Daylight

At this date the sun comes up in Saint-Aignan at 8:32 a.m. and doesn't go down again until 5:32 p.m. That's nine full hours of sunlight — or low, gray clouds, most days. We actually had a visible sunrise yesterday, but it lasted only five minutes. Then clouds moved it and blotted it out.

Yesterday's sunrise (15 January 2010) at La Renaudière

The hamlet called La Renaudière in the pink light of dawn

About endives, they are called just that in French: des endives. In America, the term endive used without modification means what is called scarole (escarole) or salade frisée (curly endive) in France. Americans call endives Belgian endive. In England, as Autolycus said, endives are called chicory and chicorée is called endive. It's all as clear as the mud all these plants grow in.

Endives — 2 kg pour 2,75 €

Belgian endive (a.k.a. chicon or witlof) leaves are also good raw in salads. They are slightly bitter so they are good combined with foods that are sweet, such as beets (beetroot, betteraves), green apples (pommes vertes), or walnuts (noix). They're good with Roquefort and other cheeses too. La salade d'endives et de betteraves is a traditional French combination, with vinaigrette.

Endives: treats of the season

Belgian endives are a wintertime staple over here. Have they become any more widely available, and reasonably priced, in the U.S. these days? Do people eat them in England?

Maybe its that bitterness thing. There's something about the anglophone palate that doesn't enjoy such foods. They have to be cooked right. Is it because we have lost sight of the seasons when it comes to cooking?

Belgian endives braised in butter and lemon juice, with garlic

Winter grinds on. Good food is the only consolation. Fondue savoyarde, tartiflette, endives au gratin — stick-to-your-ribs stuff. And Walt and I were talking about it yesterday: it won't be long before asparagus season arrives. And then strawberries. And then fruit from all the trees in the neighborhood. It's all something to look forward to.

Wrap each cooked endive in a slice of ham,
or chicken or turkey breast.

For now, everybody is hunkered down. Two of our neighbors just decamped to the Paris area, where they keep an apartment. They'll be back when the weather breaks. The other neighbors — the ones whose winter residence is in Blois — hardly come down here at all this time of year. And the neighbors who are here seem only rarely to stick their noses outdoors.

Cook the wrapped endives in the oven in a cheese sauce.
Don't forget to put some nutmeg in the sauce.

Life feels very routine right now. And because there are seasonal patterns, it's hard to find anything of interest to blog about that hasn't already been blogged. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Les jours se suivent et se ressemblent. All that. Cabin fever has set in. But there's plenty of good food to eat.

I've posted before about cooking Belgian endives, here and here.

Kimchi — salted, spiced cabbage from Korea

You probably wouldn't think of somebody in France making Korean food. Much less making the "pickled" or fermented, spiced raw cabbage dish called Kimchi or Kim Chee. But that's exactly what I've been doing.

It started when our friends Susan and Simon at Days on the Claise recently went back to Australia for Christmas. Their flight involved a long layover in Seoul, where Simon worked as a teacher years back. Then Jean of A Very Grand Pressigny mentioned that she had talked to them about the possibility of having a Kimchi dinner.

Kimchi in a tin that we bought at a grocery store in Paris

Earlier than that, through another blogger — Justin, an American who lives now in Paris — we heard about a restaurant serving both Japanese and Korean specialties in the Paris neighborhood where another friend has his apartment. We've been wanting to go have a meal there for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity. We had bought some little tins of Kimchi in Paris.

Ingredients in Korean, English, and — on a pasted-on label — French

So Kimchi, a food that we like and know from the days nearly 30 years ago when we lived in Washington DC, became an idea that I couldn't avoid — incontournable, comme on dit. I had to do something about it. Kimchi is cabbage, after all, and Walt and I both love cabbage, cooked or raw. And cabbage is plentiful and cheap right now in France. It's the season. Besides, cabbage is good for you.

Here's what my Kimchi ended up looking like. One cabbage
produced a good quantity. It keeps for weeks or months
in the refrigerator, and improves over time.

I went to SuperU the other day to buy some other things, and I happened to notice big heads of Savoy cabbage — un chou pommé — on sale in the produce section for 90 eurocents apiece. That did it. We had all the other ingredients in the house. I had looked at recipes on the Internet and seen that I would need salt, sugar, garlic, ginger, onion, fish sauce, and red pepper flakes or paste. Check.

Savoy cabbage salted down and draining for 24 to 48 hours

I found a French recipe posted on a blog with the title « Kimchi maison » — home-made kimchi — as well as several recipes in English. The French one looked like the best candidate. Savoy cabbage wasn't really the kind of cabbage most of the recipes called for when it came to making kimchi, but it was what I found. Most recommend what is called chou chinois or Napa cabbbage.

Anyway, I had a project that was perfect for these cold, gray winter days. Needless to say, there aren't any Korean restaurants in Saint-Aignan, and I've never seen Kimchi in the supermarkets either. The French version of salted, fermented cabbage, of course, is choucroute — sauerkraut. I've never made that from scratch, but it would be another good project.

Here's a link to my second topic about making kimchi.

Variety is the spice...

Some people live on a very limited range of foodstuffs. To me, that's not only boring, but it's not as healthy as eating a wide range of vegetables, meats, fruits, and dairy products. Balance is the key. Too much of even a good thing gets dull before too long, and your body craves something different.

That's what I love about living in France. There's such a wide variety of products available. At the same time, always in the past when I came to spend a school year in France — back when I was a student and teacher — I would lose noticeable amounts of weight before going back to the U.S. The very first time I spent a few months in France, I lost so much weight that my pants were in danger of falling down.

Now that was in part because I did so much walking in France. And that first time, in Aix-en-Provence when I was 21 years old, I lived with a family whose house was a 45-minute walk, up a steep hill, from the center of town, where our classes met. All that walking uphill every evening after dinner really took the weight off.

Collard greens seasoned with a little Chipotle Tabasco sauce,
some white wine, and some rendered pork and poultry fat.
The greens cooked for about 4 hours on very low heat
and were tender and meaty.

But so did the diet I was enjoying. On the way to school in the morning, I would stop and buy an apple from a stand in the town's big central market. That I could afford. Coca-Cola and hamburgers, potato chips and candy bars I couldn't. I soon learned that wine was much cheaper than cola with lunch and dinner, and better than iced tea. I'm convinced wine i's better for you, too, in moderation.

For a while I ate dinners at the student restaurant out on the university restaurant on the south side of Aix. But that put me even farther from "home," lengthening what was already a long walk. You had to stand in a long line and push your way into the place to get served. Soon I and some of the other students found a little restaurant that served a plat du jour, a daily special, early every evening. I'm pretty sure it was called Chez Nénette, and I'd be amazed if it still existed. It was affordable even on a poor student's budget.

Yesterday I made what we call "biscuits" in the U.S.
In other anglo countries and in France, biscuits are
of course something else entirely (cookies, crackers).
These biscuits turned out great and went well with greens.

The variety of foods served in such a restaurant was incredible. Salads the way you get them in France: one vegetable at a time, or an assiette de crudités where each little salad is separate, not tossed all together. Salads or side orders of tomatoes, lentils, carrots, beets, red cabbage, green cabbage, Belgian endive, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, red beets, new potatoes, mushrooms, red beans, green beans, celery root, incredible green peas (petits pois) and on and on. Not to mention a lettuce salad at the end of the meal. The salad dressing was always vinaigrette — oil, vinegar, and mustard — with no sugar. Imagine. Oh, and each meal ended with a piece of cheese.

I ate things I had never tasted before. Veal. Lamb. Rabbit. Guinea fowl. Duck. Goose. Pâtés. Smoked sausages. Rillettes. And many unfamiliar fishes — skate wings, monkfish, smelt, and more. Quiches and runny omelettes with mushrooms, ham, and cheese. Almost nothing was breaded and fried, and as often as not all these good things were cooked in a wine sauce of some kind. I ate butter, where in the U.S. we ate only margarine. Oh, and the cheeses!

Thanks to Tom, a friend in Illinois, for the biscuit recipe.
It's on An Amateur Baker in Sidney. I used all butter
to make the biscuits because we don't have Crisco-
type shortening here in Saint-Aignan.

There were desserts too, but the portions were small — the portions of all the different parts of a meal were smaller than what I was used to — and the desserts weren't so sweet. So I was eating less sugar (no cola or sweet tea), smaller portions of everything, and a much wider variety of foods than I had been eating in the university cafeterias in the U.S., where I remember living on beans and franks, and tossed iceberg-lettuce salads with "French" dressing, for weeks at a time.

The result was that I lost something like 20 lbs. in 6 months. It's true that I never felt really stuffed, or even full, in Aix. But then again I had a lot of energy, I was getting a lot of exercise, and I was learning a lot about food. And enjoying it in ways I had forgotten.

When I was growing up, we had good foods — fish including flounder, spots, hogfish, croakers, and bluefish; shrimp, blue crabs, clams, oysters, and scallops (we lived on the coast); fantastic tomatoes in summertime; cabbage, collard greens, and beans year-round; chicken, pork — that good Eastern N.C. pork barbecue, especially — and beef, of course; cornbread, including hushpuppies, and yeast rolls. After going off to college, I realized that my mother was a really good cook. She worked full-time and the budget was limited, so it must not have been easy to keep us fed so well.

But the sheer variety of the foods I ate daily in France was something I hadn't experienced before. It all tasted very fresh and you could actually taste the different ingredients and appreciate the flavors and textures. Dinner wasn't a hodgepodge, with everything tossed into the same bowl or pot. There was so much less sugar. Oh, and did I mention the bread?

Now in Saint-Aignan, we have all that variety in the markets and supermarkets, but to extend it we grow and make our own specialties from home. We grow things we can't usually buy here: collards, sweet corn, okra, mustard greens, and more. And we cook, once in a while, collards, cornbread, fried chicken, gumbos, jambalayas, and other things we remember we liked at home. It keeps life interesting.

Staying in, cooking collards

The temperature outside is 6.2ºC and it is supposed to start raining any minute. There's some wind and the sky is a leaden gray. December is the here and now!

The sun comes up so late and goes down so early that it is nearly impossible to take pictures outsdie these days, at least at the normal walking hours. Callie wants her walk at 8:00 a.m., and then we don't want to take her out too early in the evening because that means she's shut in for too many hours overnight. By 5:30 p.m., the light outside is too dim for photography.

Yesterday all the supermarket flyers came in the mail. There are twice as many as usual, because all the supermarkets have special booklets advertising prepared food and special products (like foie gras and oysters) for the holidays at the end of the year. I guess a lot of people here, as in the U.S., more or less "order in" their Christmas and New Year's feasts. All the pictures and descriptions of beautiful, delicious foods do raise your spirits.

The rain has been good for the greens.

At 111 mm of precipitation — 4.37 inches — November 2009 was the rainiest single month we've had here in Saint-Aignan since we put in a rain gauge in 2004. The next closest was 107 mm in June 2007, the beginning of the summer of our discontent. That year, it was so damp and chilly that our vegetable garden was pretty much a bust.

Meanwhile, today I'm cooking collard greens. I grow them because I like them so much, and we had a long, dry, warm summer this year, so the garden was a great success. Collard greens are my special holiday food, or at least one of them.

Collard leaves

At home in North Carolina, they say the collard greens are better — sweeter — after the plants have been touched by frost. Well, this November it has been far too mild for that. We did have frost on one or two mornings in October and early in November, and that will have to do.

I picked, washed, and trimmed a good batch of collards yesterday and this morning. The leaves are green and good-looking right now, so I thought I'd take advantage of having them. Unless it gets extremely cold this winter, the collard greens will grow right on through. I'll have more in January of February. And the chard is still looking good too.

Pull the little leaf flaps off the stem, and then pull out
the leaf's main rib. Discard the stems and ribs.

This time I decided to be kind of fancy with the collard leaves — I pulled out all the stems and ribs and just put the leaves on to cook. It's easy to do, and you can do the same thing with spinach or Swiss chard. In fact, it's recommended. I don't always go to the throuble though. Once the stems and ribs are well cooked, they are tender and fine to eat.

A big colander full of collard greens

Season the greens with salted or smoked pork, or cook them in chicken broth. I put a few bay leaves in the pot, and a glug or two of white wine. Rough greens like collards can use the sweetness that wine brings to the pot. Salt and pepper of course, and if you like it, some hot red pepper flakes. Or a dash of Chipotle Tabasco sauce, which is what I did this time.

I recommend eating greens. Spinach, chard, collards, cabbage, and kale. Turnip greens. They are all good and good for you. Is it lunchtime yet?

Zucchini moussaka

The classic moussaka is a kind of casserole or gratin of eggplant slices, ground or chopped lamb in a tomato sauce, and a sauce béchamel with cheese melted in it. You can make the same thing using zucchini slices if you don't have eggplant — ou simplement pour varier les plaisirs (just to do something different).

We had zucchini slices in the freezer that we grew in the vegetable garden. In fact, it was yellow summer squash. It was cut into disks that had been blanched in boiling salted water for a couple of minutes before going into the freezer.

Zucchini moussaka

And we had the rest of the leg of lamb that we cooked on Thanksgiving Day. I cut it off the bone and cut the meat into ½-inch cubes. You could just as easily use ground lamb in this kind of recipe.

The first thing to do is to chop an onion (or two if they are small), a couple of cloves of garlic, and 6 or 8 mushrooms (cep stems are good — see yesterday's post). Sauté those in a skillet in oil or butter, and then add about 1½ lbs. of lamb. Season it with good pinches of dried thyme, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper, and of course salt.

The lamb mixture over a layer of zucchini slices...

...and another layer of zucchini slices over that

When the lamb is browned, add about ½ cup of tomato paste or very thick tomato sauce. Add water or white wine to moisten the mixture, without making it too soupy. If you have pan juices left over from roasting the leg of lamb, add some of those too (but not too much lamb fat).

Meanwhile, put a layer of zucchini slices in the bottom of a big baking dish. The slices can be blanched, sautéed, or just raw, however you want them. Spread the meat mixture over that, and put another layer of zucchini slices over the top. Salt and pepper the top layer.

A thick cheese sauce is the top layer.
It will set up because there's an egg in it.

Separately, in a saucepan melt two tablespoons of butter. Sprinkle in two tablespoons of flour and let it cook in the butter for a minute or two. Then gradually add milk or cream until you have a smooth, thick béchamel sauce. Grate in some nutmeg (or add a pinch). And don't forget salt and pepper.

Into the sauce put about ¾ cup of grated cheese — Swiss, parmesan, or feta, for example. When it has melted into the sauce, take the pan off the heat. Let it cool for a few minutes, while you break one egg into a bowl and beat it. Then add a spoonful of the cheese sauce to the egg and whisk it in well. Now pour the egg mixture to the cheese sauce, stirring it energetically so that the egg will be incorporated but won't scramble.

Pour this thick cheese sauce over the top of the casserole and spread it around to cover all the zucchini slices. Put some more grated cheese on top if you want. Bake the casserole in a 350ºF/180ºC oven for at least 45 minutes, until it's golden brown on top. Let it cool slightly before you cut it or spoon it out onto plates.

Don't leave out the cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice when you cook the meat. Those are the good flavors you want in moussaka. You can make it with beef, but lamb is better.

More about boletuses

That's what the dictionary says is the word to use for mushrooms of the genus Boletus. They are called boletuses or boleti, and the species called Boletus edulis, the Bordeaux Cep, is only one of very many members of the family. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a boletus is: “A fungus of the genus Boletus, having an umbrella-shaped cap with spore-bearing tubules on the underside and including both edible and poisonous species.”

Despite what our pharmacist, Mr. Martineau, said, I'm pretty sure the mushrooms we got were not the noble Cèpe de Bordeaux. They were much more likely a species called Xerocomus badius (or Boletus badius), known in French as the Bolet Bai and in English as the Bay Boletus. Wikipedia notes that the Bay Boletus, though “often considered a poor relation of the Cep (Boletus edulis) ... is nevertheless highly regarded by some authors...” In Bolet bai or Bay Boletus, the term “bay” describes the chestnut color of the mushroom cap.

Here are a couple of pages from the Larousse des Champignons,
including the page about the Bolet bai mushroom.

After all, as Chris said in a comment yesterday, describing her experiences in the town of Alès, several hours south of Saint-Aignan, French pharmacists might have some mycology training and expertise, but they are not infallible. In Saint-Aignan, the woman I consulted in the second pharmacy just used the term bolet to describe my mushrooms, and then told me how to trim and cook them.

Drying the boletuses on a towel on top of a radiator

Well, I trimmed them but I didn't cook them yet — at least not the caps. I'm drying them. I cut them into slices, and this morning I have them drying on a towel on a hot radiator. We've bought dried boletus mushrooms before, and they are very tasty. I think we got them at the big Tang Frères Asian supermarket in Paris. We are out of them at this point, and the Paris-Store in Blois doesn't have them. They have dried shitakes, and we have bags full of those. They are good, but they are not Boletus edulis, dried ceps.

The mushroom caps ready for slicing...

Make sure you take a look at Leslie's blog, eat.sing.ride, for a topic about Ceps gathered on the California coast. They look beautiful.

...and the stems chopped for cooking with some chopped onion

I sliced the boletus mushroom caps for drying, but I chopped the stems and added them to the meat portion of a Zucchini Moussaka I made yesterday with the remains of the Thanksgiving Day leg of lamb.

The mushrooms

Here's the verdict. Yesterday morning I put those big mushrooms in a shopping bag and took them down to the Pharmacie Martineau in Saint-Aignan where we always get our prescription medications. Everybody in there —6 or 7 employees — knows us. I was hoping to see Mme Smith, the Frenchwoman pharmacist whose husband is a Scotsman, but she didn't appear to be there.

Instead, old Monsieur Martineau himself came to greet me at the counter. « Bonjour, Monsieur. On m'a donné des champignons et je voudrais savoir si vous pouvez me dire de quelle variété ou espèce il s'agit », I said to him — “Somebody gave me some mushrooms and I'm hoping you can tell me what variety or species they are.”

M. Martineau peered into the shopping bag and then reached in and picked one up. « Ce sont des cèpes, he announced, des cèpes de Bordeaux, Boletus edulis. Ils sont bons. En fait, ils sont très très bons à manger. » — “They are ceps,” he said, “the ones called Bordeaux Ceps, Boletus edulis. They are fine. In fact, they are very very good to eat.”

I thanked him and left, feeling pretty pleased. I was headed to the bank, and there just happens to be another big pharmacy right down the street from the Crédit Agricole. I could see into the shop and there didn't seem to be any customers inside, so I grabbed my bag of mushrooms and took them in for a second opinion.

This time a middle-aged woman seem to be in charge. I told her my story and showed her the mushrooms. « Ce sont des bolets, she said, et ils sont bons. » — “They are boletus mushrooms,” she said, “and they are good.”

I asked her about the yellow spongy material under the caps, where buttom mushrooms have those pinkish-gray gills. “Oh, with ceps, you remove all that before you cook them,” she said. And she proceeded to show me how the yellow stuff, which she called « le foin » — the “hay” is the same word used for the choke of an artichoke — just peels right off.

This is the spongy yellow stuff you remove.
It seems to be turning a little green now.

“Remove the yellow spongy material, trim off the bottom of the stem, slice the cap and chop the rest of the stem. Then cook them. Never cover mushrooms while they are cooking,” she said, “because the water they release needs to evaporate.”

I don't think the second pharmacist said the mushrooms were Bordeaux Ceps, but I'm not sure now. She used the term bolet, and ceps are a member of the boletus family. Some boletus mushrooms are edible, and some are quite toxic. These are safe to eat, and may be very delicious. That's what I've concluded.

After a trip to the bank, I was off to buy some wine over in the village just on the other side of Saint-Aignan. I've been buying wine from one grower-producer over there for 3 or 4 years now. It's the woman of the house who comes out when you drive into the courtyard, and she pumps the wine into your containers for you. Once in a while it's her husband who comes out, but not often.

This woman and I have for several years had an ongoing conversation about our mothers and how they are doing. Her mother lives in Brittany, alone, but with some help in the house and yard. Mine, as you know, lives in North Carolina. She sold her house a few years ago and moved into an apartment. Madame L. likes to get news of her.

Once we completed the updates about how our mothers were both doing well, I mentioned the mushrooms to her. She said an old customer of theirs had brought her and her husband a whole crate of ceps a couple of years ago. She had never eaten them before, she said, and so had never prepared them.

She asked me how I planned to cook them. She always does that. One time when I went over there we talked about eggplants. She said she had planted some in her garden for the first time ever, and I told her that Walt and I grow them. She wanted to know how to cook them.

Another shot of what the pharmacist called « le foin ».

She said the ceps she got tasted very good sautéed and served with a roasted chicken, but that the mushrooms were actually kind of gluants — slimy. I told her I had been worried about the yellow material under the caps, and she said, well yes, that's the part that seemed to produce the gluey liquid. I told her that a pharmacist had showed me how to remove that part, and then we went over to my car and I showed her how to do it.

Voilà. More later.

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.

Roasted red peppers

One of the garden crops we have had the best results with over the years is red bell peppers. Starting in 2004, our first year of gardening in Saint-Aignan, the pepper plants have proven prolific and the peppers perennially perfect. (How's that for alliteration?)

What do you do with a dozen or more big plump red bell peppers? There are basically three options, and one that I prefer above the other two. First, you can stuff them with rice or meat or a mixture of the two and bake them in the oven. Or secondly, you can chop them up, removing the stems, seeds, and pulp, and cook them in a little water. Then run them through a food mill and make a puree, which is good in — or as — a soup, or as a pasta sauce or sauce ingredient.

A red pepper, roasted, collapses and shrivels some

The third and best way, I think, to prepare red bell peppers is to roast them. It's also pretty easy, at least until the time comes to peel and, especially, de-seed them. But the messy, tedious work of doing that part is more than repaid by the delicious result.

De-stemmed and peeled, but not yet
opened up and completely de-seeded

Roasting peppers is pretty straightforward. Rinse off and dry 6 or 8 fresh red peppers and put them whole on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Pre-heat the oven to 200ºC/400ºF. Put the pan of peppers into the hot oven and wait for about 30 minutes. The peppers will collapse and shrivel up a little. The skin will start to blacken.

Go through the pepper pieces one last time to remove
stray seeds, and then roll or fold them and arrange
them in a dish if you plan to use them immediately.

Take the roasted peppers out of the oven and immediately put them into a big bowl or baking dish — use tongs. Cover the dish tightly with plastic wrap. The hot peppers will create steam inside the sealed container. The steam will help loosen their skins. And meanwhile they will also release a lot of delicious reddish brown juice, which you'll want to save.

When it has cooled completely, put the dish of cooked peppers into the refrigerator if you don't want to work on skinning and cleaning them right away. It'll hold there for 48 hours easily. When the time comes, remove one pepper at a time from the dish and work on it. I put each pepper into a big shallow pasta bowl and clean it there, so that I don't lose any of the juice.

The rest of these pictures are here just to make you hungry.

First, pull out the pepper's stem and press lightly on the top of the pepper to squeeze as many of the seeds out of it as you can. Then see if the skin won't just peel right off. Usually it will, but sometimes you have work on it a little big, peeling off a strip at a time.

Finally, tear the pepper open from top to bottom. It will come apart at the natural seams, very easily. Then start picking the seeds off and out of it. That's the part of the process that takes time. Plan on having wet, sticky hands for the remainder of the peeling and seeding operation. If you want to take pictures, you'll have to stop and wash your hands frequently so as not to gum up your camera.

Pour the pepper juice over the pepper pieces
before you put them away or serve them.

Just stack the pieces of pepper flesh in a dish and keep working. When all the peppers are processed, wash your hands and then go back through all the pieces one more time to remove any stray seeds that remain. This takes some time and again is fairly messy. But remember, it's worth it. And don't rinse the pepper strips off — you'll lose a lot of the good flavor if you do.

Pour the juice from the bottom of the bowl you peeled the peppers in, and from the bottom of the dish you stored them in, through a strainer into a big measuring cup or a clean bowl to remove those pesky seeds. Don't throw the juice out!

Roasted red pepper pieces swimming in sweet, thick pepper juice

The best way to preserve the roasted pepper flesh long-term is to freeze it. Put some of the pepper pieces in a plastic freezer container and pour on enough juice to cover them. Put them in the freezer.

When you want to eat them, thaw them. You can have them as a salad or in a salad with some olive oil and balsamic or other vinegar. And some of the pepper juice, of course. You can also eat them on sandwiches or on toasted bread spread with cream cheese or soft fresh goat cheese. A sprinkle of salt, a grind of pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil... and a glass of wine.

Turning tomme into Cantal

This is the fifth of five topics about cheese-making in the Cantal.
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Salers cheese, made in the area surrounding the old town of Salers — which is now the Parc des Volcans d'Auvergne — is always made with unpasteurized milk. The milk, unheated and unrefrigerated, is made into cheese twice a day, right after the twice-daily milking of the cows. It is the most authentic style of Cantal cheese, which has been made in the area since Roman times.

Cheese is a way of processing milk for long-term storage. You can make it in the summer, when the cows have an abundance of grass to graze on, and you can keep it in a cool dark place — a cellar or a cave — all winter. It will improve in texture and flavor for many months. The land in the Auvergne region was always too hilly and wet to be much used as farmland, but it was and is nearly perfect pasture land. Cheeses have always been valuable commodities in trade with other regions as well.

Une vache de la race Salers

Cantal cheese, which is mostly what you find in France outside the Auvergne region, can be made with pasteurized or unpasteurized milk, and can be made year-round, either in commercial dairies or on farms. Often dairies purchase milk for Cantal cheese from co-ops, so it comes from several different farms. Cantal is the generic form of Salers cheese, which is made seasonally on farms using raw milk from one herd of cows. That's not to say that "generic" Cantal cheese is not delicious — it is, or can be. In order to use the name, farmers and dairies must adhere to certain requirements and methods for its fabrication, too, but the rules are not as strict as for the Cantal label as for Salers label.

Evelyn took this nice picture of Cantal and Salers cheeses
at the outdoor market in the old town of Salers.

New sanitation and hygiene rules are changing the way French cheeses are made. But traditions remain, and Salers Tradition cheeses, and even just plain Salers cheeses, are proof of that. Modernization is inevitable — on n'arrête pas le progrès — you can't stop progress — but some principles and practices are time-honored. Even U.S. regulations provide that raw-milk cheeses are authorized for importation into the U.S. if they have been aged for at least 60 days. Pasteurization is a good thing, but it's not necessary or even desirable when the milk is going to become aged cheese.

Cows in a pasture near the Château de Saint-Chamant

Salers cheese is aged for a minimum of 90 days. Cheese called just "Cantal" can be sold after just 30 days. That's called Cantal Jeune, young Cantal. Between one month and three, the cheese is called Cantal Entre-Deux, or medium-aged. And beyond three months of what is called affinage, it is called Cantal Vieux — old Cantal. It can actually be aged, or dried, for much longer.

I asked Eric Lafon about affinage, which you might call "maturation" or ripening — keeping cheese at the proper temperature and humidity so that it improves with age — "finishing" it. I asked him if he aged his own cheeses or if a third party was involved. He said he sold some cheese to affineurs — specialists who ripen cheeses before putting them on the market — but mostly he does it himself. Where? He said the assocation of Salers cheese producers has bought an old de-commissioned railway tunnel in the area from the national railroad, the SNCF, and all the producers can store cheeses in there for ripening.

A couple of the Lafon family's farm-made cheeses

Before it matures, Cantal cheese is called tomme (or tome) fraîche — fresh cheese. It is bland, as Evelyn has said, because it hasn't yet been salted. It's used in cooking. Aged Cantal is for eating as it is sold, on a plateau de fromages — a cheese platter. Tomme is for melting, including in the Auvergne specialties called aligot and truffade. Both are potato dishes. You can melt aged Cantal too, and it's very good, but for the purist it's a shame to eat Cantal other than in its natural state.

Les fourmes — the forms in which Salers
and Cantal cheeses are pressed

So how does the fresh tomme become Cantal or Salers cheese? After ripening for 12 to 24 hours, the tomme is run through a grinder and mixed with salt. After a few hours the salted mixture is packed into cheesecloth-lined molds and pressed for a couple of days. Then the fat cylinders of cheese are ready for ripening in the cave or cellar. As it ages, the cheese develops a crust that gets thicker and thicker as the cheese dries out.

Eric Lafon removes a cheese from the mold
and turns it over for further pressing.

I don't know how easy it is to find Cantal in the U.S. I have the impression that French cheeses are not always kept under ideal conditions as they are shipped and stored for sale over there. Because turnover is slow, they are often too old by the time you by them, and past their prime. But if you choose carefully and have a good cheese vendor, you can find good ones. I used to buy very nice cheeses at a shop on 24th Street in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

In French terms, virtually all the cheeses you find in supermarkets in the United States are "industrial" cheeses. Very few "artisanal" cheeses, made the way Salers style cheese is made, are to be found — except imports. For information, we paid between 10 and 13 euros per kilo — 5 or 6 €/lb. — for the cheeses we bought at the farm and in the farmers' market in the old town of Salers.

A map of the part of Auvergne we spent our time in,
around Mauriac, and Salers
Click on the map to enlarge it.

One regret I had about our visit to the Conches dairy farm at Saint-Chamant was that Eric Lafon didn't have any of his butter for sale when we were there. After they curdle the milk, they separate the cream from the rest of the whey. With that cream they make butter twice a week and sell it in their store, on the premises. It had all been sold the day we were there.

The Lafon family also sells most of the cheese they make right there in their own shop. Can you imagine how much cheese they make annually? Thirty tons! That's 30,000 kilograms. That's two 40 kg cheeses a day, 365 days a year. They have 50 cows, and each cow gives as much as 10 liters of milk every day.

By the way, Eric Lafon is also the first deputy mayor of the village of Saint-Chamant.

Here are a few links to sites with information about Cantal and Salers cheese, all in French:

• Les Fromages AOP d'Auvergne, with a map of the Route des Fromages;
• A description of Salers cheese-making as practiced by a dairy farmer near Aurillac;
• a site called www.salers.org, with a lot of information about the cattle, the beef, and the cheese.

This is the fifth of five topics about cheese-making in the Cantal.
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Making cheese morning and night

This is the fourth of five topics about cheese-making in the Cantal.
Here are links to all the topics: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

On dairy farms that produce the cheese called Salers [sah-LEHR], two batches are made every day. The first cheese is made in the morning, after the morning milking. The second is made in the evening, after the afternoon milking. Each time, the milk from the traite is brought in and made into cheese immediately, without ever having to be refrigerated. That seems to be one of the keys to how good it is — refrigerating the milk would alter its qualities.

French A.O.C. (Appellation d'Origine Contôlée) and European A.O.P. (Appellation d'Origine Protégée) rules require that Salers be made that way. They also require that it be made only during the months when the cows spend their days out in the pastures — April 15 to November 15 — and graze exclusively on the local vegetation. Along with grasses, the pastures are also full of wild aromatic plants that flavor the cows' milk and give the cheese its unique taste. The grasses and plants the cows graze on also give the cheese (and the whey) a nice yellow color.

The curds are pressed, cut into chunks, and pressed again
several times over about an hour to remove as
much of the whey, le petit lait, as possible.

Other A.O.C. rules specify that Salers cheese can only be made in a well-defined geographical area, that being the the département du Cantal. The milk must not be pasteurized, and Salers cheese must be made on farms, not in dairies. There are about 80 dairy farms that make Salers. They and other producers also make Cantal cheese, which is only slightly different — Salers is Cantal that's made on farms and only in summer.

The whey is run through a a centrifuge to spin off the cream,
which is used to make butter twice a week.

What the rules don't state is that the milk used for Salers cheese must come from cows of the Salers breed. Salers cows will only give milk in the presence of their calves. At milking time, the calf is brought to its mother and it begins to suckle. Then the calf is pulled away and the milking machine attached. When most of the milk has been taken, the calf is allowed to finish feeding. All that is a lot of trouble for the farmers, I think.

As a result, most of them have herds of cows of other breeds, especially Montbéliardes. Those are, I believe, the cows with splotches of brown or black on white in the pictures I posted yesterday. Montbéliardes give a lot of milk, don't need to have their calves present during the milking process, and produce milk that they say is very similar to the milk given by Salers cows.

Eric Lafon cuts the pressed curds into big chunks, turns
them over, and presses them again. You can see the
blue plastic booties on the guy in the background.

Farmers who do maintain the tradition of using milk exclusively from the red Salers cows have the right to put the appellation « Salers Tradition » on their product. Salers cheese made with milk from other breeds is called just Salers — or Salers-Salers, for some reason I have yet to figure out. It might be because the word Salers is stamped into the rind two times on the big round cheeses. There's an example on this web page. None of this is very clear to me...

The wooden tub that the milk is poured into for the curdling operation is also important in the Salers cheese-making process. It must be made of wood, and the wood is normally chestnut.

Evelyne and Eric Lafon continue cutting and rearranging the
curds for pressing. It takes an hour to press out all the whey.

One of the questions I asked when we were watching the cheese being made was about the timing of the addition of a starter culture — ferments lactiques — to the milk. Eric Lafon, who with his wife, son, and brother make the cheeses at Roziers near Saint-Chamant, said there is nothing "added" to the cheese at all. The microbes that cause the fermentation are present in the wood of the tub that they use in the curdling process.

He said a laboratory in Bordeaux had confirmed that to be the case when European authorities wanted the Salers producers to use stainless steel vats instead, and then add cultures during the cheese-making process. The laboratory's conclusion was not only that the wood carried the cultures, but also that the resulting cheese is both delicious and a healthy food. So even though the facilities where the cheeses are made are modern and well equipped, the wooden vat is both traditional and essential to the process.

Here's the result, called tomme fraîche. It's cheese you can
cook with, or you can press it some more and then age it
for at least three months to get Salers cheese.

Twice a day the cows are milked and twice a day a big "drum" of Salers cheese is made, from spring to fall. At the Conches dairy farm, Eric Lafon, his brother, his wife Evelyne, and the Lafons' son all know how to milk the cows and make the cheeses. They take turns. What do they do in the wintertime? They make Cantal cheese rather than Salers.

And what are the differences? For one, the cows are fed hay rather than being free to graze on fresh grasses and other plants out in the pasture. And the A.O.C. rules for Cantal don't require that the milk be processed into cheese after each milking. The morning milk, for example, might be refrigerated and then added to the evening milk, before it's all made into cheese. Cantal cheese can also be made with pasteurized milk, and in dairies rather than on farms.

Meanwhile, spills do happen. That's why there's
a tile floor, a garden hose, and a big drain
in the middle of the room.

Eric Lafon told us that he actually follows the same process year-round, making a fat cylinder of cheese in the morning and another in the evening, after each milking, even in winter. The Conches farm has a herd of 50 Montbéliarde cows. He said he normally does the morning milking, and the day we were there he came in once the milk was curdled and took over from the man in the black shirt, who I assume is his brother. More tomorrow...

This is the fourth of five topics about cheese-making in the Cantal.
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