Souvenirs en noir et blanc

I have to walk the dog this morning (in the rain) and then we are going to try to leave early to drive over to Loches to do some shopping. So I'm posting something short.

Last night I was looking around in my photo archives — on the computer, of course — to see what kinds of pictures I took in Januaries past. Instead, in a folder dated January 2003, I found this picture of me from 1977:


That's the caption that appeared with the photo. Somebody facetiously called me "professor" the other day, but let me say I never actually became one. I was a teacher for a dozen years, however, in Illinois and in France. I loved it but gave it up to move to Washington DC, where I ended up working as an editor, translator, and writer. What I never gave up was France. Or plaid shirts!

Notice that fancy word processor on my desk. The AATF was and is the American Association of Teachers of French. I worked in the association's offices in Champaign, Illinois, for three years. I was in my late 20s, and I left there to return to France in 1979 at the age of 30.

Loir-et-Cher, the song by Michel Delpech

The singer and songwriter Jean-Michel Delpech was born in Courbevoie, in the well-to-do westside Paris suburbs, in 1946. He chose Michel Delpech as his stage name and starting performing in the 1960s. He was the opening act (la vedette américaine in French) for Jacques Brel, for example, when Brel gave his final concert at the Olympia theater in Paris in 1966.

Michel Delpech continued his career with a string of hit songs in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. I came to France in 1970 for six months, and then returned to spend the 1972-73 school year in Rouen (Normandy). Delpech's songs were on the radio all the time. Some of his biggest titles were:

• Pour un flirt (1971) — I remember this one because it was kind of racy for the times and it taught me that the English word flirt got a different meaning when it was imported into the French language. In French, « un flirt » is what is also called « une aventure » — what the dictionary calls "a brief romance." It's an old-fashioned term now, and might already have been back then.
• Les Divorcés (1973) was about a man whose wife is leaving him for another. He's getting a divorce and has accepted the situation, even though his lawyer says he has to testify against his wife. « La vie continue, malgré tout », he sings. Divorce by mutual consent was not yet possible in France then, unless I'm mistaken.
• Que Marianne était jolie (also 1973) is one I remember for the music and the style. It's a song about the symbol of the French Republic — the New Regime, after abolition of the monarchy in the 1790s. I was always a little mystified by the subject and words, but Delpech's refrain « Dieu ! mais que Marianne était jolie ! » was catchy and memorable. It's a song about Paris and the revolutionary spirit. Here's a live version from a couple of decades ago.

And finally, there was the song called Le Loir-et-Cher, in 1977. Now Walt and I live in the Loir-et-Cher, which is the territory around the old royal town of Blois. It straddles the Loir River in the north and the Cher River in the south — both are tributaries of the major local river, the Loire. Here's the song on YouTube:



These are the lyrics in French:

Le Loir-et-Cher

Ma famille habite dans le Loir-et-Cher,
Ces gens-là ne font pas de manières.
Ils passent tout l'automne à creuser des sillons,
A retourner des hectares de terre.
Je n’ai jamais eu grand chose à leur dire
Mais je les aime depuis toujours.
De temps en temps, je vais les voir.
Je passe le dimanche dans le Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain:} Ils me disent, ils me disent :
« Tu vis sans jamais voir un cheval, un hibou. »
Ils me disent :
« Tu ne viens plus, même pour pêcher un poisson.
Tu ne penses plus à nous.
On dirait que ça te gêne de marcher dans la boue,
On dirait que ça te gêne de dîner avec nous.
On dirait que ça te gêne de marcher dans la boue,
On dirait que ça te gêne de dîner avec nous. »

Chaque fois que je m’arrête dans le Loir-et-Cher,
Ils ne me laissent plus partir de chez eux.
Je leur dis qu’il faut que je rentre sur Paris,
Que je ne fais pas toujours ce que je veux
Et qu’il faut que je trouve encore un poste d'essence,
Que je n'ai pas le temps de finir ma bière
Et que je reviendrai un de ces dimanches
Passer la nuit dans le Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain}

And here's my loose translation:

The Loir-et-Cher

My family lives in the Loir-et-Cher,
They're the kind of people who don't put on airs.
They spend the whole autumn working the fields,
Plowing up acres and acres of soil.
I've never had much to talk to them about
But they've always been dear to me.
Once in a while I go to see them.
I spend a Sunday in the Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain:}
And they'll say to me, they'll say:
"You live your life without ever seeing a horse or an owl."
And they'll say:
"You don't come see us any more, not even to go fishing.
It's like you've forgotten all about us.
It's as if you're afraid you might get mud on your shoes.
As if you don't really care about sharing a meal with us.
It's as if you're afraid you might get mud on your shoes.
As if you don't really care about sharing a meal with us."

Every time I stop off in the Loir-et-Cher,
They don't want to let me leave again.
I tell them that I have to get back to Paris,
That I can't always do exactly as I please.
And that I need to find one more place to fuel up my car,
So I don't have time to finish that last beer
And I'll be sure to come back some Sunday soon
To spend another night in the Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain}

Here's a much more recent live performance by an older Michel Delpech:



I'm a true believer when it comes to songs like these as a way to learn French pronunciation and expressions. They can teach you the music of the language. They are full of historical and cultural references. And they're fun, at least to me.

So rural there's a song about it

It will soon be eight years since we left California and started a new life in Saint-Aignan. We found the house we now live in and put a deposit down on it in December 2002. Then we decided we really didn't want to stay any longer in San Francisco — France was too tempting. So we sold our house in S.F. in March 2003. A month later, we signed on the dotted line and became owners of a house in the country near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher. By July 2003, we were all moved in.

What a transition! We not only went from living in the U.S. to living in France, but we also moved from the city to the country. We used to live near the ocean, and now we live well inland. We lived in the temperate, nearly seasonless, kind of monotonous climate of the San Francisco Bay Area, and now we live in the much more varied, exciting climate of the Loire Valley, with clearly marked seasons. We're still getting used to that. Winter can be cold and snowy, and summer can be hot and arid. But you can't count on much of anything, weather-wise.

The rural Loir-et-Cher département, southwest of Paris

When we first arrived in Saint-Aignan — we live about 3 miles from the town, on a dead-end road on the edge of a big vineyard — I remember how quiet it was here. I'd go to bed at night and lie there listening for some sound, any sound. There were none. The silence was deafening. It must have been really noisy where we lived in San Francisco, but I had never particularly noticed.

Now it doesn't feel so quiet any more. I must have adapted. When I listen carefully, I can hear the little train across the river toot its horn. If the wind is right I can hear the train running along the tracks. I can hear church bells from down in our village. In the daytime, I can hear chainsaws or tractor motors off in the distance. I hear owls hoot at night and a neighbor's donkey braying. The other neighbor's rooster crows every morning. Green woodpeckers "laugh" out back when they are startled. Geese honk in another neighbor's yard. Birds, that's mostly what I hear. Once in a while a car drives by in front of the house. Or a light plane, a low-flying military jet, a helicopter, or a hot-air balloon goes by overhead, always startling me.

In San Francisco, we lived one house over from a street that ran at a very steep angle up and down a hill — as streets in San Francisco tend to do. Cars made a lot of noise on that hill, at all hours of the day and night. You got used to it. We lived maybe a quarter of a mile from the 280 freeway, which was down in a valley below our house. There was a constant roar of traffic, but you hardly heard it after a while. And we were only 10 miles from the airport, so we had a lot of planes in the sky overhead all the time. You didn't hear them much, but you heard them, sort of subconsciously — in the background, like the freeway noise.

The so-rural Loir-et-Cher is framed by three major
French cities: Tours, Orléans, and Le Mans

The fact is, the French département we live in is just a little larger, geographically, than the three-county area we lived, commuted, and worked in for many years on what they call "The Peninsula" out there in the Bay Area. Those counties are San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, and they cover an area of about 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 sq. mi.).

Our département, called « le Loir-et-Cher », is — you might have guessed — basically rural. Okay, entirely rural. It covers some 6,000 square kilometers from near Le Mans on its northwest side to Saint-Aignan in the south and Vierzon on the southeast end. Blois, in the middle, is its biggest city, with a metropolitan area (called an agglomération in French) of about 75,000 people. San Francisco — and I mean the city itself, not counting any surrounding area, is 10 or 11 times larger.

The whole Loir-et-Cher département, which is barely bigger geographically than the three-county area where we lived and worked in California, has a population of about 325,000. The area in California that I've described has a population of 3.25 million! (The Paris area, by comparison, is twice as large geographically (12,000 sq. km) and has a population of 11.5 million.)

Speaking of the country vs. the city, you might not know that our département, the Loir-et-Cher, has had a popular song written about it. I can't think of any other French département (there are 100 of them — they are like counties or little states in U.S. terms) that can claim that distinction. Except Paris, of course, but that hardly counts.

The song was a big hit in the 1970s and I remember it from back then, although I didn't yet know where the Loir-et-Cher was located. I had been to Chambord and Blois to see the châteaux in the early 1970s, but I didn't know what département they were in. Now I know that the name Loir-et-Cher is known by nearly all French people, and it is synonymous with rurality, farming, and the old-fashioned life out in the country.

More about the song later...

Bitter greens in salads

One of the best salad greens we get here in France on a regular basis is scarole — escarole in English and it's sometimes called that in French too. We've been enjoying it for the past few weeks, and it's a wintertime product. It's a member of the chicory family, along with frisée (curly or frisée endive) and endive (Belgian endive).

The chicory family gives salad greens that are on the bitter side. Much of the bitterness of the original plants has been bred out of them by selective propogation, but some remains. Often they are "blanched" — in other words, protected from sunlight so that they leaves are whiter and more tender. Other bitter greens, from different plant families, are pissenlit (dandelion leaves), cresson (watercress), and mâche (lamb's lettuce). All these are treated the same way in French salads.

A standard French salad of escarole and red beets

To counter the slight bitter taste, people make salads of escarole, frisée, or Belgian endive that include sweet, salty, or other strong-flavored ingredients. The classic salade lyonnaise, for example, is curly endive with smoked pork lardons (bacon) and a poached egg, with a vinegary dressing. Hard-boiled eggs pair with Belgian endive or escarole salads, and so do cheeses like Roquefort or cubes of Gruyère or Comté. The saltiness of bacon or cheese mutes the bitterness of the greens.

Often the dressings served with bitter greens of this type are made with a good amount of garlic or shallots, which also take off the bitter edge. Sometimes garlic croutons, called chapons, are added to the salad for both their crunchy texture and their taste, which are good with the bitter greens. Walnuts are very good in these bitter salads too, for their sweetness and nuttiness.

Smoked pork lardons and a garlicky vinaigrette dressing
make another standard French escarole salad.

Mild lettuces like batavia (green leaf lettuce), laitue (Boston lettuce), or feuille de chêne (oakleaf lettuce) are too tender and delicate to stand up to such strong, assertive ingredients. The more tender lettuces are usually just dressed with a mild vinaigrette, made with less vinegar and more good oil, and sometimes flavored with fresh herbs or a little chopped shallot.

One salad ingredient that lends sweetness to bitter greens is betteraves (beets or beetroot). Beets are tossed with Belgian endive, frisée, escarole, watercress, or, especially, mâche. The beets themselves are usually dressed first with vinaigrette and chopped shallots. Red wine vinegar goes especially well with beets, and toasted walnuts are good in a salad with them and escarole or frisée, for example.

Escarole, beets, vinaigrette, and good bread... oh là là

The nice thing about beets in France is that you normally buy them already cooked. They are sold out of a paper-lined crate at the markets and even at the supermarket, but sometimes you get them shrink-wrapped (sous vide). They are a standard item and available everywhere. Buying them pre-cooked means you are saved the long cooking time they require. One of my French books says that raw beets need to be boiled for three hours!

That's a very long time and I think that the raw beets we get today don't need more than about an hour's cooking, whether in boiling water or wrapped in foil and roasted in the oven. In her cookbook from the 1920s (I think), the woman who called herself Tante Marie wrote this about beets:

Tante Marie says beets are better cooked in a slow oven,
where their sugars develop more fully. She says to leave
them in the oven to cook for at least seven hours!

Roasted for seven hours! I bet the beets are really good cooked that way, but the instructions date back to a time when the kitchen stove was also a source of heat for the whole house. There was always a fire going in the kitchen when the weather outside was chilly. So you had the luxury of putting beets in a place in the oven where they wouldn't burn and leaving them there all day, or overnight.

If you can get endive, escarole, or frisée (curly endive) where you live, try them in salad with the flavor ingredients they are served with in France. They are good for you, interesting in texture and taste, and they make a good change from everyday tossed salads.

Steamed pork “barbecue”

I wish I had a smoker. You know, for smoking pork, chicken, fish, and other meats. I guess that is a project to work on. Meanwhile...

I've found a method for cooking meat that I really like: steaming it. I steam it in a big pot on top of the stove, on a folding steaming rack that in French is called a marguerite. That's because it looks, if you stretch your imagination a little, like a daisy, and that's what the word marguerite means. It fits in pots of different sizes because the "petals" fold up. These steaming racks or baskets are used in other countries too.

This is a marguerite. Your probably have one in your kitchen.

Yesterday at SuperU I bought a pork roast. On the label, it said « Filet de porc sans os » — boneless pork fillet — but that's not what it was. In reality, it was what I'd call a pork loin roast — une longe de porc. That's not the tenderloin — le filet mignon — but a very lean, drier cut of pork.

Steamed pork loin, shredded with a fork...

To cook it, I decided to steam it. That way, I could cook it for a long time without the risk of drying it out or burning it. Cooked in the oven, in dry heat, pork loin can get stringy and unappetizingly dry. This is the second pork roast I've steamed this way, and I'm pretty happy with the result. Steaming is a good way to cook a lamb or pork shoulder too.

... and then chopped

All you have to do is set the roast or shoulder on the steaming rack and pour in enough water to just come up to the bottom of the rack. Salt, pepper, and otherwise season the pork as you like. I put on some crushed hot red pepper flakes and a good quantity of smoked paprika. I also put about half a cup of distilled vinegar — vinaigre blanc — into the steaming liquid.

Writing this, it just dawned on me that this would be a very good use for a pressure cooker — une cocotte minute. I have two of them, and I hardly every use either one. Next time I'll try it in the little stainless-steel pressure cooker I have sitting around doing nothing.

The chopped pork roast seasoned with the reduced
steaming liquid plus vinegar and spices

Steam the roast until its internal temperature, measured with a meat thermometer, gets up to at least 195ºF, or 90ºC. My roast actually went up to 205ºF. At high temperature, all the collagen and other connective tissue in the meat melts, adding moisture to the meat and tenderizing the muscle fibers.

When the roast is done, you can reduce the steaming liquid in the bottom of the pot and use it as a sauce. In my case, I shredded and then chopped the pork to make a kind of pulled-pork dish resembling Eastern N.C. "barbecue" but without the need for a long- and slow-burning wood fire. The smoked paprika adds smokiness, and some extra vinegar and hot pepper only improves the sauce. I'm not above putting a spritz of hickory or mesquite liquid smoke in it too.

Progress and changes

Jacques the building contractor sent one of his men over on Thursday to seal all the cracks and seams in our upstairs closets where cold air was coming in. It took the man all day, and he seems to have done an excellent job. It's been very windy this morning and we aren't feeling it up here in the loft at all.

The weather is still very mild and very wet most of the time. Walt got up this morning, looked out the window, and said: "There are all these very strange points of light in the sky." Ha ha. That's right, it's clear this morning, but that's not supposed to last. A rain front is moving in from the northwest and will give us steady rain all afternoon and into the night, according to the forecast I just saw.

This morning's sunrise, with a rare clear sky

Oh, and I got the currency exchange done. It's easy once I've made up my mind. I set up the transaction, then I send a request form to the bank in the U.S. by e-mail, and I wait for a call. The phone rings, I answer a few security questions to prove I am who I say I am, and the money is sent.

Living on U.S. dollars in a country where they are not the legal tender is not the ideal situation to be in. But there we are. We are at the mercy of the dollar/euro exchange rate. It certainly makes budgeting more complicated.

I ended up getting a rate of $1 U.S. = 0.76 € this time. That's not too bad. Expressed in dollars per euro, that's 1 € = $1.31. I realized a gain of a couple of hundred euros by waiting a few days as the euro fell against the U.S. dollar. Every euro counts, that's my attitude. When I changed money last spring, I got 80 eurocents per dollar, but in March it was only 72 eurocents. So my average for the year is $1 = 0.76 €. We did several currency transactions in 2010 because we were having the attic converted into new living space.

In other news, we think one of the houses in our hamlet might be going on the market. There are only 9 houses here at La Renaudière, and about half of them are occupied only seasonally. None has been sold since we bought ours in 2002/2003. The house we think might be advertised for sale soon belonged to a woman who died last year. She was 95 years old. Her two children — people my age — inherited the house, but one lives in the Paris area and the other lives down south near the Mediterranean.

Yesterday's sunset

Both of the late owner's heirs have come and spent a few days here over the past year, but not often, and they never stay long. One of them told me the place needs a lot a work. I've never seen the inside, and, unfortunately, they don't seem to do open houses here the way they do in the U.S. to sell houses. I'd love to see the interior, what facilities it has, and how it is decorated. All I know is that there are at least two small outbuildings and there's a small orchard of half a dozen apple trees out back. The house has great views of the vineyard right outside.

We haven't seen any « A Vendre » signs go up yet, but there's been a flurry of activity over there this week. Obviously, contractors are being called in, either to repair things or to spiff the place up. And Walt found a real estate agent's calling card on the ground on the road out there. I don't even know if the heirs are here right now, or are having all this done from afar. I haven't seen them or their car.

Watching the rates

It's time for me to transfer some U.S. dollars over to France so that we'll have money to live on for the next six months. Doing the transfer is not complicated, but it is a lot of trouble. I have to set up a transfer with a company that specializes in currency conversions and agree on the exchange rate. Then I have to have my bank in the U.S. wire the dollars to the currency exchange company, which is in London. The London office wires the money as euros on to my bank here in Saint-Aignan (Montrichard, actually) at the agreed-upon rate.

It's important to me to get the best rate I can get for the conversion from U.S. dollars to euros. As a retired person, I'm in a position where every dollar — or euro — counts. And the dollar is weaker than we'd like it to be. For the past few days, I've been watching the exchange rate evolve in favor of the American currency. In other words, just this week the U.S. dollar has gone from being worth 0.74 to 0.77 centimes d'euro (eurocents). In other words, the euro has dropped from $1.34 U.S. to $1.30.

As a hypothetical example, let's say you are having $25,000 U.S. dollars transferred to Europe. If you change the money at $1 = 0.74 €, you end up getting 18,500 euros. If you change the money at a rate of $1 = 0.77 €, you get 19,250 euros. Those 750 extra euros represent a good portion of our everyday expenses for a whole month (groceries, fuel for the car, bread, wine, satellite TV, Internet, etc.). Or a six-month supply of heating oil. Or several years' worth of firewood. A round-trip plane ticket to the U.S. Or, for example, I could buy a nice computer with the extra money. We could go spend a week in a rental apartment in a nice neighborhood in Paris. Or... well, I can dream, can't I?

Remember, the above example is purely hypothetical. Nonetheless, when we bought our house in 2003, that sum, $25,000 U.S., was worth more than 23,000 euros — nearly 4,000 € more than it is worth today. In 2002, it was worth more that 28,000 euros! And a couple of years ago, at the U.S. dollar's low point, it was worth less than 16,000 €. All the while, prices in France, as nearly everywhere, just keep going up. Wild and unpredictable currency fluctuations have been a hard reality of the American (and British) expatriate's life for the past eight years.

When I applied for my future U.S. Social Security benefits the other day, the man I talked to at the American embassy in Paris told me that I can have the monthly payment sent directly to my bank here in France in euros. There is no fee involved for the conversion of the dollars into euros. The only unknown factor is the exchange rate. We won't know from one month to the next how much money will come through when it gets to the bank in euros.

I think I'm going to try it. Having the money paid into a U.S. bank account and then processing the conversion into euros once or twice a year is a big hassle. Something in my head says I'd have more control over the process if I continued doing it that way, however. I'm sure that's just an illusion. There's no need to be a control freak. Exchange rates are like the weather. You can worry about them, and you can talk about them, but really, you can't predict or change them. All you can do is watch... and adapt.

Weather, cold and especially wet

We are finally having a real thaw in Saint-Aignan, after about 6 weeks of freezing temperatures and off-and-on snow. December 2010 was the coldest month we've had in the last 8 years, and it was also the wettest month we've had since we starting keeping rain and temperature records at our house in 2004.

The low temperature this morning was in the mid-40s F (8ºC) and the highs over the next few days are supposed to go as high as 12ºC (mid-50s). It's a big change, and we're glad for it. The price for this "tropical heat wave" is rain, which started last night. There's quite a bit of wind too.

The stretch of bad weather started during the last week of November. We had snow then, and it continued for about three weeks, off and on. In December we recorded 13 mornings with temperatures below freezing (as low as –5ºC, which is in the low 20s F), and we had only 9 days when the temperature got up higher than 5ºC (41ºF).

About the only dry place Bertie can find to sit outdoors
these days is on top of a car parked out back.

We have a very temperate climate here in the Loire Valley, but you wouldn't know it if you lived through our December 2010. It was the rainiest month we've ever experienced here in Saint-Aignan. We recorded a total of 133 mm (more than 5 inches) of water in our rain gauge. A lot of days, we had to bring in a rain gauge full of snow and wait for it to melt to see how much precipitation we really got.

Our average monthly precipitation is about 60 mm. In 2010, we more than doubled that in December, and we nearly doubled it in July 2010 too, with 110 mm. (An inch of rain is about 25 mm.) Our drought is over, for sure. The only other months that have ever come close in amount of precipitation were June 2007 and November 2009, both with just 100 mm. In no other month since we started keeping track have we exceeded 100 mm of precipitation.

The ground out in the garden is very squishy, and even the gravel road out through the vineyard feels spongy when you walk on it — unless it's frozen solid, of course, which it was earlier this week. The pond out back has been overflowing for weeks now. The water runs down what is normally a tractor path just out behind our back hedge. It's cutting quite a gully, so that track will need some maintenance next spring.

Or maybe that tractor path will just revert to being a natural watercourse. It depends on the weather.

Feeling lucky

Did you eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day? I did. It's a tradition, and a superstition. Eating black-eyed peas on January 1 brings you good luck for the whole year.

Luckily, black-eyed peas are available in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. I got a one-kilogram bag of dried black-eyes at Intermarché. They put them in the imported food section. They are imported from Portugal. I think they might actually be grown in the U.S.A. Oh, and in French they are called cornilles [kor-NEE-yuh]. Here's a link to a brief Wikipedia article in French.

Black-eyed peas with turkey confit and Montbéliard sausages

There are quite a few Portuguese people living in the Saint-Aignan area. SuperU has an annual semaine portugaise — a week when Portuguese products are on special sale. Evidently, black-eyed peas are appreciated in Portugal and in Brazil, as they are in the U.S. South. Portugal had colonies in Africa, and that's where black-eyed peas came from originally.

Confit de dinde — turkey leg and thigh sections, with
the turkey heart and gizzard, cooked slowly in
duck fat for two or three hours and then drained

We cook our black-eyed peas with smoked Montbéliard sausages from eastern France, and we season them with duck fat and vegetables including celery, onion, and carrots. This year, I made confit de dinde — turkey leg-thigh sections slow-cooked in duck fat until the meat is very tender and cooked to the point of falling off the bone. That turkey meat went well with the black-eyed peas too.

Black-eyed peas have a distinctive, pleasant taste compared to all the other dried beans — cocos blancs (navy or great northern beans), cocos roses (pinto beans), lingots blancs (canellini beans), and haricots rouges (kidney beans). You can use all of them in soups and salads, though, or eat them as beans the way we did, with or without accompanying meats.

Starting the year

I'm going out today to start the New Year. I have to go to the pharmacy, so I'll be able to wish a Bonne Année to all the employees there. I've gotten to know the six or seven of them over the past 7½ years — to the point where a few of them always shake my hand when I go in, rather than just say bonjour.

Then I'm going to go over the village of Seigy to buy some wine from the vigneron whose rosé and Gamay red wines we prefer over all the others we've tried in the area. Again, I've gotten to know the man, his wife, and his daughters over the years.

On Saturday I'll go to the morning market in Saint-Aignan to greet the vendors who I buy products from most often. Then I need to go over the the garage one day soon and make an appointment to have the car worked on one more time — before Christmas they couldn't do the front-end alignment because there was a part they needed to order first. That'll be another round of Bonne Année greetings.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get my U.S. Social Security pension set up. I turn 62 in March, so I should be able to start collecting my pension on April 1. A couple of months ago, I went on line and saw that nowadays you can apply for your SSA pension over the Internet. That seemed easy enough. And then I got a letter from SSA saying I ought to apply three months in advance of the date when I expect to start receiving payments.

So last week I went back to the Social Security Administration's web site and started working through the process. It only took a minute for me to find out that I was not eligible to apply for benefits on line. Why? Because I don't live in the U.S. My primary residence for tax and legal purposes is here in France.

The instructions told me I needed to contact the Federal Benefits Unit at the embassy in my country of residence. The link showed me that I could contact that office, which is in Paris, either by phone or by e-mail. I sent an e-mail. I got a couple of responses from an agent there who said he'd call me. I'm still waiting for that call. I guess I'll have to phone the FBU in Paris this morning if I don't get a call today.

Everything international gets complicated really fast. Straddling two cultures, two legal systems, two tax systems, and two currencies makes nearly everything twice as hard to deal with. You have to get used to that if you come to live here.

Gâteau de riz – rice pudding

One of my favorite rice pudding recipes is this one (in French, it's a gâteau de riz or "rice cake"). You make the pudding on top of the stove and then you put it in a caramelized mold and let it set up in the refrigerator. I think a pyrex loaf pan makes a good mold, because with pyrex you can make the caramel in the microwave right in the loaf pan itself. An other way to do it would be to make the caramel in a saucepan on top of the stove and then pour it into the loaf pan.

The recipe doesn't have any eggs in it. It calls for milk, which I assume to be whole milk. Since I usually have only skim milk in the house, I always add some cream to enrich the pudding. This time, I put in 40 cl of liquid cream (30% butterfat) and 60 cl of skim milk (0% butterfat).

The caramel in the cake pan liquefies in contact
with the cooked rice mixture and gives good flavor.

The recipe also calls for a vanilla bean, but a teaspoon of American-style vanilla extract works just fine. I used riz rond — short-grain rice — because I like its texture cooked this way, but I'm sure long-grain rice would be good too. The recipe doesn't specify a type of rice.

Speaking of the recipe, it comes from the little Cuisine pour toute l'année cookbook written by a woman named Monique Maine and published in Paris in 1969. I use this book all the time. It's full of simple recipes that are quick and easy to make. Here's the rice pudding recipe:


And a fairly literal translation:

Monique Maine's Rice Pudding

1 teacupful of rice, 1 liter of milk, 1 vanilla bean, 175 grams of granulated sugar, 12 lumps of sugar, half a glass of water

Pour the rice into a strainer; wash it under running water. Drain it. In a big saucepan, boil the milk with the granulated sugar and the vanilla bean, split open. Pour the rice into the boiling milk, turn down the heat. Cook on very low heat for about 45 to 50 minutes, stirring once in a while. At the end of this time, the rice is cooked; turn off the heat. In a high-sided cake mold, make a golden caramel sauce using the 12 sugar lumps and the water, spread it all over the bottom and sides of the mold, which you will fill with rice. Let it cool, put it in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours. Unmold when ready to serve.

Finally, here is the recipe in American format:

Rice pudding in a caramelized mold

For the rice pudding:
1 cup rice
1 quart milk (or half-and-half)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
¾ cup sugar

To caramelize the mold:
4 Tbsp. sugar
3 Tbsp. water

Put the rice in a wire strainer and rinse it thoroughly in running water. Drain it and set it aside.

In a big saucepan, put the milk on to boil. Add the sugar and the vanilla extract. When the mixture comes to the boil, add the rice and turn down the heat to the lowest setting. Let it cook very slowly for 45 to 50 minutes, stirring occasionally. When it's cooked, take it off the heat.

Make a caramel sauce in a loaf pan. You can do it in the microwave: put the sugar and water in the bottom of a pyrex pan. Put it in the microwave oven on high heat for three or four minutes. Watch it carefully — it will burn in an instant. When the sugar starts to turn golden brown and thicken up, take the mold out of the oven and turn the pan from side to side so that the caramel coats the sides of the pan an inch high or so.

When the caramel has cooled slightly and firmed up, spoon the rice pudding into the mold. Press it down with the back of a serving spoon and smooth off the top. Let it cool and then put it in the refrigerator for at least three hours. The caramel will liquefy and make it easy to unmold the rice "cake" — when you're ready to serve it, turn it over on a plate or platter. Be careful, the caramel will be liquid and will go all over the place! Cut slices of the cake and serve with a little caramel sauce.

All about oysters

Just now, looking for an English name for the oysters that are commonly called « huîtres creuses » in France, I came across a very good web site about oysters. Here's a link. The author, John McCabe, has done a great service for us English-speakers who want to describe and discuss oysters and the oyster industry in France.

"Eating oysters is good for what ails you."

Huîtres creuses literally means "hollow oysters" or maybe "bowl-shaped oysters." These are oysters that have one shell that is deeply concave or "cupped" — the other is much flatter, and it fits over the top of the cupped shell like a lid on a bowl. In English, however, "hollow oysters" — and they aren't really hollow, because the succulent oyster flesh is inside there — are just called "Pacific oysters."

Red wine vinegar with chopped shallot and black pepper makes
a mignonnette sauce that's good with oysters on the half shell.

That's where the species came from — the Pacific Ocean. The history of the French oyster business is fairly complex. The oysters that make up by far the largest portion of the total haul in France were imported to French waters from Japan a couple of decades ago. That's because the native French oysters had been nearly fished out and then decimated by a parasite.

Don't forget to eat your oysters...

The Pacific oysters we had for our New Year's Eve dinner were my favorite ones. They are produced down near the town of Marennes, which is on the mainland just across from the tip of the Ile d'Oléron. That's between La Rochelle and Bordeaux on France's Atlantic coast. Walt and I spent a week on the island in 2008 and I blogged about it here.

Our platter of Pacific oysters from Marennes-Oléron

We actually had two kinds of Pacific oysters in the batch we enjoyed consuming on December 31. The ones we paid for were Pacific oysters "fattened" in salt ponds called « claires », and are known as « fines de claires » [feen-duh-KLEHR] — fines because they are "fine" or "refined" oysters. The claires are man-made basins dug out of the mud in salt marshes along the coast. They're fairly small, Mr. McCabe says, at about 500 square meters (say 50 x 100 sq. ft.), and they are shallow — maybe 1 or 2 feet deep.

« Fines de claires » oysters

Oysters are gathered in the beds in coastal waters where they breed and live and they are put into these salt ponds to fatten up under nearly ideal conditions. Like fine French cheeses, oysters go through a process of « affinage » or "refinement" before they are taken to market. Cheeses kept in proper conditions of temperature and humidity improve with age, and oysters that spend two or three months in salt ponds to feed and fatten up also benefit greatly. In the ponds, they are not subjected to tides and currents that can at times leave the oyster beds high and dry, and leave the oysters exposed to the hot, baking sun for hours at at time.

So we bought a dozen and a half fines de claires oysters, and as a bonus the vendor selling them at the market threw in a few oysters of the same variety that had not been fattened in claires. Those are called « huîtres de pleine mer » — "open-sea oysters" that are gathered out in the offshore beds. Some people say they like them better because they taste more natural and wild — and of course they are less expensive.

Huîtres plates (and a few huîtres de pleine mer on the right)

We also bought a dozen « huîtres plates » — the "flat oysters" that are the original Northern European species. These native oysters were nearly fished to extinction in the last century, and then a parasite decimated the remaining population. They were first replaced in France by oysters imported from the waters off Portugal and that were actually more like the Pacific "cupped" oyster. Then the « huîtres portugaises » also caught a disease and were wiped out too. That's when new seed oysters were brought in from the Pacific Ocean — about 40 years ago.

The native French flat oysters are also called « belons » because they were originally cultivated and fattened at the mouth of the Belon river in Brittany. Only ones that have been farmed and fattened in Brittany can legally be called belons in France — the same oysters that come from other areas (like Marennes-Oléron) are just huîtres plates.

After eating raw oysters, a nice escarole salad with croûtons,
bacon, and a garlicky vinaigrette dressing can be refreshing.

I thought the flat oysters we bought had a muddy taste compared to the crisp, clean taste of the fines de claires. Maybe it was just those particular ones, because the flat oysters are reputed to have a distinctive metallic taste and to be saltier (plus iodé) than the fines de claires. I didn't find that to be the case. I'll probably stick to fines de claires from now on. But maybe I will soon try some real belons from Brittany.

Say it now!

One night this week on the TF1 evening news, the anchorman announced that it is permissible, according to les bonnes manières and people who practice them, to express happy new year wishes starting on December 26!

Until now, the rule in France has always been that expressing such wishes prior to midnight on December 31 was bad form. I guess that's a French custom (or superstition) that is changing. Fact is, nearly everybody here is still very careful not to say Bonne Année before January 1. If somebody does say it, he or she apologizes or qualifies the expression to acknowledge that a rule is being broken.

One French friend who now knows a lot of "Anglo-Saxon" expatriates in the Touraine region told me the other day that she now has to cope with expressing two sets of holiday greetings at year's end. The Anglo-Saxons expect a Christmas card and a Merry Christmas, whereas French people are indifferent to Christmas greetings of that sort. Sending Christmas greetings is just not important in the culture. People might say « Bon Noël » to you in the shops and markets on December 23 or 24, but they might as well be saying « Bon appétit ! » The family dinner on Christmas Eve is sacrosanct. Meanwhile, you won't get any Christmas cards from friends and neighbors.

French people do celebrate Christmas, of course. It's a family holiday, are religious holiday. It has become more commercialized, with present-buying, especially for children, at fever pitch in the days before December 25. There are decorations and lights in the cities, towns, and villages, and even on some houses, at Christmastime. But the holiday itself is a private affair.

However, French people do expect new year's greetings in January. This month, it is very important and polite to seek out friends, close acquaintances, neighbors, and others who are important to your daily life and "present your best wishes" — presenter vos meilleurs vœux — to them for a happy and healthy 2011. A telephone call will do, and it's nice to send a Happy New Year card to special people. You have until January 31 to express or send greetings and wishes, I've been told. Don't mention prosperity, however, the way we Americans tend to do. Talking about money is in bad taste.

So today I can finally say it:

Très Bonne Année à Toutes et à Tous.
En vous souhaitant une année 2011
pleine de joie et de bonheur —
et surtout bonne santé ! —
je vous envoie tous mes bons vœux...

Happy New Year

Oysters to finish the year

Tomorrow's date will be 1/1/11. Let's hope it's a singular year.

We just came back from the market in Saint-Aignan, where we went to buy some oysters for our New Year's Eve dinner. Oysters and then a big escarole (scarole in French) salad with some lardons (chunks of smoked bacon), croûtons (cut from a baguette), and garlicky vinaigrette dressing will be our food for the day — plus some rice pudding that I made day before yesterday.

The church in Saint-Aignan on New Year's Eve 2010

Yesterday I bought some Muscadet wine to go with the oysters. It's a very dry white wine from the area down at the mouth of the Loire River, and it's the quintessential shellfish wine. It's not expensive either — about 3 € a bottle. With the oysters and Muscadet, we eat slices of rye bread spread with butter.

Rice pudding with a caramel sauce —
Gâteau de riz au caramel

And with the oysters, we like to have what is called a mignonnette sauce — that's a shallot diced up into a little wine vinegar, with lots of black pepper. A few drops of the vinegar-shallot sauce on each oyster does the trick.

Three kinds of oysters: "flat" at the top; "open sea" on
the right; and salt-pond fattened on the left.

We got three kinds of oysters: 18 Fines de Claires, which are oysters that are fattened up in salt ponds along the coast for a couple of months before they are taken to market; 12 "flat" oysters, which are the original French species, now not so plentiful as they used to be; and 3 pleine mer ("open sea" or wild, I guess) oysters, which the market vendor gave us as a bonus — they're a present for the person assigned the task of opening the the other oysters, she said.

I'll have more to say about the oysters after we've tasted them. I'm not sure we've ever bought the flat oysters before.

Un beau plateau de fruits de mer

Our New Year's Eve meal is very simple. Just look at the plateau de fruits de mer — shellfish platter — that I enjoyed at a friend's house in Normandy a few years ago. We could get the same thing here, but for the two of us it would be overkill.

The cheese stand at the market in Saint-Aignan

The market was small and not crowded. Only the essential merchants were there. One sells all kinds of seafood and fish. Another had oysters only. Two or three were selling produce. One had nice breads and brioches. And finally, the regular cheese vendor was there, with a great selection of cheeses from all over France.

Buying and stacking wood

We received a delivery of firewood yesterday. With all the cold weather we were having, it didn't seem like a bad idea to have some extra wood to burn — even though we thought we might already have enough to last us through a "normal" winter.

We didn't initiate the transaction, however. Friends did. She's French (Parisian) and he's English. They live in the old part of Saint-Aignan, and they have a couple of fireplaces in their house. Problem is, they don't have any outdoor space where they can store large quantities of wood. We told them they could store it at our house, and went 50-50 with them on the purchase of 7 stères. That's 7 cubic meters, or about 2 cords.

A hazy sunrise this morning

She made contact with a wood seller over on the south side of Saint-Aignan — found him through an ad in one of those free advertising papers — and arranged for delivery on December 29. We held our breath and crossed our fingers that it wouldn't rain really hard that day, or snow. As it turned out, the weather yesterday was almost sunny and the temperature was mild for late December: 7ºC — nearly 45ºF.

She called the seller on Tuesday to confirm everything. Then she called me and said there was no need to call him too « parce qu'il vous connâit. » He knows us? Yes, she said, he has delivered wood to you before, so he doesn't need directions. Oh, then it's Jean-Claude? Yes. Jean-Claude helps our across-the-street neighbors to maintain their property — trimming hedges, clearing undergrowth in wooded areas, and cutting down dead trees. We've been acquainted with him for 5 or 6 years.

Our hamlet at sunrise today

Jean-Claude showed up shortly before 2:00 yesterday. That was the agreed-upon time. Our friends arrived shortly thereafter, and so did Jean-Claude's son-in-law on his tractor, pulling a trailer containing the two cords of meter-long oak logs. The idea was that the sellers would just dump the wood in our front driveway, or courtyard, or whatever you'd call it, and the buyers would move it to a prepared spot and stack it neatly.

Dumping the wood in the driveway required backing the trailer in through the front gate, which is not all that wide. On his first attempt, Jean-Claude's son-in-law misjudged the distance to the gate post on the right and proceeded to neatly shear off the cast-iron bell we had mounted on the post. It was our "cat bell" and Walt just last summer painted it black so that it resembled Bertie.

The cat bell is irreparably damaged, we think.

Merde. That was all I could say. And c'est pas grave. What could we do? Maybe the shop where we found the bell in 2004 will still have them in stock. Or something similar. We need a bell out there. There's also an electric one, but there's a bad contact somewhere in the wiring and it's hard get it to ring. Besides, the button is hard for people to find. The cat bell was a lot handier.

Anyway, the wood got dumped, Jean-Claude got paid (320 € for the 7 stères of oak), and our friends and we got busy moving the logs and stacking them up against the north wall of the house, under the balcony. Since our friends had been nice enough to being along a helper, a local man who works with and for them, there were five pairs of hands to do the work.

We debated whether we should set up a "log brigade" — like an old-fashioned bucket brigade to move water. Our friend said it would be « une bonne méthode de translation ligneuse ». We finally decided we weren't organized, disciplined, or coordinated enough to do that, so we just tackled the work by brute force. Each of us would grab a log or two, move it or them to where the pile was, and try not to bump into each other in the traffic muddle that ensued.

The new woodpile — two cords of oak logs

Callie the Collie just sat out in the yard and watched us with an amused look on her face. On pourrait dire qu'elle se fendait un peu la gueule... Too bad she's not capable of splitting logs as well as she can "split her gueule."

In an hour the work was done. We retired to the living room to celebrate, qui with a glass of wine, qui with a cup of tea, as they say in French. It was a job well done, on a day made to order for outside activity.

France in 1970 – old letters

Five years ago when my mother sold her house, I learned that she had kept all the letters I wrote to her over the years, starting in 1970. We used to write a lot. All of us, I mean. MA also had packets of letters I had received from friends I went to college and spent time in France with. The letters were in boxes in the attic and garage, and I didn't know it. Or had forgotten.

I found one this morning that describes my trip to Paris on Saturday, March 21, 1970. I took the train from Marseille to Paris with an American from Nantucket who was friends with a fellow student of mine in Aix. We left Marseille at 10 p.m. and spent the night on a train, in a compartment with three French guys, two Englishwomen, and an Englishman. With us, that made eight in the compartment, so it was crowded.

Letters to the parental units from 1970

Two of the French guys — brothers about my age — were traveling with what I described as "a cute little kitten," and sometime during the night the kitten peed all over my pants leg. I was really fresh, as you can imagine, when we arrived in Paris at 7 a.m. that Sunday morning. I had turned 21 years old just a few weeks earlier.

Recently, remembering back, one of the things I've been wondering about that two-week trip to Paris so long ago is how I afforded it. Well, the answer is in the letter. We arrived in Paris early in the morning and all the passengers from our train compartment went off in different directions, including the American from Nantucket. He was going to Amsterdam. I headed for the Latin Quarter. I wrote this in my letter to my parents:

Found a hotel within an hour, for 15 F a day (including breakfast) [Fifteen French francs were worth less than $3.00 U.S. at that time.] Small single room, creaky floor, very clean. Shower costs 2.50 F extra. Slept until 1:30 p.m., took métro to Place de la Concorde and strolled up the champs-Elysées to the Arche [sic] de Triomphe. Went to a movie after dinner and then to hotel and bed.

So that's how I afforded it. Less than $3.00 a night for room and breakfast, and there were plenty of Paris restaurants where I could have a full meal for 5 FF — less than a dollar.

I found this sticker in with my old letters.
"I lost my heart to Paris," it says (more or less).

Before going, I had written in a letter that all the other American students I knew were "spreading out all over Europe, from Greece to Scotland," for the two week spring holiday. Not me:

I figure I'll buy a round trip ticket to Paris for $40 and stay there until I get tired of it. Then if I run out of money I'll be guaranteed passage back to Aix when I do.... I figure I'll have $10 a day, even after train fare, and that should be plenty. Europe on $5 a Day lists hundreds of hotels in Paris where single rooms cost $2 – $3 a day, so that should be no problem.

One more paragraph from a letter I wrote a few days after my 21st birthday:

Sunday we took a bus excursion to Nîmes. Six of us Americans and about 20 old (over 60) French people. Kathy, a girl from Duke, got sick and threw up, so the bus driver had to clean up. Plus, every time we stopped they had to wait for us to get back on the bus. Old people get tired and don't want to stop and see as much. The bus driver got lost twice and had to ask directions from old men working in the fields alongside the roads.

My parents were in their early 40s at that time, so I could talk to them about "old people" without risking any offense or hurt feelings! I'll be 62 in a few months, and I can attest that my observations as a 21-year-old were spot on.

Most of my letters from back then include at least one
paragraph like this one. I was an accomplished beggar!

I still looking at letters to see if I wrote anything about going to Les Halles in Paris during that trip.

More than you want to know about...

Yesterday I wrote about Les Halles in Paris. I was inspired to do so by an article that Walt found and in which the writer seemed to misstate the relationship between, and history of, the old central Paris marketplace and the newer, ex-urban market complex in the suburb of Rungis that replaced it.

I've often wondered where the term « halles » came from. Did it come into being in the 19th century, when the architect Baltard designed and oversaw the building of the market pavilions, or halls, in the area now known as Les Halles? Was it a recent linguistic borrowing from English, with its word "hall"?

After all, the word « hall » exists in French, borrowed presumably from English, which got it from German. It was borrowed fairly late, I think, and is pronounced [OL] or [AWL] and is used in the expressions hall de gare (lobby, concourse) or hall d'entrée (entry hall, lobby, foyer), for example. It doesn't mean "corridor" which is couloir.

The title page of the old dictionary I found on the web here.

So I've been reading about the word halles. The term is much older than the 19th century, and it probably came from German. French, after all, is half German and half Latin in origin, with a lot of English thrown in over the past several decades and generations. The Franks were Germans.

One quote I found dates from the time of French King Philippe Auguste, who was a contemporary of Richard the Lionhearted — the two men were born just two years apart in the 1150s. A writer of the time wrote about « Duas magnas domos, quas vulgus halas vocat... » in which merchandise was sold. That's "two big buildings, which the people call halls," I think. The term halles or its older equivalent was used currently in the late 12th century, which is when the central market place that came to be known as Les Halles was originally set up (between 1110 and 1180).

Voilà. Some have tried to find a Latin root for the term halle, but one etymologist says (and I translate): "I don't see how one can doubt that the word halles comes from the German word hall, signifying a covered space, a house, a portico, a palace, and exactly what we call une halle in French. There is no need to search for any other derivation."

This is a sample of the text I've been trying to read.

The singular form halle is really not used much any more, except historically, as when it is the name of a specific building, or in the name of some of today's stores (La Halle au Chaussures, for example). There's a beautiful old halle in the town of Bracieux, near Chambord, and another in Montrésor, not far south of Saint-Aignan, near Loches. I also remember such a covered marketplace in the town of Luynes, just west of Tours on the Loire, from a trip last summer.

In Tours, the central market, which is really just a single market pavilion, is called Les Halles. It's a newer building, but maybe it replaced two or three old market halls, hence the name in the plural. In Paris, the central city market came to be called Les Halles as well, and there of course there were many market halls or pavilions, so the plural made sense.

One of the main things to know about the word halle is that the initial H is what is called an « H aspiré ». The French H is never "aspirated" in the way the English H is, however. The aspirated French H simply prevents any kind of elision of preceding articles or any liaisons of the final consonants of preceding words.

In other words, Les Halles is pronounced [lay-AHL] and not *[lay-ZAHL]. And it's la halle [la-AHL], not *l'halle in writing and in pronunciation. That's the most important thing to know about the word if you are learning French. If you're going to the covered marketplace or to the Paris district called Les Halles, vous allez aux halles [voo-zah-ley-oh-AHL], not [oh-ZAHL]. There will be a test tomorrow.

The aspirated H of halles and other French words (le hangar, la Hollande, la haie, la honte, le hall, and so on) is a good sign that those words are derived or were borrowed from German or Germanic languages like English and Dutch, in which the H is physically, not just virtually, aspirated. That confirms the etymologist's statement. Latin words that begin with an H, like l'homme (from Latin homo, hominem) don't have the same kind of H, just a vestigial or historical H.

This is the kind of stuff I'm interested in, along with food and cooking.

Frigid France, then and now

We are living through the coldest December in France in the past 40 years, they are saying on the morning news show. We've had beautiful sunshine for two days now, but the price has been temperatures below freezing. I mean in the daytime. Early in the morning, it's like an icebox outside.

Forty years! The first time I came to France was 41 years ago. We landed in Paris on about December 30, 1969. I don't remember what the weather was like, but I do remember the atmosphere and the food. Already the food. I was 20 years old, and I had been learning French for seven years in North Carolina. (Don't laugh — I was lucky to have had excellent teachers, including several at college who were nationally and internationally respected.)

Foie gras et tranches de pain d'épices grillées à Noël

Anyway, I spent a semester in Aix-en-Provence during the first half of 1970. I do remember the weather there. It was much colder than I had thought it would be. I was coming from a very mild climate. The winds, that famous Mistral, roared and roared. The place where I lived — I rented a room from a family — was a long uphill walk from central Aix, where my classes were held, and I remember a few times having to trudge up the hill soaking wet because it was raining so hard.

I also remember that it snowed. It might have been in February or March. That really surprised me. A cold wind howled. The mild, sunny South of France. Ha!

Cutting cornpone into cubes to make stuffing for the turkey

At spring break, I went to spend two weeks in Paris. Other students headed for Spain, Greece, or Scandinavia. I just wanted to be in Paris. I stayed at a hotel at the place Maubert in the Latin Quarter — a hotel that went out of business several decades ago. It was definitely not what they call, in France, un palace.

And it snowed. I distinctly remember going to Versailles one day and walking around in the park at the château for hours in the snow. It was beautiful, of course, but my feet were wet and cold.

Foies de volaille — chicken or turkey livers — for the stuffing too

Back then, you could have what I considered an amazing meal in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter — nothing fancy by French standards, of course — for a dollar or two (5 to 10 francs). That was good for me, because I hardly ever had more than a dollar or two to my name. (I wonder how much that room at the Hôtel Pierwige cost?)

Yesterday, Walt read an article about the big wholesale food market in Rungis, south of Paris. The writer kind of got things mixed up and said that the Rungis market has existed for nearly a thousand years. The article said the Rungis market used to be located in central Paris in a district called Les Halles.

Oh well. The truth is that the market at Les Halles ("The Market Halls") existed from at least 1180 until about 1970. Then, because the narrow streets of central Paris were becoming too congested with trucks and cars, and because developers and politicians wanted to clean the area up and build something more profitable there, the whole market was transferred out to the suburbs.

Cooking chair à saucisses — sausage meat — for the stuffing too

Anyway, I remember going to Les Halles in 1970. I remember taking the metro over there and coming up out of the underground station to an amazing scene of confusion and hubbub. It was dark — it might have been snowing that day too. The memory is dark too. Demolition of the market pavillions had started in late 1969, but the market was still going.

It was too much for a 20-year-old from North Carolina. I couldn't make heads or tails of the place, and it was, frankly, kind of scary. Too real, and somehow threatening. I didn't stay long. I got back on the metro and went back to the Latin Quarter, with all of the other 20-year-olds. I'm sorry now that I didn't explore more.

I lived at Les Halles for three years at the end of the '70s and '80s. By then, it was a gigantic construction zone. It wasn't scary — at least not most of the time. The rue Montorgueil, today a kind of hip street full of cafés and restaurants and fancy food shops, had kept the atmosphere of the old Les Halles market to a great extent. It hadn't yet been pedestrianized and prettied up. Mornings, year-round, rain or shine or cold or hot, little old ladies wheeled wooden carts with wagon wheels out of the old courtyards and warehouses and sold vegetables, fruits, and other products to shoppers. It was something out of Victor Hugo, Flaubert, or Maupassant.

I was lucky to be able to get to know it, to buy food there in the shops and market stalls, and to learn a lot about cooking from merchants and French home cooks that I knew back then. One home cook was a woman who was in her late 70s then, the grandmother of a friend. She cooked lunch for us every Sunday for three years, teaching me what the traditional French dishes and meals were like. Another was the charcutière in a shop on the rue Montorgueil, who would patiently and thoroughly explain to me how to cook the products I bought from her.

A slice of that foie gras on a slice of the pain d'épices

(a kind of gingerbread but not too sweet)

The coldest winter I remember in Paris was 1978-79. The pipes froze in the little apartment I lived in just a few steps off the rue Montorgueil. I was on the top floor, so there wasn't much to keep the heat in. And the only heat in the place was a little electric radiator on wheels that you could roll around from room to room. There were only two rooms (350 sq. ft.) so it wasn't hard to move the radiator and keep it close by. The streets outside were icy and slippery. It was not something we were used to — the winters from 1970 to 1978 had been very mild in Paris and in Normandy.

Cold weather, good food. The dark days of December, the warmth and color of a little French kitchen. Time spent at the table, eating and talking. That's France for me.