La saga du magnétoscope (part 1)

The title of my blog leaves me a lot of latitude to write about anything and everything that is going on here in Saint-Aignan. So let me tell you the story of my VCR — mon magnétoscope, in French.

Maybe you don't know that U.S. and European television signals do not at all conform to the same standards. That means that you can't bring an American TV set or video cassette recorder to France and expect it to work, even if you have a transformer to step the electric current down from Europe's 220 volts to America's 110 volts. The U.S. set won't receive French TV signals correctly, and neither will the VCR.

In the U.S. (and Canada and Japan), televisions receive broadcasts in the NTSC standard, while in most of Europe it's PAL — with France and some other countries using a system called SECAM. Luckily, NTSC video cassettes and DVDs are common enough in Europe that most manufacturers build into their TVs, VCRs, and DVD players the ability to at least read NTSC tapes or discs. So if you make your purchases carefully, you'll end up with machines on which you can play media that you recorded or purchased in the U.S. or Canada.

When we left California, we left all our TVs and VCRs and DVD players behind. We sold some of them, and we gave others to friends and relatives. We had collected quite a bit of such equipment over nearly 20 years of life together.

After arrival in France, we went almost immediately to one of the big chain electronics and appliance stores, Darty, and bought everything we needed to set up housekeeping in Saint-Aignan. That included a television set, a video cassette recorder, and a DVD player. Actually, we bought two TV sets, but never mind.

The first VCR I bought was a Philips model. And the first time I put a cassette in it and started it up, it promptly mangled the tape, which was ruined. I was not happy. At the next opportunity, I drove back up to the Darty store, which is 45 minutes away in Blois, and expressed my discontent. The people at the store understood my complaint and immediately offered me a new machine to replace the original one.

I told them I didn't want another Philips model. They offered me a Toshiba VCR for the same price. I took it. And it worked just fine for nearly two years. We didn't use it much, but it was good to have it. Soon after moving here, we signed up for a satellite TV service and acquired a decoder box with a built-in hard disk for recording and delayed playback of shows and films we were interested in watching.

After two years, just before the warranty expired, the Toshiba VCR went on the fritz. I took it back to Darty and they successfully repaired it in just a few days' time. They said it was a simple adjustment. The machine worked for the next 2 or 2½ years. We hardly used it at all. I did record three or four cassettes during that time. Then the same problem came back. When I played a cassette, there was a distracting white band of static across the bottom of the TV screen
that I couldn't get to go away using the machine's tracking adjustment feature.

It didn't matter. As I said, we hardly used the VCR at all anyway.

That was the situation until one day not too long ago, when I realized that we had about 65 video cassettes on a shelf down in the garage that we might as well get rid of. They were gathering dust and slowly deteriorating. Among them are some recordings that CHM made with his video camera (son caméscope) years ago. We had copied them onto VHS cassettes so that we could have a copy.

One was a video record of a day we spent together in the Napa Valley in California. Another was video of a party attended by a lot of nice people that CHM and I worked with in Washington DC many years ago. I didn't want to lose those.

And then there were tapes our friend Sue made with her camera in California. There were Christmases we spent together, and videos of our house in San Francisco. They and others were cassettes that I really wanted to transfer onto DVD so that we'd be able to look at them from time to time. They are part of our history together and with close friends.

So I did some research and bought a gizmo that I can plug into a port on the back of the VCR or TV set and, at the other end, into a USB port on my computer. Voilà! Now I could make my own DVDs. But here I was with a VCR that didn't work right and was no longer under warranty.

Continue to part 2.

Fromages du supermarché

Supermarket cheese. Of course, in America, that's about all we have. Only in a few small regions of the U.S. can you find farmhouse or dairy-made cheeses. Two of the cheeses below are what the French call "industrial" cheeses — they're made in factories called fromageries.

A color-coordinated selection of cheeses from SuperU

That doesn't mean they aren't good. I'm sure they are the cheeses most French people consume on a regular basis. The real farm-made cheeses, and the cheeses with an appellation, an A.O.C., are a special treat, of course. All three of these cheeses sell for between two and three euros at the supermarket.

At SuperU the other day, I was looking for a piece of Pont-l'Evêque, which is an A.O.C. cheese made in Normandy from cow's milk and which Walt and I both really like. But I couldn't find any. It's funny, I remember back in the '70s, when I lived in Normandy, I thought Pont-l'Evêque was a very pungent cheese, much stronger than the Normandy Camembert cheese I ate most often (I practically lived on it for a year when I was a poor teaching assistant).

Since I couldn't find any Pont-l'Evêque, I decided to buy a cheese called Le Vieux Pané. It's made in the Mayenne, which is a little province just north of the Loire, not far west of Saint-Aignan and on the southern border of Normandy. It first appeared on the market in 1978.

Vieux Pané is made with pasteurized cow's milk. It is ripened for three weeks before being sent to market. Because it is "industrial," Vieux Pané doesn't have a season — it's the same year-round. One web site says it resembles Pont-l'Evêque, which is true. You can use it in cooking to make sauces or fondues.

Another cheese I picked up, just out of curiosity, was a Saint Albray. It is also made industrially down in the southwest, in a town called Jurançon (known for its wines). The same company also makes a cheese called Chaumes, which has been around for a long time.

Saint Albray is also made from pasteurized cow's milk, and it's also ripened for three weeks before being put on the market. In fact, Le Vieux Pané and Saint Albray are very similar to each other in taste, if not in texture: mild, creamy, and sweet, not sharp. Some might say wimpy. Like Vieux Pané, it can be used in cooking.

The third cheese is one I've blogged about before, a Neufchâtel from the town of Neufchâtel-en-Bray in Normandy, north of Rouen. It's one of my favorites. And it's not made industrially. It has the A.O.C. designation, which means it is made by farmers and dairies according to strict standards.

The official Neufchâtel cheese site says that Neufchâtel is the oldest Normandy cheese. It goes back more than a thousand years. It's made from raw cow's milk (that's what au lait cru on the label means), and is salty and more flavorful than the other two cheeses. Neufchâtel is made either by farmers or dairies in a small, well-defined area of upper Normandy.

I've been eating Neufchâtel for 36 years. It's very different in taste and texture from Camembert or Brie — it's saltier and grainier. I've only ever seen it in the heart shape, but apparently it can also come in squares. Because it's made from raw milk, Neufchâtel has a season — it's best from October to May. And it would be a shame to cook it. Just eat it as it is, preferably at room temperature, on good bread with a glass of tasty wine.

If you want to start enjoying French cheeses, the distinction between commercially made ("industrial") and A.O.C. products is an important one to know about.

Today's entertainment — cabbage rolls

In the "entertainment is where you can find it" category:

Blanched cabbage leaves — these were in the freezer.

A few weeks ago, I cooked a savoy cabbage, un chou frisé. I removed about a dozen of the outer leaves and blanched them in boiling salted water for a few minutes, and then I rolled them up, put them in plastic bags, and froze them.

Make a stuffing of ground beef and cooked rice,
cooked millet, or dry breadcrumbs, with seasonings.

A couple of days ago I decided to make stuffed cabbage leaves with eight of them. I found stew beef on sale at SuperU. Walt ran a pound (500 g) of it through the meat grinder this morning. We had some left over millet in the refrigerator. That, the ground beef, some sautéed onions and shallots, dried thyme, salt, pepper, two eggs, and some diced mushrooms made a good stuffing.

Chop some mushrooms. These are rehydrated shitakes.

Use cooked rice or dry breadcrumbs in the place of the millet, and add breadcrumbs as needed to make the stuffing stiff enough to form into rolls. Don't forget the seasonings.

Roll up "cakes" of the stuffing in blanched cabbage leaves.
Some of the leaves are dark green, others are more yellow.

With the meat stuffing divided into eight equal parts, I could roll up each sausage-shaped piece in a blanched cabbage leaf, which I had thawed in cold water. That way there was no stuffing left over.

Arrange the cabbage rolls on a layer of tomato sauce in a baking dish.

Meanwhile, I made a tomato sauce with a big can of whole peeled tomatoes, a few small carrots, and some onion, shallot, garlic, thyme, and bay leaves. Actually, that cooked while I was working on the stuffing and rolling up the leaves. You could use a jar of good tomato sauce. Or fresh tomatoes, if it were tomato season.

Spoon more of the tomato sauce over the top.

When the sauce and rolls are ready, put a generous layer of sauce in a baking dish. Arrange the cabbage rolls in the dish as best you can. Then spoon the rest of the sauce over the top. Spread it around.

With all the tomato sauce spread around, it's ready for the oven.

Put the dish, covered, in a 350F/180C oven for about an hour. That will give the stuffing time to cook through and the sauce time to cook down and thicken (I hope — it's in the oven now). Take the lid off at the end and let it brown a little. It would — will — be good with some grated cheese. And some red wine. And some French bread

Entertainment where you can find it

I guess you might have figured out that I came to my senses and decided not to buy that old Renault 6 from my mechanic over in Noyers. I went back and looked at it a couple of times, but I never did ask to drive it. What stopped me was not having a place to keep the car. We have a garage, but only one car will fit in it easily. The door is too small. We could try to rearrange all the other stuff in the garage to make room for a second car and squeeze it in there, but it's not really worth it.

Winter weather — a snow shower earlier this week

The old Renault has one bad patch of rust on it. But if I leave it outdoors over the winter for a year or two, it will have many more. The winters are just too wet and sunless here. Last year I left the Peugeot outside a lot of the time, because it wasn't very cold in January, February, or March. And by spring I noticed green algae or moss growing on it in all the seams and indentations. I vowed that I would keep it in the garage this year, even though opening and closing the garage doors is a lot of trouble. But what else do I have to do with my time? I only go out once or twice a week, anyway.

So no old Renault will be turning into a heap of rust in our driveway. At least for now. And no old Peugeot either. The Peugeot is a nice car and I want to keep it that way. If I keep it nice long enough, it will turn into an old collector's car (the old collector being yours truly) like the Renault.

Callie in the vineyard with the stick she's taking home this time

Right now, we have enough appliances and systems acting up without asking for more trouble. Our boiler is still not working right (see Walt's topic). We get heat, but we have to operate the thing manually because the controls that regulate when the heat comes on and goes off, at at what temperature, are not functioning correctly. It's an electrical problem, maybe a bad contact in one of the dials.

The VCR we bought when we got here in 2003 was not working right back in October. I took it in for repair and adjustment and it stayed in the shop for nearly two months. Now, 60 euros later, it works again, sort of. In the kitchen, the espresso machine has sprung a leak and is not usable. I dropped the food processor bowl on the hard tile floor and broke it.

The Renaudière vineyard in winter, with dog

How much trouble can a person stand? So no Renault.

Did I ever mention how long that 15€ tank of butane that we bought for our cooking stove lasted? We bought it in mid-July and it finally ran out in early December. That's not bad — just short of 4 months — considering the amount of cooking we do. The gas cooker was a good investment, I think.

I'm writing this on Friday night and the temperature is about 30ºF (-2ºFC). We hardly made it above freezing today, despite a bright blue sky and full sunshine. The sun is so low in the southern sky at this time of year that it doesn't really heat anything up. There was still a lot of frost on the ground, especially in shady places, when I took Callie out for her afternoon walk at about 5 p.m.

When I pretend I'm going to get Callie's stick from her,
she takes off running toward home

Tomorrow it is supposed to be cold in the morning, with clouds coming it. And we are supposed to have rain in the afternoon and evening. For a change. 2008 has been by far the rainiest year we have had in Saint-Aignan since we moved here in 2003.

Today, Saturday, is CHM's birthday. Bon anniversaire, C-H. Ou comme j'ai déjà dit, « un petit beurre, des tou-yous ».

Today is also Tom Lloyd's birthday. I heard from him last week. Maybe he'll read this and see my happy birthday message.

Walt's birthday is in about a week. Chery's was last Monday. Everybody I know is getting really old.

December skies

Since it's Christmas and since I realized I shouldn't by that rusty old Renault, I bought myself... er, us... a different Christmas present. It's a new 32-inch LCD television. Prices are low, the dollar is high(er), and we deserve a present. This time of year, we watch TV a lot. But it's in French most of the time, so it's good for our language skills. Often it's cooking shows on Cuisine TV, but we also watch documentaries, talk shows, news broadcasts, and movies. And DVDs. Some people say they don't watch much TV, but we'd be lying if we said that, especially in winter.

After all, there isn't much nightlife around Saint-Aignan. We've been to most of the restaurants several times, and we like to cook too much to go out to eat very often. Who wants to be out on the highways at night anyway? And in winter, we can't really be outdoors much, even in the daytime, except when we walk the dog (who insists, most days, whatever the weather).

This time of year, I really would like to be in a city — Paris, de préférence — and be distracted and entertained by the hustle and bustle of the streets, shops, and stores. Out here in the country, we have to entertain ourselves as best we can. Cooking is one of our biggest entertainments, I guess. Our pharmacist in Saint-Aignan, Mme Smith, told me this a few years ago: when you spend the winter in the countryside, il vous faut une occupation, otherwise you get bored and depressed. We have occupations, what with the dog, the kitchen, the TV, and the Internet.

Watching that old Renault rust away, now that might have been quite a hoot on gloomy winter days.

P.S. Still Friday evening. Just as I finished typing the above, the phone rang. That's quite unusual in our house. It was local friends, and Englishwoman whose partner is French, that we have known for nearly five years now. They're having a party a week from Sunday and we're invited.

Vouvray: "a bit of a mess"

That's how the Cadogan guide to the Loire Valley describes Vouvray. When you arrive in the town, "the lower part looks a bit of a mess down in the valley," it says. "Signs signal potential wine tastings, dégustations, at every turn." That's the hokey part of Vouvray, and it's very small — maybe the equivalent of three American blocks along the main road along the Loire.

Hauling grapes up the Vallée Coquette in Vouvray

To be fair, the Cadogan guide describes the upper part of the village of Vouvray as "elegant." The Michelin Green Guide to the Châteaux de la Loire is a little kinder: « Au cœur d'un vignoble réputé, Vouvray s'étage sur les coteaux qui dominent la rive droite de la Loire, en amont de Tours » — "At the heart of a famous wine-producing area, Vouvray is built on hillside terraces above the right bank of the Loire River, upstream from Tours." The guide goes on to mention the old troglodyte dwellings you can still find around the area.

A typical house in Vouvray

Vouvray is not a glitzy place, that's for sure. On good days, when the sun is shining, it can look green and beautiful. On gray days, it all looks a little rundown and sad. I guess you can say that about a lot of places in the Loire Valley, or all over France. What Vouvray has, of course, is the wine, which sparkles. It certainly can lift your spirits.

Our favorite place to taste and buy wine in Vouvray is the winery run by Jean-Claude Aubert and his family in the Vallée Coquette. We found it by chance in October 2000, and immediately liked the wine, the people, and the prices. We could walk there from our gîte (but we usually took the car because it was easier to carry the bottles home that way).

Arriving at the Aubert winery, which is built into the side of a hill

The Vallée Coquette, despite its name (as you know, coquette means "charming, attractive, stylish"), is not at all prettied up. The road that runs through it is lined with wineries, both the old-fashioned, agricultural-looking ones and some big modern buildings with parking lots for tour buses. Aubert's place is definitely on the agricultural side, as you can see from some of the pictures in this post.

A jumble of hoses, tanks, and tools in the Auberts' courtyard

Until recently, the person we dealt with for tastings and sales at Aubert's was a small, square-jawed woman in her 60s who I'm sure was Madame Aubert herself. She had short dark hair and a big smile. She was always welcoming and cordial, but also very business-like. She had a very aged cat that climbed around on the cases of wine stacked all around and would jump up on the table where tastes were poured. The cat would arch its back and make it clear it wanted to be petted — « Caressez-moi, caressez-moi ! » it would say in cat French.

A real grape press in Vouvray — not the tourist version

One day a couple of years ago we drove over to Vouvray and stopped to pick up a few bottles. Mme Aubert was on duty, but we saw no sign of the cat. "Where is your cat?" we asked. Her face went solemn and tears welled up in her eyes. "I ran over it with the car two days ago, and it was killed," she told us. "The cat was so old, and it was deaf. It was behind the car when I backed up, and I didn't see it. It is so sad." We were sad for her and the cat.

Wines for sale at the Cave Touristique in Montlouis

On another visit we saw that some swallows had built a mud nest on the arched ceiling of the wine cellar. Mme Aubert told us they had had to make sure to leave a window open all the time so that the birds could come and go as necessary to keep their chicks fed. That day, Mme Aubert's four-year-old grandson was spending the afternoon with her, riding his tricycle through the cellar and sales area.

The Vouvray vineyards in October

Nowadays a new generation of Auberts seems to be taking over the business. We've met the daughter and her husband (parents of the little boy on the trike). They are very nice, all smiles in a formal kind of way. But the old metal cash box is gone. We no longer get a hand-written invoice when we buy wine. Now there's a PC. We are in the database. A printer whirs and a printed invoice slides out. The whole transaction goes faster, but it's not as authentic as it was. The old-world charm is going out of it. I'm starting to wonder if we even will see Mme Aubert again, on a future visit.

Day 1 in Vouvray

In the spring of 2000, we decided to plan a trip to France from California for our annual vacation. A good friend, Sue, was going to make the trip with us. We decided to come to the Loire Valley and I started looking for a gîte rural — a vacation rental house — for the three of us. The most attractive one I found happened to be in Vouvray. By then I had certainly heard of the wine, but I'd never seen the village.

The little stone house in Vouvray that we rented
for about $300 a week — two bedrooms, nice bath

Sue was spending a lot of time reading guidebooks to prepare for the trip. She read about Vouvray in one of them, and it said in a kind of flip way that Vouvray wine was good but that the village itself was kind of plain and didn't have any big attractions in it. Sue said, now why exactly are we going there? They say it's ordinary.

The front yard of the rental house

Well, I guess I insisted because I could tell that the rental house was really charming. And I could see from the maps that in Vouvray we would be well situated to drive around the region, from Amboise to Chenonceaux, Blois, and Chambord. We would be close enough to be able to go over to the other side of Tours to see Azay-le-Rideau, Chinon, and Langeais.

Besides, I was tired of searching the Internet for just the right place for our one-week stay. I had a full-time job back then.

An old wine jug in the Vallée Coquette

We arrived in Vouvray in early October to start our vacation — one week in the Loire, one divided between Champagne and Normandy, and a third in Paris. The day after our arrival, a Sunday, we decided not to drive anywhere, but just to walk around the village and up through the vineyards. After traveling from San Francisco to Vouvray, we needed to keep our feet on the ground for a day.

The weather was beautiful. We went walking with our cameras and took dozens... scores..., no, hundreds of pictures in and around the village. I was using a digital camera by then and starting to develop an interest in photography for the first time in my life.

The owner's house seen from the front door of the gîte

Sue was snapping pictures of everything with her film camera. I didn't think much about it. I was used to seeing her take a lot of photos. She obviously thought it was interesting, if not beautiful. I figured that at least she wasn't disappointed with the place we, I, had chosen. We spent a very nice day around Vouvray, finding it all very picturesque. The beautiful late-summer-type weather helped, of course.

Two more views of the gîte we rented

The next day we got in the car and went to see the Château de Chenonceau. It might have been the first time for all of us. Then we went to Montrichard, where we had lunch, and in the afternoon we drove on to Fougères-sur-Bièvre, whose château CHM had recommended as interesting, and Chaumont-sur-Loire, one the main Loire attractions. It was all a lot of fun.

Troglodyte dwellings near the Château de Moncontour

At some point, Sue said: "Why didn't you guys tell me all these little towns were going to be at least as pretty as Vouvray? I took way too many pictures yesterday — I already used up a lot of my film, just in Vouvray." She was going to have to buy more before the trip was over.

Like some more Vouvray?

The first time I came to the Loire Valley was at Christmastime in 1972 — 26 36 years ago (oops!). I was traveling with two friends and we stayed in a hotel in Tours. Two of us hitchhiked to Chambord because we wanted to see the castle. We probably didn't even know about Vouvray.

The church in Vouvray as seen across the vineyard

I ended up living in France for 8 years in the 1970s and '80s, mostly in Paris. In the late '70s or early '80s, I drove through the Loire Valley at least once, on my way to Noirmoutier, an island off the Atlantic coast of France.

A little farmhouse in the Vallée Coquette at Vouvray

And then in 1989 Walt and I drove through Saint-Aignan to Beaugency, where we had lunch. It was one of our first vacations together in France. We were on our way from Bordeaux back to Paris. Neither one of us remembers Saint-Aignan at all from that trip — we were hurrying to get to Chartres before dark that day — but we know we drove through because Walt was marking the routes we took on a map that we still have.

Troglodyte houses (built into the sides of cliffs) in Vouvray

In 1992, Walt and I drove the length of the Loire Valley as far as Orléans on our way from Nantes to Paris. We stopped in Saumur, drove through Azay-le-Rideau, saw Chambord from the car. I didn't do photography much back then, but Walt might have pictures. The weather was cold, gray, and even foggy, and I had caught a bad cold out in Brittany. It was pretty miserable.

The Château de Moncontour, a wine property at Vouvray

On none of those trips did we ever go to Vouvray. I'm not even sure we were much aware of the existence of the wine or the village before about 10 years ago. We weren't aware of the existence of Montrichard or Saint-Aignan either. It wasn't until October 2000 that we really got a clue.

A shop window in Vouvray

That changed everything. Through a series of circumstances, we ended up moving to Saint-Aignan in 2003. This week is the sixth anniversary of the week when we found the house we now live in.

Hushpuppies (no, not the shoes)

Yes, Hushpuppies (capital H) are a brand of shoes. But in a large part of the United States, hushpuppies (lowercase H) are a kind of fried cornbread. The unofficial etymology of the term has to do with cooking around a campfire and throwing some of the fried cornbread to the "pups" to keep them quiet. Who knows?

In my home town there is a very big seafood restaurant called, of all names, the Sanitary Fish Market & Restaurant. The restaurant's web site explains the name (but with quite a few typos). My maternal grandfather, who died in 1939, worked with the two men who founded the restaurant. Both of them were still active in the business in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up.

The Sanitary (a.k.a Tony's among local people) is famous for its hushpuppies. Here is the recipe for the restaurant's fried cornbread that you will find on the Sanitary web site.

Tar Heels are people from North Carolina, as Sooners
are from Oklahoma and Hoosiers are from Indiana.

And here is my mother's recipe. It's not very different:

Fantastic Hushpuppies

Mix together:

2 cups coarse cornmeal
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. sugar
1 pinch baking soda
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk

Add enough water to the mixture to make a very stiff batter. Cut the batter with a wet spoon and drop in hot oil. Cook the hushpuppies until they're golden brown. Dip the spoon in water each time to keep the batter from sticking to it. Serve the hushpuppies with butter.

Some people who are new to eating hushpuppies have a a hard time understanding that they are a kind of bread. You don't normally eat them with ketchup or tartar sauce. They do not replace a vegetable or French-fried potatoes. They do replace other kinds of bread.

Hushpuppies shaped by hand rather than dropped from a spoon

Hushpuppies surely date back to a time or developed in situations when people didn't have easy access to an oven for bread-baking. You can heat a pan or pot of oil on a campfire, for example, and cook hushpuppies just fine that way. If you are on an overnight fishing trip, you can cook your catch in cornmeal and make hushpuppies to enjoy with the fish.

Some cooks put minced or chopped onion in their hushpuppy batter. Others, like many people in eastern North Carolina, are purists about such things. But personally, I admit that some onion in the hushpuppies can be pretty good. My mother lists adding 1 or 2 tablespoons of finely minced onion as a variation on her recipe.

You can substitute plain yogurt or a 50-50 mixture of milk and yogurt for the buttermilk (buttermilk being hard to find in France). Or you can add a tablespoon of distilled vinegar (vinaigre blanc) to a cup of milk and use that in the place of buttermilk.

Hot hushpuppies

Some recipes might include some amount of wheat flour in the hushpuppy batter. I can't see why you'd want to put that in. Don't use cornmeal that's too coarsely ground, however, like French semoule de maïs, or the batter won't hold its shape. You'll end up with a fryer full of burned crumbs instead of nicely shaped, golden hushpuppies. Use farine de maïs if you're in France.

Some cooks make golf-ball shaped hushpuppies. I think longer, log-shaped hushpuppies, like the ones in the pictures above, are better.

In North Carolina, we eat hushpuppies with fried seafood, but we also eat them with barbecued pork, which is dressed with a vinegar and red pepper sauce. And always hot, with butter. Don't eat too many!

Hushpuppies with fried shrimp

In his book Classical Southern Cooking (1995), Damon Lee Fowler says this about hushpuppies:

These morsels of fried cornmeal batter are something of an enigma. They are so commonplace in Southern cookery nowadays that it seems as if they have always been around. There is even a popular legend, supported by early recipes titled Fried Pone, crediting them to American Indians. However, the earliest recipes I have found that are recognizably like modern hush puppies date no earlier than turn-of-the-century New Orleans. They were called beignets de maïs and were lightly sweetened puffs of cornmeal, egg, and milk, deep-fat fried and dusted with sugar. Only in the second decade of the twentieth century did unsweetened recipes for fried pone and cornmeal fritters begin to appear...

Modern hush puppies know no in-between. When they are good, there is nothing better, and when they are not good, well, nothing is worse.

The hokey side of Vouvray-Montlouis

The two wine villages of Vouvray and Montlouis, facing each other on opposite sides of the Loire River near Tours, do have a hokey side. Tourism is the reason. Both villages live off their Chenin Blanc wines, still and sparkling, dry and sweet, all white. And they cater to tourists more than most Loire Valley towns.

Outside a tasting room on the main road in Vouvray

"Hokey" is a slang term used to describe something that is "contrived"or "artificial." A synonym is "corny." By the way, the pictures in this post are all 7 or 8 years old and were taken with an earlier-generation digital camera. Image quality has improved, but Vouvray and Montlouis haven't changed much at all.

A corny sculpture of grapes in Montlouis.
That's our friend Cheryl from California.
Today is her birthday! Bon anniversaire !

In an earlier post, I started describing the bio-dynamics principles adopted by a couple of major Vouvray-Montlouis wine houses, François Chidaine and Domaine Huet (the final T of Huet is pronounced, BTW). It would be easy to include such methods in the hokey category, the way they are described by the people at Domaine Huet, even though bio-dynamics has its very serious and rational side as well.

An old wine press at the Château de Moncontour in Vouvray

In bio-dynamics, two products, cow-manure compost and "horn manure" (see previous topics), must be "dynamised" or "enlivened" by being stirred in water in specific directions for a specified amount of time. They are then applied to the ground in the vineyards after 3 p.m. GMT, according to the brochures and this web site.

Manure compost brings life to the earth. That makes sense. "Horn manure" is made from filling a cow horn with compost and burying it in the ground to over-winter, and it "makes the cosmic and planetary forces present in the soil thanks to the [application of] manure compost, rise in the sap" of the grape plant. So far so good.

The next bio-dynamic step is to apply "horn silica," which is prepared by putting finely ground silica in a cow's horn and burying it in the ground over the summer. There, it is "exposed to the vital forces of the sun."

La Maison du Vouvray, a sales and tasting room on the main road

Horn silica "acts on the atmosphere so that the forces of light will reach the plant," Huet says. "It encourages the leaves to assimilate the trace minerals contained in the homeopathic state within the atmosphere." Whew!

The fact is, application of these natural products, however hokey the description, instead of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, encourages insects, spider mites, and micro-organisms to live in equilibrium with the grape plants and the grape-growers. It prevents contamination of the wine — and the region's water table, la nappe phréatique. That's all good.

Yet another tasting room with its hokey signs

Here in Saint-Aignan — in nearby Mareuil-sur-Cher, more precisely — there is at least one winery that practices bio-dynamics in its vineyards. It's Clos Roche Blanche, and the wines are excellent. Some were on sale in François Chidaine's shop in Montlouis. A couple of years ago, I found some of Clos Roche Blanche's wines in a shop in Urbana, Illinois, and enjoyed them with friends there.

When I say Vouvray and Montlouis have their hokey side, don't misunderstand. Walt and I would not now be living here in Saint-Aignan if we had not decided in early 2000 to come spend a vacation in a gite rural in Vouvray. The area, including Montlouis, Amboise, and Montrichard, was a revelation to us. We didn't find Saint-Aignan and leave California until a few years later... but here we are.

We go to Vouvray to buy wine at the Aubert winery at least a couple of times a year. Aubert doesn't practice bio-dynamics, but the wine is great. A couple of weeks ago we tasted it alongside comparable but much more expensive wines from Chidaine and Huet, and we found Aubert's sparkling Vouvrays to be as good if not better.

Fried shrimp with all the trimmings

I've been thinking about starting a series of posts called something like "American Food Classics from Scratch." In fact, I've already started it, but without calling it anything — I've done posts about making veggie burgers and Southern fried chicken. Black-eyed peas. Have I done meat loaf? All these are things you don't ever get in France (except for the fried chicken at KFC — but why go there when you can make your own?).

Headless frozen shrimp from an Asian grocery in Blois

This time it's fried seafood. Now you can't exactly call it a gourmet cooking or haute cuisine. Other preparations are more refined. But a man can't live on haute cuisine alone. When you grew up on fried seafood on the N.C. coast, you get an urge to eat some every now and then. In France, you have to make it yourself.

Dredge the raw shrimp in coarse corn meal (semoule de maïs)

And we now have found uncooked shrimp that is affordable. We got a bag of them, frozen, at the Paris Store Asian grocery in Blois last weekend. They are sold headless, so you don't feel like you're paying for a lot of weight that you just have to throw out. And you can peel and devein the shrimp after you thaw them, which means you don't bite down on grit and sand every time you eat one.

The Paris Store in Blois is also our source for corn meal now, so we can make corn bread whenever we want to. Walt likes it as a dessert. You can put no sugar in it, or you can make it with an amount of sugar that gives you the sweetness you like. One of the best recipes we've found is our friend Harriett's Corn Pone recipe, which is eggless.

Fried shrimp and hushpuppies (recipe to come)

Or you can make hushpuppies. Fried cornbread. That's what we did. I'll post a recipe later. I know, it's a lot of fried food. But it's not every day. And it transports you back to the U.S. and your childhood for a few minutes when you are eating it.

One more accompaniment. Or two, actually. Three even. First, cole slaw. Grated cabbage and carrot, plus mayonnaise and vinegar. Make your own mayonnaise. It's really easy: put a whole raw egg, a big teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a teaspoon of cider vinegar, and a good cup of canola oil in a tall container. Plunge in the stick blender and mix the ingredients together until they emulsify.

Home-made mayonnaise with the makings for sauce tartare

It won't take long and it will probably be too thick. (Canola oil, a.k.a. huile de colza, seems to work particularly well for mayonnaise.) Thin it down with more vinegar, or even with a little luke warm water, to get the consistency you want.

Walt's cole slaw — grated cabbage and carrot
with mayonnaise and vinegar

Mix enough of the mayonnaise into the grated vegetables until you like the consistency of the slaw. And then chop some green olives, pickles (in French, cornichons), capers, and a shallot — about a tablepoon of each — and mix all that with the rest of the mayonnaise to make sauce tartare. Tartar sauce will be good with the fried shrimp.

Fried dinner — very decadent, non ?

And finally, French fries. We are attempting again to make pommes frites from fresh potatoes nowadays, since I bought a five-kilo bag of Agata potatoes at the supermarket. They are the potatoes that are supposed to make good frites.The results are OK but they just aren't as crispy and crunch as the frozen French fries we get from Intermarché. We are still experimenting.