch at a restaurant near Ecole Militaire in the 7th arrondissement in Paris. It was called Le Bistrot de Papa, I think — yep, just looked it up and that's the one. When we went there, one of the specialties on the menu was le bœuf de Salers, steaks of Salers beef. That's what we, or at least I, ordered. I asked the waiter if I should say [sah-LEHR] or [sah-LEHRSS]. He said he was from Auvergne and that down there the final S is silent, but that in Paris a lot of people pronounce it. So you really can't go wrong, I guess.

A typical solid-looking house on the edge of Salers

That's what I tell English-speakers who want to know how to pronounce town names that end in an S. Go ahead and pronounce the S. French people will understand you, even if that's not the way they normally pronounce the name. Then listen carefully to see if you can hear the French-speaking person say the name back to you. Imitate that pronunciation.

Nice street view in Salers

Well, I got carried away with those pronunciation questions. The pictures in this post are ones I took in Saler' on September 2. It is a very photogenic place.

Salers, the town

Town or village... It certainly feels like a town, with its narrow winding streets, ramparts, and big central square. But it has fewer than 500 inhabitants, so I guess it is a village. It has a church, of course, and an outdoor market. Salers is in Cantal, in the Auvergne region.

Auvergne lost a lot of its population starting in the 19th century, when the railroads came in. Paris is full of "refugees" from the region. Life down there in those deep valleys, with a harsh climate, wasn't easy. But it's a fantastically beautiful area now. Green and a little empty.

On the streets of Salers

The day we were there in early September it was very foggy. The sky was white, and you couldn't see the valley below the town because it was fogged in. We wandered around, taking pictures and enjoying the street scenes. It was all kind of dark and quiet at first.

A view out over the edge of the town to the cow pastures beyond

The dark volcanic lave stone that everything is built out of is hard to get used to. The fog that morning gave us a taste of what winter must be like — all in grays, blacks, and whites. At least in summer and early fall, however, the monotone quality of it is broken up by some greenery and plenty of flowers (a lot of red geraniums, as everywhere in France).

A nice weathervane

Most of the houses in Salers were built in the 1600s and 1700s, a period of prosperity for the town. It became the judicial center of the region, and a lot of well-to-do lawyers settled in. The wars of religion were ending, and France was entering into an era of relative political stability. The railroads hadn't yet arrived to take so many people away to Paris.

An old doorway with its decorations, dating from 1700

Salers was not deserted the day we walked around it. There was at least one busload of senior citizens — people our age, ha ha ha — clogging up the streets. We tried not to be engulfed by that crowd. Walking into a crowd with a dog on a leash is always a dangerous thing to do. Callie was glad to be out of the car and walking around, but she was a little confused by the whole experience.

One of a kind vases and lamps made by "The Recykler" —
and a splash of color on the side of the street in Salers

I bought some things: a bottle of apéritif wine made from the gentian plant, for example, and some cheese and ham at the market. We spent time talking to a woman who makes Salers and Cantal cheese just a ways west of town and sells it at the market from her truck. This was before we went to the dairy farm near Saint-Chamant, so we had a lot of questions. We looked inside several shops, and there was no lack of them. We tried to stay ahead of or behind the crowd of old people.

There's a lot of picturesque stuff to see in Salers.

Just as we were finishing our stroll and starting to think about lunch, the sun came out. But we had made our afternoon plan, which was to drive 25 miles north and see the Château de Val. The town of Mauriac looked like a good place for lunch, and we had pizzas in mind. But I'm not through with Salers (the town) yet.