Snow and ice

The good news is that we have plenty of wood. And that the central heating system in the house seems to be working fine. The car is in the garage. There's no need to go out, because the freezer, the pantry, and the cupboards are full.

The temperature this morning is -6ºC — that's +21ºF, and that's very cold by Saint-Aignan standards. This is not record-breaking cold, but it feels frigid. The temperature where I am sitting, downstairs by the front door where my computer is, was 11ºC — 52ºF — when I came down half an hour ago to write this. I turned the heat on and it's up to 12º now.

The sunset from our back gate yesterday afternoon

According to the TV, the ground is already snow-covered up in Normandy, and north of Paris in Picardy. We are in a flow of air coming down from Scandinavia and Russia, they say. It's supposed to start snowing in Paris early this morning and then the snow will move south and west to cover the Loire Valley and surrounding regions.

We live up on the high ground along the south side of the Cher River, and the hill to get up to our hamlet is pretty steep. I can walk up it without too much trouble, but I can't really ride a bicycle up it — I'm not in that kind of shape. If it gets snowed over, and then ice forms, the little road will be impraticable for cars.

And from out on the dirt road a few minutes later

I went out yesterday and stocked up on groceries, in anticipation of the roads being slippery today and tomorrow. Some reports say it will be even colder in Saint-Aignan next week.

Did I tell you the bad news we got this week? Our morning bread delivery has been cut from five to four days a week. I know, that's not a tragedy. It is, however, a move in the wrong direction, as far as I am concerned. The Monday bread run was not profitable, the bread lady said, so it has been cut.

Bruno was out pruning his vines as the sun set.
The temperature was at freezing, but Callie didn't mind.

It sure is easy to get spoiled by mild weather and frequent bread deliveries. Now I have to go walk the dog.

Snow just beginning at 11:15 a.m.

A few days ago I read an article about a University of Missouri study of people's success in walking daily for exercise. It said that people who walk dogs are more likely to go out for a walk more faithfully every day, and they end up walking a lot faster than people who walk with other people. They get more exercise in both ways. Dogs are less likely than a human walking companion, the study pointed out, to say to their buddy: "Are you sure you want to go today? It's too hot/damp/cold. Let's just skip it for today and go tomorrow instead."

Restaurants and taxes

Saint-Aignan, pop. 4,000, is home to about a dozen restaurants, including two pizzerias, a crêperie, and a Turkish shish-kebab place. Five "downtown" restaurants — operating in the old centre-ville — are full-service restaurants serving French food.

Saint-Aignan's most upscale restaurant these days is "The Frog Eater."

The most up-scale place is a relatively new restaurant called Le Mange-Grenouille — The Frog Eater. That's a pretty funny name. The menu does include one frog dish — Fricassée de grenouilles au beurre persillé (fricasseed frog legs in parsley butter) — but that's only one I see. Le Mange-Grenouille opened for business just three or four years ago, and it's nicely decorated. There is outdoor seating when the weather is nice.

Here are Le Mange-Grenouille's à la carte choices.

Another Saint-Aignan restaurant is located on the main square, where the food market is set up on Saturday mornings, and is called Chez Constant. I've eaten there three times in just more than six years, including a lunch about two weeks ago. It's pretty good, but the food served there has never really knocked my socks off.

Chez Constant, on Saint-Aignan's main square. Notice the
outdoor table, with ashtray, even in December —because
smoking is now forbidden in all French restaurants and bars.

At lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had the daily special — partly because we were being treated to the meal and I didn't want to order anything expensive. The plat du jour was a lightly curried turkey sauté, with rice. I asked whether it was turkey white meat or dark meat, and the server said the morsel used for the dish was what is called the sot-l'y-laisse in French.

« Le sot-l'y-laisse » means, literally, "the fool leaves it there." It is the little "oyster" of meat near the bird's thigh, on the carcass. It's pronounced [soh-lee-less]. The fool leaves it there — in other words, ignores it or doesn't even know it exists. The irony is that it is the tenderest, most succulent morsel of meat on the bird.

Chez Constant has a nice old bar in the front room
and a big dining room in the back.

Anyway, the curried turkey morsels were good but it was a dish I could easily make at home. I feel more and more that way about restaurant food these days. It's expensive and I can make the same food for a much lower cost at home. The main point of going to a restaurant is to spend time socializing with people whose company you enjoy. And of course restaurants are very useful when you are traveling.

So what's happening with restaurants and taxes in France? Until about six months ago, the value-added tax — VAT in English, TVA in French for Taxe sur la Valeur Ajoutée, the kind of sales tax you pay here in Europe — was something like 20% on restaurant food. Full-service restaurant food, that is. The VAT charged on fast food, like McDonald's hamburgers, was only 5.5%. I'm not sure why or how the discrepancy came about.

Le Mange-Grenouille's courtyard is set up
as an outdoor dining space in summer.

About 6 months ago, the French government — President Sarkozy took credit for it — decided to reduce the tax on "slow" restaurant food to 5.5% as a measure designed to lower prices for consumers. Restaurants were not required to lower their prices, but were encouraged to do so. Some restaurants said they would rather pay their employees better salaries, for example, with the extra money they would make by maintaining their prices and paying less in taxes.

Now the government has expressed its displeasure at the way restaurant owners have dealt with lower tax. Prices have not come down as much as it had hoped. Are owners just pocketing the profits? There is at least an implied threat that the VAT on restaurant food will be put back to the old, high level. It still seems like it would be fair to tax all kinds of restaurants at the same rates, doesn't it?

Le Mange-Grenouille's set-price menus —11.50 or 14.00 € at
noon, 19.50 € for dinner, with a children's menu for 8.80 €.
If you just have the plat du jour at lunch, it's 8.50 €.

Does the government want a policy that encourages people to eat in fast-food restaurants rather than full-service restaurants? I hope not. I know governments like Sarkozy's don't want to be seen as raising taxes, so maybe they thought that lowering taxes on traditional restaurants was the only way to level the playing field.

Bringing the tax rate on fast food up to the rate paid by other restaurants was probably not ever in the cards, but maybe a compromise rate could have been found. What about 10% or 12% on all restaurant food?

Whether it was intended or not, you can see how consumers might think that full-service restaurant owners and operators are trying to get away with something. They are paying lower taxes now, but not lowering prices. Are they gouging the consumer? At the same time, the big fast-food chains are unsullied — they haven't had to make any changes.

All this can't be good for the traditional French restaurant business. Whether by design or inadvertently, the government appears to be encouraging the growth of the fast-food industry in France. That's too bad.

Saint-Aignan's Père Noël

When you come into Saint-Aignan from the north this time of year and cross the bridge, the most brightly colored thing you see is Father Christmas. Okay, it's a plywood cutout, but it is boldly painted.

Santa, a reindeer, and an elf in Saint-Aignan

Santa Claus, or more correctly Le Père Noël, has an interesting face and a toothy smile.

How jolly can he get?

If you look up above Père Noël's head and over the rooftops of the houses behind him, you see the back side of the Château de Saint-Aignan.

The Château de Saint-Aignan looms over the town...

And if you look left, up the main street leading into town, you see the tall tower of the church high above the rooftops.

...as does the church

The weather is literally freezing, but there's no more talk of snow. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas anyway.

P.S. The weather forecast has now changed. They are predicting snow here and all around on Thursday and Friday. Maybe we will have a white Christmas this year.

Chez le volailler

The market in Saint-Aignan is usually held on Saturday mornings, and it operates year-round. Sometimes in summer and on holiday weekends there are more vendors than at other times, and once in a while a vendor will take some time off and be absent for a week or even two, but otherwise most of the same stalls are open every Saturday.

At Christmastime, the market is often rescheduled to match up with Christmas Day and New Year's Day. This year, for example, instead of a market on Saturday, Dec. 26, the market will be held on Thursday, Dec. 24 for Christmas Eve. And the same schedule will hold for Dec. 31 — a market that day but not on Sat. Jan 2. It's pretty convenient, and I'm sure it's more profitable for the vendors that way.

Chickens, ducks, and rabbits at one of the
poultry vendors' stands in Saint-Aignan

Saint-Aignan's is not an enormous market. It's smaller than the ones at Selles-sur-Cher on Thursdays or Amboise on Sundays. The vendors present, though, cover the spectrum of food needs for the people of the town and surrounding area. There are at Saint-Aignan half a dozen vendors selling fresh fruits and vegetables; two poultry stands that also sell spit-roasted chickens, rabbits, and pork roasts; four pork butchers selling sausages and pâtés as well as fresh cuts of meat; one butcher selling other meats; one full-service cheese stand plus two or three vendors selling the local specialty, goat cheeses; and finally, one big fish and shellfish stand.

Rolled, tied, and larded roasts of turkey (dinde),
guinea fowl (pintade), and duck (cane or canard)

I've probably left a few vendors out. In fact, I don't want to forget the local mushroom lady, who is always there. There are also a couple of bakers selling breads, cakes, and pies. And there's a man who sells escargots — snails — and another who seems to specialize in apples. I'm sure I've still forgotten two or three of the smaller local vendors, who sell produce from their own gardens and goat cheeses they make on the farm. Recently, there's also been an Asian food stand where you can buy spring rolls and pre-cooked noodle or rice dishes.

Rabbits, a goose, a rooster, and some little pigeons for sale

A lot of the vendors come in special market trucks that open up into full display cabinets and counters, where you can view all the products for sale. I took pictures of a few of these on Saturday to post here.

We ordered our goose. The woman who took the order wrote it down in a notebook where a lot of other orders had already been recorded. We knew from the price list that a goose would cost 8.50 €/kg (a little less that 4.00 €/lb. — that's not quite $6.00 U.S. at current rates) but we didn't know how much one weighed. The woman said they went from 3 kg up to 10 kg.

Market trucks that open up to reveal refrigerated display cases

We told her we needed a small one because it was basically just for the two of us. She pulled one out of the display case and said it was a fairly small one. She weighed it to give us an idea — it was nearly 5 kilos. I hope we'll get one smaller than that, but we'll take and pay for what we get.

If the goose is really big, I'll probably cut off the legs and cook them separately in goose fat to make what's called confit d'oie. Then I can use the confit later with dried beans to make a cassoulet. We'll cook the breast and wings for Christmas dinner, with chestnut-sausage stuffing and some Brussels sprouts. Maybe I'll make some biscuits using duck or goose fat instead of butter, to go with it.

Another market truck selling fresh and cured pork products

P.S. I just stepped outside to get our daily baguette from the bread lady and saw that we actually got a dusting of snow overnight. The bread lady told me that we should start putting some bread in the freezer so that if it snows and she can't drive up the hill to our house, we won't have to go without. She doesn't know about our biscuit and pizza baking skills.

A goose, and some root vegetables

We succeeded in ordering a goose for Christmas. Je ne recule devant rien — I'm pretty fearless when it comes to the kitchen. I'm going to cook it in our little oven, no matter what. More about that later, as the time approaches. Meanwhile, we'll go pick up and pay for the goose — the French word is oie [WAH], and it's feminine, so it's l'oie [LWAH] or une oie — on December 24. There's a special Christmas market that day.

It was cold yesterday morning, and gray. Thankfully, there wasn't much wind. Saint-Aignan was crowded and all the activity, all the colors, all the sounds of the market made it seem warm despite all. We first stopped at one poultry vendor's stall and asked him if we could buy a goose for Christmas dinner. « Il faut la commander », he shouted — "You'll have to order it." He sort of waved us away, as if we were bothering him. He was busy cleaning a chicken, I have to say — gutting it and burning off the few feathers still attached to the carcass.

I walked away, saying we would reflect on it, but immediately decided to go back over to ask him about the price. How much would the goose cost, by the kilo? He shrugged and said he couldn't really tell me. Maybe about 10 euros a kilo. « Les producteurs n'en vendent qu'à une seule époque de l'année », he said, or something like that, « et c'est à eux de nous dire le prix. » "People who raise geese only sell them at a certain time of year" — that would be à Noël — "and they're the ones who set the price."

That didn't sound very promising to me. We walked on over the the second poultry stand, which is the one I actually prefer doing business with. And there they had a price list posted on top of the glass-fronted refrigerated cabinet full of ducks, chickens, rabbits, turkeys, and... geese. They were selling the Christmas goose at 8.50 €/kg. I ordered one from them.

Onions and shallots, yellow carrots, yellow Boule d'or turnips,
and parsley roots that you cook like turnips or parsnips

On the way from one vendor to another, a big display of what really looked like farm-fresh root vegetables caught my eye. We still have some of the white sauce left from the Chicken and Dumplings we made the other day. I'm sure there's some chicken meat left in it, and there are some carrots and mushrooms. I thought it might be good to have a sort of vegetable version of the dish for lunch today — une blanquette de légumes — using some of those root vegetables.

They had parsnips. I remember just a few years ago that you never found parsnips around Saint-Aignan. They're very popular in England, but in France they long ago fell into the category called « les légumes oubliés » — "the forgotten vegetables." That category included Jerusalem artichokes, pumpkins, butternut and other winter squashes, and even broccoli, until not that many years ago.

Parsnips, carrots covered in sand, little turnips, potatoes,
Jerusalem artichokes, fresh spinach, and lettuce

Now you find all those vegetables at the markets and even in the supermarkets. Remember, a lot of the produce sold at stalls in open-air markets in France actually comes from the wholesale food suppliers that operate out of Rungis, the huge distribution center just south of Paris. I think I can often tell the difference between the locally produced vegetables and the ones that are shipped in. They are more rustic looking, less prettily arranged for display.

Here's a better picture of the parsnips (panais in French).

In fact, the vegetables and fruits from Rungis include things like avocados, lemons, oranges, green beans, and other fruits and vegetables that are not local and not even of the season. This stand, however, had nothing but produce that is in season here, now. I guess I should have asked the people running it where it was all grown, but I was too surprised at the variety of vegetables to think about that.

What are those? What are these? And these? I kept seeing unfamiliar veggies alongside more familiar ones. I knew what the parsnips were, but there was a crate of something that very closely resembled them right behind them. Those turned out to be not smoother, smaller parsnips, but parsley roots.

Broccoli, little pumpkins, and both black and long red radishes

And those big yellowish globes, are they rutabagas? No, the rutabagas are over there — these are yellow turnips, des navets « Boule d'or ». They have a slightly sweeter taste, with a touch of bitterness, the man said.

Are these carrots? Yes, they are yellow carrots. And these, are they red carrots? No, they are radishes. I had recognized the big black radishes — they're very good — but I had never seen carrot-shaped red radishes before.

Another vendor had raw beets — in France, you usually find them
already cooked — along with Jerusalem artichokes and
romanesco, which looks like radioactive cauliflower

I got a couple of parsnips, a big turnip, and some long red radishes. They'll supplement the carrots and potatoes we already had in the fridge to make a white vegetable stew for lunchtime today. More about the goose tomorrow.

To market, to market...

...to buy a fat goose. Well, maybe we won't buy it today, because Christmas is still two weeks away. But we've decided to cook a goose for our dinner on December 25, and we need to go find out if we have to order one or if geese for roasting will be available closer to the day.

The market I'm talking about is the open-air market in Saint-Aignan. These kinds of markets are called marchés volants — "flying markets" — which I guess we would call "roving" or "itinerant" markets. In cities, the vendors move from neighborhood to neighborhood — and out here in the country, from town to town — setting up their stalls on different days of the week.

The cheeses for yesterday's raclette. We melted both
fromage à raclette and Comté cheese.

The markets in different towns are ever exactly the same, because all the vendors have different circuits that they follow. In one market you might find some of the vendors you saw in a nearby town a few days ago, but not all of them. And you find others who do different towns. That keeps things varied and interesting, and gives each town's market its own character.

And the meats for eating with hot melted cheese: jambon cru (cured
ham) and saucisses sèches (skinny little dry salamis cut into pieces).

Both Montrichard and Contres have a nice market on Friday mornings; Selles-sur-Cher on Thursdays; Valençay on Tuesdays. A little farther away are the bigger Amboise, Loches, Romorantin, Blois, and Tours markets. So there are plenty of close-by food shopping choices. Some of the vendors are farmers selling their own produce, but most are not.

Cornichons (gherkins) and home-made cucumber
pickles go with melted Raclette cheese too.
Also, fresh pork belly, grilled.

There are two poultry vendors — volaillers, they are called — at the Saint-Aignan market on Saturday, and there is at least one at the market across the river in Noyers-sur-Cher on Sundays. We shouldn't have any trouble finding our Christmas goose.

Not much else to report this morning. It's cold and gray out. I think the snow watch for Saint-Aignan has been canceled.

Change in the weather

The weather in Saint-Aignan is changing just in time to sync up with the change of season that is only 10 days distant. It's been very wet but quite mild here for weeks and weeks now. Over the past few years, we had gotten used to having a much colder November.

Now, after the relative warmth of a lot of 60ºF afternoons, the weather reports are suddenly predicting snow, even down here at low altitudes — en plaine, as they say, not just en montagne. A big high pressure system will be sending us air and winds from Scandinavia and Russia. The maritime flow that brought us mild wet air off the Gulf Stream has been interrupted.

Sunset yesterday, 10 December 2009

You know how it is when you are waiting and waiting for something to happen and it just never does? That's been our autumn weather. Walt and I spent a lot of energy in early November bringing in plants, raking leaves to mulch our garden plots with, and otherwise getting ready for the first blasts of icy weather. Well, we haven't had a freeze at all yet, with the exception of a couple of mornings in October when there was light frost on the grass way out in the vineyard.

Western sky in December

Now I discover that I didn't actually finish the winterization process. I still have plants that need to be brought inside or otherwise protected from frostbite. There are pots of soil to be emptied so that freezing temperatures don't crack the pots. And we have plants around the house and farther out in the yard that still need the protection of a layer of dead leaves so that roots and bulbs won't freeze. I guess that's what I'll be working on today.

What we call "brush" is taking over an abandoned
parcel of vines far out in the vineyard.
It looks like a brush against the horizon.

Our weather is nothing far out of the ordinary, I guess, when I look at what's going on in parts of the U.S. where I used to live and still have friends and family. A day or two ago the temperature in my home town on the coast of North Carolina was above 70ºF. And in California, just east of Sacramento up in the Sierra foothills, they got 5" of snow earlier this week, according to a friend. That's very rare.

Out on the gravel road through the vineyard, late in the day

Our Saint-Aignan weather has been unusual only in that the mild November spell has lasted so long, and because we've gotten about 5" of rain during a time when 2" would feel like a lot. The ground seems completely saturated now.

For lunch, I'm going to make a raclette, a cold-weather dish about which I posted a topic a few days ago. Our high temperature today is supposed to be in the 40s. There's a dense fog hugging the ground this morning, and it's in the mid-30s.

Red December skies

The other afternoon we went into Saint-Aignan to get a couple of things from a store called Gamm Vert, which sells gardening supplies, work and hunting clothes, and even wine and other seasonal food products, along with canning equipment like jars and funnels.

There we bought a 500 g bag of black peppercorns for just over three euros. That will last for a while. We buy black pepper in bulk because it keeps just fine and is much less expensive that way. I also picked up a brightly colored box of Epices Rabelais, a spice mix that I had never even heard of before. It was on a rack next to the cash register in the store, and the cashier said people buy it to use in making pâtés and terrines.

Epices Rabelais, "popular since 1880." Good for roasts, pot roasts,
court-bouillon, terrines, confits, stuffings, and rabbit stews.

That's a seasonal activity and takes place in the fall. You make pâtés that will carry you through the winter, and that you can enjoy during the holidays. You also make foods like confit de canard that you can store in your cellar during the cold months, alongside the apples, carrots, beets, potatoes, and onions you have harvested from your orchard and garden. It's cold enough in the cellar in wintertime so that even pâtés and canard confit don't spoil. Cabbages and leeks continue growing in the garden all through the winter, unless it gets extemely cold.

The composition of the spice blend is a closely guarded secret.
When you smell it, you can tell it contains a lot of cloves —
clous de girofle — a spice that cuts the gaminess of meats.

The supermarkets sell large quantities of these winter foodstuffs at low prices so that people can stock up for the winter even if they don't have an orchard or a vegetable garden themselves. I'm sure it's mostly older people, like me, who live and eat this way. The stores, including Gamm Vert, also sell black pepper and special items like the Rabelais spice mix for the same purpose: good pâtés and terrines need to be highly seasoned because you eat them cold.

Let me add that many if not most people here in Saint-Aignan also have freezers nowadays, as we do. But the cellar still plays a big role in preserving and enjoying local, seasonal food products. Some things just don't freeze well.

Seven-year itch

It was seven years ago that we came to France and found this house we now live in. Seven years. Is that lucky? Or unlucky? Either way, it's a magic number.

I've been blogging every day, with very few exceptions, for two years now. Blogging is an aberration, you know. It is publishing, or quasi-publishing. It reminds me of the days when word processing and page design first became available to le commun des mortels back in the 1980s and 1990s. Anybody with a computer and a desktop publishing application could suddenly produce documents using many fonts and many font sizes, in italic or bold or underlined... and all of the above. A lot of pages that looked like ransom notes resulted.

Blogging is definitely publishing, though it is only digital. What am I saying? Only digital! What isn't, these days? Print publishing is in serious decline. But there are some elements missing from the new digital publishing modes. One element is editors. In no other type of publishing does an author write, format, and release for public consumption articles and thoughts and sentences and spellings that are not revised by even one other set of human eyes.

I was an editor for more than 20 years. I edited English and I edited French. I edited for audiences that went from ambassadors and politicians, government officials in the U.S. and elsewhere, to high school teachers, business executives, university professors, computer programmers, various magazine readers, and le commun des mortels of computer users. I'm not saying I always did a great job. But I believe I "added value" to the texts and documents I worked on. That's what editors do.

Now here I am without an editor myself — I who always firmly believed that writing and editing were two fundamentally different processes, both of which were necessary to the production of truly publishable material.

A good editor doesn't make a writer feel dumb for writing a defective sentence or not noticing a typo. Other readers are not so kind, because they don't understand the complexities of writing words, thoughts, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and articles — not to mention books. That's why editors are employed: to protect the writers from silly errors, to get the best out of them, to help them express what they have to say.

If you think writers just write and publishers just publish what they write, think again. Writing is nearly always a collaborative effort, especially writing for publication. It takes many brains, many pairs of eyes, a clear vision, and many revisions and corrections to get any writing ready for publication. It costs money.

Well, you get what you pay for. That's the thought that comes to mind when I think about blogs. The stuff I write is free. Not only do you get words, typos, misspellings, and silly errors — you get pictures too. And once in a while, you might get something interesting or entertaining.

Already, the emphasis in digital communications seems to have shifted from blogging to twittering or facebooking. I've tried them all, but not for long. Twittering and facebooking are not really publishing. That mode doesn't suit me. Blogging is publishing, or at least could or should be. Good, serious editing is the only thing missing.

Bloggers, like other writers, need editors who can stand back from the written work, assess it, and push it in the right directions. Who can edit out the silliness we are all prone to. Who can fix the typos, refine the sentences and paragraphs, and give the writer not only encouragement but a shove or a kick in the pants when needed. Who can ask the hard questions: Aren't you getting carried away here? Are you seriously expecting people to believe what you're saying? Have you thought this through? Don't you see the contradictions in your own writing and ideas? Have you lost your way? Your mind?

Maybe what I'm having is not the seven-year itch, but the sixty-year itch. Sixty years old, I mean. I just saw on the Washington Post web site that CBS is canceling its "As the World Turns" soap opera after a 54-year run. That makes my four-year run as a blogger seem pretty insignificant.

Some days I think I need a new hobby.

A Blanquette with boiled biscuits

I realized yesterday that the Southern U.S. classic dish called Chicken and Dumplings is just an American version of Blanquette (de veau, d'agneau, de poulet, etc.) in disguise. The disguise is the American name. The rest is the same, except people don't really eat veal or lamb much in the American South.

The element that is different in Chicken and Dumplings compared to a French Blanquette is, well, the dumplings. The Robert-Collins dictionary says "dumpling" is translated as
« boulette (de pâte) ». I think it is also translated as
« quenelle » — as in « quenelles de brochet », or fish dumplings.

Blanquette de poulet, a.k.a. Chicken and dumplings

Except for those, Chicken 'n' Dumplings is the same thing. Here's how you make it.

Take a whole chicken and poach it in a big pot, in enough water to cover it completely. For flavor, add a couple of carrots, two or three medium onions, a couple of celery stalks, some black peppercorns, a couple of bay leaves, and some salt to the water. Get the water up to boiling before putting the chicken in the pot.

For a Blanquette de Veau — White Veal Stew — you do the same thing. Well, if you want to, you can start the veal (or chicken) cooking in cold water. And you can add a lot of dry white wine to the water if you want. Actually, I put about half a bottle of dry white wine into the liquid I cooked my chicken in. I'm not sure that's very Southern, but I am sure that it's very good.

Boned-out chicken and Southern-style dumplings

Let the chicken cook in the liquid at a low simmer for about 90 minutes. Then take it out of the liquid and let it cool to the point where you can stand to touch it. With your fingers, remove all the chicken meat from the bones, putting the skin and cartilage aside with the bones. If you have a dog or cat, all that skin and cartilage, with some cooked rice, will make very good pet food. Discard the bones.

Strain the broth — the water or water & wine mixture is now chicken broth — into a bowl. You can put the carrots, celery, and onion into the stew if you want, but discard the bay leaves and peppercorns at this point. Cut the carrots, celery, and onions into small pieces if you haven't already done so and if you want to add them. Otherwise, throw them out. They've given their flavor but vegetable fiber is not a bad thing to eat, apparently.

In a pot, make a roux with two tablespoons of butter, melted, and two tablespoons of flour. When the flour has cooked in the butter for two or three minutes, start adding broth, using a ladle. With each ladle of broth, stir the sauce over medium heat until it gets smooth and creamy. Continue until you have put in about two quarts (or liters) of broth. The sauce should be slightly thickened, but not gloppy — about as thick as heavy cream.

At this point add the carrots, celery, and onions to the broth along with half a pound of cleaned, sliced, raw button mushrooms. Now, Southern Chicken and Dumplings doesn't normally have mushrooms in it, but French Blanquette does. This is my major concession to good French cooking technique when making a Southern dish. (The wite wine is a minor concession.) If you don't want the mushrooms, leave them out.

Cook the sauce for about 15 minutes or until the mushrooms seem done. At this point, add all the chicken meat to the broth and let it start simmering again. Also add about ¾ cup of heavy cream. Stir it to blend it all together. If you want, you can add a cup of frozen or fresh green garden peas at this point. They're optional, but traditional in the South.

The dumplings cook on top of the slightly thickened cooking liquid.

Meanwhile, make a batch of baking-powder biscuits following Tom's recipe here. You're going to cook them in liquid, not in the oven.

When the pot of chicken is simmering and the mushrooms look cooked, add the juice of half a small lemon to the sauce and stir it in. That really perks it up. Then cut the biscuit dough into pieces, about eight of them, and add them all to the pot. They will float on top of the liquid and cook. Turn the heat down low and cover the pot so that the dumplings will steam through and puff up.

How about a salad of Belgian endive with diced red beets?

Voilà. After about 15 minutes, you have tender, fluffy dumplings to enjoy with the creamy chicken-broth sauce and the nice, boneless chicken meat. The dumplings replace the rice you would have with a French Blanquette. If you prefer rice, don't make the dumplings at all and call it Blanquette de Poulet. Or have pasta with it. That's good too. All you need is a salad to finish it off.

What about the same kind of stew made without chicken but with turnips, parsnips, carrots, and celery root. That would be a Blanquette de Légumes.

Game for dinner?

Wow, look what Intermarché is featuring as its star products this week. Gibier. Game. Well, we do live on the very edge of La Sologne, which is an area famous for hunting, and for adorning its dinner tables with what gets bagged.

It's interesting, too, how different supermarkets in France can be from each other. A lot of people lament the standardization of food offerings around France and see supermarkets as the culprits. La grande distribution, as it's called, is seen as being at odds with current trends, like promoting locally-produced foods. But here in the Saint-Aignan area, the butchers at Intermarché do just the opposite.

A haunch of wild boar for dinner? It's on sale at 5.59 € a pound.

I'm pretty sure that the butcher counter over at Intermarché is a concession run by local butchers, not just another department in the store. In other words, these butchers in the past would be working out of their own shop in town. Nowadays, however, they set up shop where the customer traffic is, and that's in a supermarket. Of course, the store also sells packaged, brand-name meat products.

How about some roe deer venison at 6.50 €/lb.?

Over at SuperU, our other main supermarket, you can feel the differences in the meat, cheese, and produce departments. There's something slicker, less rustic and les old-fashioned about the store. There's no cheese counter where you can ask for a piece of Brie or Gruyère to be cut off a big wheel for you, for example. Most of the cheeses are in a self-service counter, in styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic, pre-cut.

I have my eye on these: thighs of a wild hare at just over 6.00 €/lb.
Seems to me they might be good made into confit for a cassoulet.

I've never seen a sale like the current Intermarché promotion over at SuperU. But then SuperU has a better selection of many things, including and especially sausages in the meat department. The butchers over there obviously specialize in sausages. At Intermarché, they specialize in locally produced meats you don't find elsewhere: ducks in the fall, rabbits in the summer, beef and pork in all seasons. And right now, game animals.

How about a pheasant? They're priced
at 9.95 € apiece — about $15.00.

The Sologne is a 2,000-sq.-mile area of forests and small lakes that has never really been developed. The biggest town is Romorantin, population 20,000 or so, but the Sologne is mostly an area of small villages out in the woods. It's south of Orléans, north of Bourges, and east of Tours. When you look at satellite pictures of the Loire Valley region, the triangular area of forest that is La Sologne really stands out clearly.

Here's a map showing Paris, Orléans, Tours, Bourges, and La Sologne.

Saint-Aignan is on the southwestern edge of La Sologne, the northwestern edge of Le Berry, and the far eastern edge of La Touraine. Three old provinces come together here, then, with their different cultures, histories, economies and landscapes. La Sologne is forested, Le Berry is rolling fields of grain, and La Touraine is an area of vineyards and small vegetable farms ("le jardin de la France").

No pictures of these, but they are faisan ( pheasant), lapin de garenne
(wild rabbit), canard colvert (wild duck), and perdreau (partridge).
P.A.C means prêt à cuire — oven-ready (plumed/skinned and gutted).

Actually, Saint-Aignan, now with « -sur-Cher » appended to the name, used to be called Saint-Aignan-en-Berry. It is on the border with Touraine but on the Berry side. The village we live in, just west of Saint-Aignan, is in La Touraine, if I can believe the local people I know — we live on the edge of a vineyard, after all. Across the river is the Sologne, which is part of the Orléanais province. The old French provinces have historical and cultural significance, but they are not political or administrative units the way they used to be.

And here's a haunch of the large red deer native to our area.
It's a little less expensive than the boar, roe deer, or hare.

And we do have game animals here. We see rabbits and hares frequently. There are pheasants and partridges and other game birds in the woods and vineyards. Deer, both the smaller roe deer and larger red deer, are all around us — as in many areas, the populations are too large. We have seen wild boars not 5 minutes north of Saint-Aignan, crossing the road at night. And there are, as well, big animals that are not hunted as food: badgers, foxes, great white owls, blue or gray herons, and many birds of prey.

Saint-Aignan has a big, highly reputed zoo. One day, according to the woman who sold us our house seven years ago, she and her husband were sitting out on the front deck, enjoying warm weather, when a kangaroo went hopping down the street. No, kangaroos are not native to the region. This one had escaped. They called the zoo, and the animal was pretty soon rounded up and taken back to its pen.

In fact, it was on a Tuesday in early December seven years ago that we first laid eyes on this house. We looked at each other and decided this is was the one. It was December 10, 2002. When we moved in 6 months later, deer frequently grazed in our back yard early in the morning.

“Botanical idioms”

Yesterday I was looking things up using Google and Wikipedia, both French and English, when I came across a Wikipedia French page that lists dozens of expressions that include the names of fruits and vegetables.

Things like:

avoir un cœur d'artichaut (to have an artichoke heart) =
to be fickle

c'est une asperge (calling a person an asparagus) =
describes a person who is too tall and too skinny

avoir la banane (to have the banana) =
to have a big smile and be feeling great

avoir du blé (to have wheat) =
to have money (or even a lot of dough)

les carottes sont cuites (the carrots are cooked) =
all is lost, the game is over

appuyer sur le champignon (to press down on the mushroom) =
to step on the accelerator and speed up

ne rien avoir dans la citrouille (have nothing in the pumpkin) =
to be stupid

être dur de la feuille (to be hard of the leaf) =
to be hard of hearing (leaf = ear)

c'est la fin des haricots (that's the end of the beans) =
that's it, it's all over

avoir le melon (to have the melon) =
to have a swelled head, to be full of oneself

un navet (a turnip) =
a bad movie or play

se mettre en rang d'oignons (stand like a row of onions) =
to line up single-file

s'habiller en pelure d'oignon (to dress in onion skins) =
to wear several layers of clothing

en avoir gros sur la patate (to have a loaded down potato) =
to be very sad (potato = heart, I think)

avoir la patate (to have the potato) =
to be feeling good, in fine form

avoir la pêche (to have the peach) =
to be feeling good, in fine form

manger les pissenlits par la racine
(to be eating dandelions by the roots) =
to be dead and buried (“pushing up daisies”)

une poire or une bonne poire (a pear, or “a good pear”) =
a person easily taken advantage of

découvrir le pot aux roses (to discover the pot of roses) =
to learn the truth

raconter des salades (to tell salads) =
to give confusing and untruthful explanations, nonsense

And so many more, some very polite and some a little racy. Enjoy.

By the way, the French word for “idiom” is « idiotisme ». That always makes me smile.

More about gastronomes and fromages

It's funny and revealing, the French word « gastronome », I think. How do you translate it? The Grand Robert et Collins dictionary gives “gourmet” and “gastronome” — only the first of those works for me. However, the American Heritage Dictionary says a “gastronome” or “gastronomer” (!) is “connoisseur of good food and drink; a gourmet.”

I hear English-speaking people use the term “gourmand” for “gourmet” in English, and I don't like it. But they aren't wrong. The AHD says in a usage note: “A gourmet is a person with discriminating taste in food and wine, as is a gourmand. Gourmand can also mean one who enjoys food in great quantities.” To me, it means the latter more than the former.

Courtine describes Bleu d'Auvergne cheese as having
« un goût un peu sauvage, piquant, très remarquable »
— a taste that is slightly earthy, sharp, and quite remarkable.

In French, the two terms are more differentiated. A gourmand just loves food. I'm one of those. A gourmet is, according to the Grand Robert dictionary, a « personne qui apprécie le raffinement en matière de boire et de manger » — a person who appreciates refinement in food and drink. I guess I'm also one of those, but if you put the two words on a scale, in my case the gourmand would greatly outweigh the gourmet.

Sometimes, I think my tastebuds must not be very sensitive, because they like nearly everything that passes over them.

Courtine doesn't have a lot to say about French-made Mimolette,
which resembles an American orange-colored Cheddar or Colby. About
“authentic” Dutch Mimolette, he says it is « d'une grande finesse
de pâte » — of a very refined texture and taste.

Anyway, I assume the late great Robert Courtine, was a (French) gourmand and a gourmet, an epicure and a gastronome (or gastronomer or gastronomist). He was what we would call in our straightword American English a “food writer” — he wrote 1500 columns as a chronicler of cooking and restaurants for the Paris daily called Le Monde, under the pen name La Reynière. His mentor was the great Curnonsky.

Evidently, he liked good puns — « Courtine-La Reynière aime les calembours bons », I read in an article published on the occasion of the gastronomer’s seventieth birthday, in 1980. He supposedly lamented in a column the decline of the good old mixed drink, the cocktail, which was losing favor to brand-name apéritif drinks in France: « L'art chatoyant des coquetels se perd. Saint Zano, priez pour lui. » I'm not going to translate that.

What Courtine says about Billy goat cheese mystifies me.
He describes it as being made in the village of Billy, near
Selles-sur-Cher and Saint-Aignan. But the only Billy I've
ever seen is this Petit Billy cheese that is made in Brittany.

Robert-Julien Courtine billed himself as Robert J. Courtine when he wrote the Larousse guide Les Fromages (1973, 1980) and when he published a revised and corrected version of the voluminous Larousse Gastronomique (1967) food and cooking encyclopedia. I wonder why he adopted an anglicized version of his name, but never mind.

He was called the « prince sans couronne de la gueule » — the uncrowned prince of the gullet, I guess you could say. Somebody who is a « fine gueule » has a fine gullet, or very discriminating tastes in food and drink. Did you know that people who are in the business of selling, preparing, and cooking food are said to exercise « les métiers de bouche » — the mouth trades?

Getting to the point: here's what Robert J. Courtine says about Morbier cheese in Les Fromages. After describing it as a cheese made by taking the curds from the bottom of the vat after the good curds used for making Comté cheese have been skimmed off the top, he says:

« Le Morbier est plus une curiosité qu'un fromage attractif par ses vertus gustatives et son intérêt gastronomique. » — “Morbier cheese is more of a oddity than it is a cheese that appeals by virtue of gustatory qualities or gastronomical significance.”

Let me quickly add that Walt and I both enjoy Morbier and have been buying it for years, both in France and in California. However, a friend who knew Paris well back in the 1940 to 1970 period once told me he had never really heard of it until much more recently. It must not have been “exported” to markets outside of its local environment until the 1970s and '80s.

I wonder what Courtine would say about « Nouveau » wines
like our local Touraine Primeur. I bet it wouldn't be praise.

And here is more of what Courtine says about the classic Swiss cheese fondue, or la fondue savoyarde as it is known in France. First, he compared la raclette to la fondue by saying the former was « combien meilleure » — so much better — and « plus chaleureuse, plus savoureuse ! » — much heartier and tastier. Then he snidely dismisses cheese fondue by saying:

« Ce plat national suisse communautaire et indigeste a ses ‘fans’. » — “This Swiss national dish, Europeanized and indigestible, has its ‘fans’.”

Now I'm not at all sure about translating « communautaire » as “Europeanized” but it's as good a guess as any. I think he might mean that the fondue has been bastardized and corrupted by being adopted and adapted by cooks in so many regions and countries. It doesn't have a very strictly defined identity — not the way la raclette does.

I think, too, that what might bother an old-school French gastronomer (!) about a dish like Swiss cheese fondue is that it includes a hodgepodge of ingredients. Three different, albeit fine cheeses are mixed and mashed into a gloppy mess, with the addition not only of white wine but also kirschwasser, nutmeg, and cornstarch. How much more elegant and pleasing is a good, rich cheese simply melted slightly and immediately served. With la raclette, you know what you are getting.

Here's a cheese that usually goes into a fondue.

Okay, all that said, I have to admit that Walt and I started making cheese fondue again, after years of not even thinking about it, at least 10 years ago. We enjoy preparing and eating a fondue savoyarde every Christmas Eve, using a selection of cheeses. I follow a recipe given to me by a French friend, one who had lived in the eastern part of France where fondue cheeses are made, more than 30 years ago. We've used combinations including Gruyère, Emmental, Comté, Beaufort, and even Cantal cheese for our fondues since we moved to Saint-Aignan six years ago.

So we love fondue, despite what Courtine says about it.

After all, Robert J. Courtine was also quoted as saying that the potato is « un tubercule exotique d'origine récente [qui] n'intéresse pas notre cuisine » — “an exotic tuber of recent origin that doesn't have a place in French cuisine.” Joël Rebuchon, if he were dead and buried, would be spinning in his grave. I guess Courtine would have considered Gratin Dauphinois a bastardized and corrupted dish as well.