Les années passent...

I went down into the village for a haircut yesterday morning. Amélie had given me an 8 a.m. appointment. Walt had had his haircut a couple of days earlier, and when he got home he said the village was sporting some nice holiday lights and decorations.

The village of Mareuil-sur-Cher before dawn on 17 Dec. 2015

I took my camera with me when I drove into the village center around 7:45. It was still dark so the photos aren't great. The weather here continues to be weirdly mild. I guess that big mass of warm air that was located over the eastern U.S. has made it's way across the Atlantic Ocean, following the Gulf Stream. It's over 11ºC this morning (low 50s), and yesterday's high temperature was 16ºC (low 60s). In Fahrenheit, that's nearly 20 degrees warmer than normal.

Amélie is the young woman who took over the salon de coiffure in the village when Mme Barbier finally threw in the towel 2 or 3 years ago. It was fun having a barber named "Mrs. Barber" and she was a very good barber, but she moved on. I've heard that she quit the business because she developed allergies to the chemicals a coiffeuse has to work with everyday. She apparently found a job at the local zoo, the Zooparc de Beauval. Good for her.

Another recent event has been the shutting down of the Garage Danger in Saint-Aignan. That's where I bought our little Peugeot 206 back in the summer 2003. The owner's name was Thierry Danger [dawn-ZHAY] (and still is I hope). The car has Garage Danger written on the hatch lid. It looks more like some kind of warning message than a car dealer's name. Now the Citroën dealer across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher is selling new Peugeots alongside his line of new and used Citroëns. The two car brands are made by the same company anyway.

Oh, and our dentist that we really liked, Dr. Christian Bigot [bee-GOH], retired a few years ago too. Plus ça change...

Cornmeal dumplings — steamed dough

Linguists and etymologists don't seem to know where the term "dumpling" came from. Some imagine that there was in some old language a word like "dump" as a noun, but don't really say what it might have meant or where it would have come from. "Dumpling" would be its diminutive form. I wonder if the word "damp" has anything to do with it. A "dampling" could be a little piece of bread dough cooked in liquid or in a steamer. I'm just speculating.

In French, there are two words for dumpling — une quenelle or une boulette. Quenelles are often dumplings made with pureed meat, poultry, or fish in the dough, and they are shaped like a rugby ball or a U.S. football. Boulettes can be meatballs (boulettes de viande) or they can be vegetable or just plain bread dumplings, like the cornmeal dumplings I made yesterday. They are often cooked in and served with greens, soups, or stews.

My mother, like most North Carolina cooks, often made cornmeal dumplings to serve with collard (or other) greens, or with coastal specialties like stewed hard crabs. I have her recipes, handed down through the family. The dumplings are made with corn "meal" or semolina, with a small amount of wheat flour if you want, plus some salt and sugar, and some baking soda or baking powder. The liquid is water.

For my dumplings, I decided to make the kind of dough that people in the U.S. South cook in deep fat to make "hushpuppies" — fried cornbread. It's about the same thing as the dumpling mixture described above, but the liquid is either milk, buttermilk, or, in my case, plain yogurt, and the dough has an egg in it, to hold it together as it steams and to enrich it slightly. The recipe is simple.

Hushpuppy dumplings

8 oz. (450 grams) cornmeal (polenta in France)

1 tsp. each of salt, sugar, and baking soda or powder

4 fl. oz. (½ cup) plain yogurt

milk or water as needed for consistency

Mix all ingredients together, adding a very small amount of water or milk as needed to produce a stiff dough. Roll pieces of dough into balls about the size of a golf or ping-pong ball, or whatever shape you like. Steam the dough over boiling water for 15 to 20 minutes, or "float" them on top of a pot of greens or a thick stew to steam through. Serve hot.

You can add herbs, grated onion, grated cheese, or black pepper or other spices, to the dumpling dough as you see fit. You can make similar dumplings using wheat semolina instead of cornmeal, I'm sure. There you have it. "Damp bread" or dumplings. They are light, tender, and bready inside.

Les Bouleaux et les terres pauvres

« Les bouleaux poussent en général sur les terres pauvres et souvent siliceuses... » — "Birches generally grow in places where the soil is poor, and often siliceous..." That means that birch trees like soil that is composed of quartz sand and flint. That describes the region we live in. Flint stone was a major industry in the Cher river valley — at Meusnes, for example, a village just seven or eight miles upriver from Saint-Aignan.

Our house has a name. It's called Les Bouleaux, and there's a sign saying that on the front of the house. The term bouleau has both Celtic and Latin origins, apparently. I don't know if giving houses a name was an affectation, or if the custom dates back to a time when the houses in our hamlet didn't have street numbers. At least three other houses in our hamlet have names, including Bella Vista, La Grange, and La Ruine. Ours is The Birches, and there are birches in our yard (and in the photos here).

« Les bouleaux sont des plantes pionnières qui constituent souvent la première formation arborée lors de la reconquête ou de la colonisation de landes par la forêt. Ils apprécient les sols plutôt acides et humides. » I'm quoting the French Wikipédia article about birches, which are described as "pioneer plants" that often are the first trees to grow when "heath" or "moor" (scrub) land is taken over by forest. "Birches like acidic, damp soils," it says.

I think grapes also like poor soils. People here describe the land all around our house as « de la terre à vignes » or "grapevine soil" that is very different from the rich river valley soils down the hill from us by just a few hundred meters. That's why we have worked hard over the past 12 years to improve the soil in our back yard garden plots by tilling a lot of compost into it every spring. Considering how poor the soil is, we've done pretty well with our vegetable gardens.

Greens in duck broth

Seafood is not the only thing you can buy at the Saint-Aignan market on Saturday mornings. There's a cheese vendor with a wide range of French cheeses, and there's a man who sells just local goat cheese, which he makes on his farm just a mile or two from us. There's a beef butcher, a poultry butcher, and a horse butcher, and there are at least two pork butchers. And there are of course several vendors selling fresh fruits and vegetables.

Meanwhile, when it comes to winter vegetables, I've laid in our supply of one leafy green that I can't otherwise find on the markets or in the supermarkets around Saint-Aignan. It's ... guess what ... collard greens. I harvested about a bushel of big dark green leaves last week. This was my third harvest of greens since summer, if I remember correctly.

I couldn't bring myself to try to make the greens into kraut because I wasn't confident I knew how to do it. I didn't want to waste my crop. So I cooked the greens the way I usually do, with a couple of differences. In the freezer, I found a liter of liquid I'd labeled as duck broth. There was also some "pot liquor" or collard broth in a smaller container. Those two finds gave me enough liquid to cook all the collards I had harvested.

And how big was the harvest? Well, after a long slow cooking — I also added some white wine to the pot, I'll admit — I ended up with about six quarts (liters) of greens. We ate some for a couple of days. Then I put the greens up in plastic containers for the freezer. (There are enough leaves left on the plants out in the garden for another harvest, by the way — if we don't have a killing freeze any time soon.)




That gave me nine pints, or 4½ quarts of greens. I put the cooked greens in the containers and then filled them with enough of the cooking liquid to fill each container. I weighed them and each container came in between 525 and 575 grams — more than a pound. Ten pounds of greens should get us through the winter. I see cornmeal dumplings in my future.