Easy spinach soufflé

I'm writing this post Monday afternoon, Paris time, because the French national weather service, MétéoFrance — as well as other weather forecasting organizations — are predicting that we will have 60 to 70 mph (100 to 115 kph) winds overnight. Who knows if we will have electricity and Internet access on Tuesday morning, which is when the worst of the storm is supposed to pass through. If we do, I'll leave a comment or something.

Several months ago, I re-read Jacques Pépin's autobiography, which contains a collection of recipes. One that I've made several times is Pépin's mother's easy egg and cheese soufflé. Sometimes I add chunks of bacon — lardons fumés — to it. The nice thing about this rustic soufflé is that you don't have to separate the eggs. You don't have to beat the egg whites. You just make it with whole beaten eggs.

Béchamel sauce with cooked spinach

Yesterday (day before yesterday as you read this) I decided to make the Pépin soufflé with spinach. The recipe is very simple. First you make a béchamel sauce: Melt 4 tablespoons of butter in a pan. Cook one small onion, finely diced, in the butter if you want to. Then toss in 4 tablespoons of flour. Stir that around until the flour is all mixed with the hot butter and let it cook for two or three minutes.

The spinach, béchamel, cheese, and eggs in a
buttered ramequin, ready to cook

At that point, pour in, all at once, 325 milliliters of milk (or a mixture of cream and milk, or U.S. half-and-half) and stir it over a hot flame until the sauce starts to thicken. Meanwhile, cook a pound of spinach (or a package of frozen spinach — 10 or 12 oz. or about 350 grams) in a pan or in the microwave. Add the cooked spinach to the béchamel sauce. Take it off the heat and let it cool for 10 or 15 minutes.

Here are the four little soufflés in the oven.

While waiting, grate cheese — cheddar or parmesan or Swiss — so that you have about a cup (half a pint). Break 4 eggs into a bowl and beat them lightly. When the sauce is cool enough, pour in the beaten eggs and the grated cheese. Season with salt, pepper, and a good pinch of grated nutmeg. Stir all that together.

An easy spinach soufflé

Butter a baking dish or some individual ramequins and pour the egg mixture into them. Bake the mixture for 30 to 40 minutes in a 180ºC/350ºF oven until it puffs up and browns on top (several smaller dishes will get done faster than one larger dish).

Serve immediately, as with any other soufflé. If you let the cooked mixture cool, it will fall. But it will still be excellent. Serves 4 as an appetizer or two as a main course.

P.S. Up late (for me) — 11:05 p.m. The wind is picking up and I can't sleep. It just occurred to me that this post about a soufflé is weirdly appropriate since the French verb for the wind blowing is souffler — le vent souffle. We've got all our shutters closed and we're hoping no roof tiles blow off and no trees blow over.

P.P.S. 6:55 a.m. The wind has been roaring all night but it hasn't been as bad as some of the weather forecasting services said it might be. It's still dark outside so I don't know if any trees or limbs are down. I'll see in about an hour when I take the dog out.

Hazy views...

...through steamed-up windows. Yesterday was a chilly day outside, with much mist. We stayed in, except for my morning walk and Walt's afternoon walk with the dog. Later in the day, we had a hot fire in the wood-burner.

Locked in... well, not really

In the morning, I didn't walk all the way out to the end of the gravel road. Callie and I ambled around the edge of the vineyard, even though it was sloppy wet and slippery. When we got about half way out, I heard loud gunshots not far away, so we retreated. Winter Sundays are hunt days.

Green but gray at the same time

Our cooking projects were bagels, using new techniques that were very successful. More about that later. We had some smoked trout in the fridge, and some fromage à tartiner, a.k.a. cream cheese. Making bagels involves boiling the dough before you bake it, so all the old windows in the house fogged up. As I said, it was chilly outside.

The neighbors' house is shuttered for the winter.

To go with the bagels and cream cheese, I made little spinach soufflés. Well, faux soufflés — more like timbales. No beating of egg whites required. Spinach, béchamel sauce, cheddar cheese (English cheddar, from SuperU, very good), and eggs.

Another December Sunday.

Filet de canard, pan-roasted

A duck breast filet is what we at with our potatoes cooked in chicken broth the other day. We're lucky to be able to buy affordable duck legs and breast filets here in Saint-Aignan. This particular piece of lean duck cost me 11.50 euros/kilo, which is about 5.25 euros/pound. It weighed about three-quarters of a pound (360 grams).

A pan-roasted duck breast filet, with a spicy rub

You might think this is a magret de canard, but on the package it was labeled as a filet de canard. The word magret comes from the same root as the French word maigre, meaning lean instead of fat. Officially, I've read, the term magret applies only to the breast meat of a fattened duck — un canard gras — that has been raised and force-fed to produce foie gras. The word filet is used for the breast meat of ducks that have not been fattened by force-feeding.

Score the skin side deeply before applying the spice rub...

...to both sides of the filet.

Whatever the word, the duck breast is delicious meat. It's more like a nice piece of beefsteak than like chicken, turkey, or even guinea fowl. The meat is red and you eat it cooked fairly rare rather than well done like other poultry. The best way to cook it is broiling, grilling, or pan-roasting, and it cooks pretty fast.

Start cooking the duck filet in a hot pan
with the skin side down.

Before cooking the duck filet, it's a good idea to score the skin side of the meat deeply in a cross-hatch pattern, using a good sharp knife. If you don't score the fatty skin, the breast filet will curl up as it cooks. And you don't want to remove the fat, because that's where much of the flavor is. Don't add any fat to the pan if you are pan-grilling the breast — just start it cooking skin-side down and it will make its own cooking fat.

Here's the pan-roasted duck breast after
it has rested for 20 minutes.

You don't have to marinate duck breast before cooking it, but I like to apply a dry spice rub. The spices and herbs I used this time were dried thyme, crushed red pepper, smoked paprika, black pepper, and allspice (Jamaican pepper). I rubbed both sides of the meat with the spices and let it rest for an hour or two before I cooked it.

Serve it rare or medium-rare so that it doesn't get tough.

The cooking doesn't take long at all. The important thing is to sear the meat on both sides and then let it rest for a while so that the heat can distribute itself through the lean center. This time, I set the skillet in a medium hot oven, turned off, with the door ajar, for about 20 minutes after searing the duck on top of the stove. Another way to let the meat rest is to transfer it to a hot serving dish, covering it with aluminum foil and a kitchen towel to hold in the residual heat.

Pan-roasted duck breast with a generous portion of
potatoes « boulangère » and some green garden peas.

You can see that the duck breast meat really is red, and it is served rare or medium-rare — in French, it's rosé. Again, it's more like eating beef than poultry. The duck fat and the spice rub give it a fine, rich taste. It's good with the pommes boulangère, and since we had some leftover green peas, we had some of those with it too.

Duck breast is much more expensive than duck leg & thigh sections — the last of those that I bought were only 2.90 euros/kilo, or 1.32 euros/lb. — but the texture of the meat and the appropriate cooking method are totally different. It's like having two entirely different kinds of meat, in fact. Both are excellent.

Pommes de terre « boulangère »

Having an oven at home to bake and roast food in has only "recently" become a widespread luxury. In France, the U.S., and everywhere, people used to have to cook their food in a fireplace. Baking was not easy. All that changed over the course of the 20th century, as people got electricity and modern cooking stoves equipped with ovens.

In France, many villages had at least two ovens that people cook use for baking cakes, roasting meats, and slow-cooking vegetable casseroles (gratins). Many villages had what was called « le four banal » — the community oven — and residents of the village could take their dishes there and bake them along with everybody else's. Friends of ours have a house just across the street from their village's old four banal.

Pommes de terre à la boulangère, cooked with
onions in seasoned chicken broth

The other oven in the village was the one the local boulanger baked breads, brioches, and pastries in. When the baker had finished his day's work, the oven was still hot. His family, friends, and neighbors could then bring over their dishes that needed baking and put them in to cook as as the hot oven started to cool down.

A tradition of calling dishes baked in those ovens [whatever] « à la boulangère » — "in the style of the baker's wife" — developed. Some of the best-known recipes of the genre feature fish (colin à la boulangère), lamb (gigot or épaule d'agneau à la boulangère), other roasted meats (rôti de porc à la boulangère), and of course potatoes and various vegetables.

Dishes prepared and cooked à la boulangère are the kind of food that country people in France traditionally cook and enjoy. They're rustic, not sophisticated. Often, meats are roasted on a bed of sliced potatoes, for example, with onions, garlic, and whatever herbs are available. The potatoes bathe in the cooking juices of the meat or poultry cooking over them.

These potatoes have been "scalloped" — thinly sliced — on a
mandolin. You might slice them using a food processor.

From there, it isn't a huge leap to imagine that you could cook potatoes by themselves in pretty much the same way. Instead of meat juices, you can use broth. You can add some fat you've saved from cooking poultry or meat in a pan in a hot fireplace. You wouldn't leave out the onions, herbs, and garlic either, right?

So one of the classic "baker's wife" dishes is called « Pommes de terre à la boulangère ». Or « Pommes boulangère », the « de terre » and « à la » parts being understood. "Potatoes the way the baker's wife would cook them" are scalloped potatoes cooked in broth with onions, garlic, and herbs. "Scalloped" means thinly sliced. The term doesn't have too much to do with the shellfish called a scallop, except that the meat, vegetable, or fish that is scalloped is cut as thin as the scallop's shell. Think escalope de veau milanaise in French, or veal scallopini.

To make pommes boulangère, thinly slice a couple of pounds of waxy potatoes (red, Yukon gold, or boiling potatoes). Arrange the thin slices in layers in a baking dish along with a couple of layers of sliced or diced onion that you have cooked slowly in butter, oil, or fat so that they are tender and translucent. Optionally, add fresh garlic, sliced or diced, with the onions, and some fresh or dried thyme and bay leaves.

Pour on enough seasoned chicken broth to just
cover the layers of potato and onion.

Once those ingredients are layered in the dish, pour on enough hot, well-seasoned chicken broth to barely cover the potatoes. That should be two or three cups for about two pounds of potatoes, depending on the shape of your baking dish. If you want to give the cooking a head start before you put it in the (conventional) onion, cover it with a lid or plastic wrap and heat it up on high in the microwave for 10 or 15 minutes to get it boiling.

Finally, set the dish of potatoes in the oven at 180ºC (350ºF) for an hour or so, uncovered, until most of the broth has evaporated or been absorbed and the top layer has browned nicely. Adjust the oven temperature and cooking time as necessary. Jacques Pépin says pommes boulangère are better if they are prepared ahead of time, left to cool, and then re-heated just before serving.

Hodgepodge

The plumber was here ALL DAY yesterday. Sigh. It took that long to get the shower repaired and to empty and clean out the water heater. I think Walt is going to write about it all. The bill is going to be salé, as they say in France — "salty", meaning "excessive" like a dish you've put too much salt in.

And it's not over yet. The plumber, Monsieur Rougemont ("Mr. Redmountain") will come back Monday to finish the job. He has to replace some pipes around the water heater. When he unhooked everything yesterday and installed a new pressure regulator, he noticed that there are some old cast iron pipes that are nearly filled up with corrosion and lime deposits. We're also having new faucets installed on our bathroom sink and the little "hand-washing" sink in the WC room.

Rain. That's the forecast again this weekend. Temperatures are very mild, and yesterday was actually a pretty day. I had a good walk with Callie in the afternoon, and she didn't try to run away.

Touraine is right next to the left shoulder of the weatherman,
Laurent Romejko, who is a neighbor of CHM's in Paris.

By the way, Monsieur Rougemont said he had done some plumbing work for the neighbors across the street about three weeks ago. What made him mention it was that Bertie the black cat came into the utility room while Rougemont was working on the water heater. Is that your cat? he asked. Yes, I told him. Well your neighbors hate him, he said, and when I was over there I got an earful.

Afternoon temperatures around 12ºC (mid-50s F)

He said he wasn't likely to accept any more work from those neighbors of ours, because they are too hard to please. They want everything to happen immediately, they complain about the prices, and then they take forever to settle up. None of that surprises me. I'm detecting a pattern.

Leftovers for lunch a couple of days ago...

Big decision of the day? Gratin dauphinois or pommes de terre à la boulangère for lunch? The two potato dishes are similar, but dauphinois is cooked with garlic, cream, and milk, where boulangère is cooked with onions, herbs, and broth. Both are thinly sliced (a.k.a. scalloped) potatoes cooked in the oven.

I'm leaning toward the broth version, because we're having a grilled duck breast with it, and I'm not sure duck and cream are such a happy combination. And I have some good chicken broth in the freezer. I think I'll take some pictures as I go. Spending the morning in the kitchen will be a good way to occupy myself as December rain blows in from up Normandy way.

Pas d'omelette ? Si.

« On ne fait pas d'omelette
sans casser des œufs. »

————
You can't make an omelet
without breaking a few eggs.

I don't know if this proverb first showed up in French or in English. But what it means is that when you make big changes, there are inevitably risks and sacrifices involved. And as somebody said, whether or not you're happy about the changes depends on whose eggs get broken and who gets to eat the omelet.

I tend to think the proverb originated in French, because that's obviously where the word omelette comes from. ("Omelet" without the final -te is chiefly an American form.) And France is the place where the best omelettes are made, in my humble opinion.

Une omelette aux épinards

What makes a good omelette? First, the egg whites and yolks need to be mixed together quickly with a fork, not a whisk. The eggs shouldn't really be rougnly beaten, in other words — that's too violent. And then the omelette needs to be cooked just enough to hold together. It should be very tender, not browned on the outside, and slightly runny inside.

In France, that's called an omelette baveuse — one that "drools." I don't think I've ever had une omelette baveuse outside France (unless I cooked it at home). Maybe things have changed...

The first omelette made in the new pan

Some say that how well a cook can roast a chicken — just a plain chicken cooked in the oven — is the ultimate test of cooking skill and talent. You might say the same thing about making an omelette.

The Larousse Gastonomique says this about it:

Making an omelet looks harder than it really is. You will succeed every time if you follow these rules:

• Cook the omelette over a very hot fire;
• Use a rigorously clean pan that is used only for cooking omelettes;
• Beat the eggs only moderately, and only at the last moment before putting them in the pan;
• Don't put too much butter (or other fat) in the pan;
• And finally, "have confidence in yourself."

Here's the French:

La difficulté de préparation de l'omelette est plus apparente que réelle. On la réussira toujours si l'on observe les points suivants :

• Avoir un feu très ardent ;
• Opérer avec une poêle rigoureusement propre et ne servant qu'à cet usage ;
• Battre modérément les œufs, et seulement au moment de faire l'omelette ;
• Ne pas mettre trop de beurre (ou de graisse) dans la poêle ;
• Enfin, « avoir confiance en soi ».

In other words, nobody can really tell you how to make a good omelette. You can make a good bœuf bourguignon or coq au vin if you just follow the recipe. For an omelette, you have to have faith in yourself and just figure it out.

I'm certainly not an expert. But I've been thinking about omelettes a lot lately, because we just got a new non-stick frying pan. If you know any good tricks, I'll be glad to hear them.

Cornbread, fried

We get fresh bread delivered to our front gate four times a week here on the outskirts of Saint-Aignan. It's a great service organized by our village baker as a way to supply bread to people who might not drive or own a car and who live too far from the village center to walk there. For us, it's a convenience and an environmentally sound scheme, since we don't have to start the car every day and drive 6 or 7 kilometers just to get a baguette or a croissant.

But as I said, we get bread delivered only on four days. The other three days, we eat French bread that we've bought in advance and stored in plastic bags in the freezer, or we make our own breads. We make pizzas regularly, foccacia or fougasses once in a while, and we've made U.S.-style "Parker House rolls" and pita-type breads that are called fouées in French. Sometimes I make the Southern U.S. quick bread we call "biscuits."

These are a kind of fried cornbread called "hushpuppies,"
which we made last week. They're a U.S. Southern specialty.
There's a recipe with cooking instructions in this 2008 post.

But another style of bread we make, mostly because of my Southern U.S. background, is corn bread — "corn" meaning maize or maïs. Corn breads can be baked or fried. They are leavened with baking powder (levure chimique or poudre à lever) as opposed to baker's yeast (levure de boulanger), or just with baking soda (bicarbonate, bicarbonate de soude). You can buy bicarbonate alimentaire in the supermarkets in France, and you can buy little packets of levure chimique.

The prerequisite to making corn breads, of course, is having access to a supply of corn meal or corn flour (I don't mean what we call "cornstarch" in the U.S., which is mainly used to thicken sauces or puddings). Corn meal comes in yellow or in white; it can be water-ground or stone-ground; and it can be coarsely or finely milled.

Another kind of fried corn bread doesn't require deep-frying.
You cook these in a pan like pancakes, in butter or oil.
There's a recipe in this 2010 post — scroll down to find it.

Coarsely milled corn meal is also known as polenta. You can make baked corn breads with it, but it's better if you used it mixed with all-purposed wheat flour (farine de froment). For fried corn breads, finely milled meal is a requirement. You don't need to mix wheat flour with it, so the breads are gluten-free (good for those who are allergic to gluten).

My mother used to make fried corn breads all the time when I was growing up. And baked corn breads too. They are truly delicious — very rich, slightly sweet, and crunchy.

Near Saint-Aignan, we have found finely ground corn meal at the Planète Verte shop in Montrichard — it's a local product — also, imported from Italy, at the Paris Store Asian and imported foods shops in Blois and in Tours. You might find it in your local supermarket — you certainly will in the U.S. For several years I was "importing" my own corn meal by bringing it back from North Carolina or asking friends to bring me some. It's a heavy load, though, and now I don't have to do that any more.

Chicken “pot pie”

So what is a "pot pie" in French? Une tourte? Un croustillant? Here's a take on it that I found on a blog called Croque-Camille. Camille is right: the Anglo-Saxon "pot pie" or "meat pie" is made up of classically French components: a flour roux, a pâte brisée, and a velouté sauce.

On Sunday we made a poule au pot — a "chicken in a pot" — inspired by Jacques Pépin and Julia Child (see Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home). That's a one-pot meal — a kind of boiled (or poached) dinner. It's a chicken cooked in broth with white wine, carrots, turnips, celery, potatoes, leeks, onions, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, and spices that can include cloves, allspice berries, and black peppercorns. The result is a dish of moist, succulent chicken and vegetables, and several quarts of good chicken broth for making soups and sauces.

Chicken pot pie (inspired by Jacques Pépin)

The next day, the chicken broth can serve as the base for a velouté sauce, which is a white sauce made not with butter, flour, and water, and not with butter, flour, and milk (that's a béchamel), but with butter (or chicken fat), flour, and chicken broth. Enriched with cream, of course. Hey, Normandy is not that far north of Touraine. And the addition of cream makes it into what can be called a sauce suprême.

The pot pie is less photogenic, but more delicious,
after you cut into it.

Walt makes the crust — butter, flour, salt, and a little water. That's all. Sounds simple, but to me it's not. I make the velouté. It's a division of labor. And then somebody has to dice up all the leftover chicken and vegetables. You just put the diced matter into a baking dish, pour the saucy matter over it, and then lay on the pastry matter. Bake it in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes, and don't burn the inside of your mouth when you eat it.

One of my cookbooks (The Dictionary of American Food and Drink) says:

Potpie. Also "pot pie." A crusted pie made with poultry or meat and, usually, chopped vegetables. The term, which first appeared in American print in 1792, probably refers to the deep pie pans or pots used to bake the pies in, and it has remained primarily an Americanism.

I think a true American pot pie has both a lower crust and upper crust. We just do the upper. That's rich enough.

Maison à vendre

It looks like one of the houses in our hamlet will soon be going on the market. It's the first one on the right when you come up the hill through the woods. Like ours, the house has a name. Ours is Les Bouleaux, and the one that will soon be put up for sale is called Bella Vista. One other house in the hamlet has a name; the other six are anonymous.

Bella Vista was evidently built by a couple who moved here from Corsica several decades ago. The house must be about between 40 and 50 years old, like ours. It's been a rental property for at least the last ten years, and the most recent tenants were a group of young people who worked part-time or temporarily at the Beauval zoo just south of Saint-Aignan.

« Bella Vista », a little house near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher

I know the house will soon be on the market because I've talked to the owner a few times over the past 10 days. He's been at the house cleaning up the yard and working inside as well. The first time or two I saw him he said bonjour to me a Callie, but that was all. After a little while, he asked me what breed of dog Callie was and the conversation started from there.

When you come up this road from down in the river valley...

We had seen the tenants moving out in November. I think they'd been there for a year — or was it two? They kept chickens in a pen in the back yard, and one day the chickens were gone. We had gotten used to hearing them squawking and crowing. Then we saw people packing up cars with boxes and bags. One day, Walt said he saw a guy putting cats in cages in the back of a station wagon, getting ready to drive away.

...the first house you see is Bella Vista. There's room in the
front yard for a nice vegetable garden.

When I talked to the owner last week, I asked him if he had new tenants getting ready to move in. No, he said, adding that he is tired of being a landlord. He said he's 77 years old now. He bought the house about ten years ago. It was occupied by an older couple at the time. They stayed on as tenants until both of them died, in their nineties, a few years ago. We didn't know them because they seldom came out of the house, though we would see them out taking a walk on the road once or twice a year.

The front view of what is called un pavillon sur sous-sol
in French— a bungalow with a basement

The group of young tenants made a lot of noise. Bella Vista is three houses down from us, and we got used to hearing loud music and even fireworks on some warm summer nights. Parties would go on until three or four in the morning. It didn't bother us much, but the disturbance did bother the people who live next door to Bella Vista. They're a retired couple in their 60s or early 70s who live when the weather's nice but return to the Paris area for the winter.

The back yard ends in a point.

According to the owner, the group of young tenants didn't do anything to improve the place, and they didn't take care of the yard the way he thought they should have. He didn't say whether or not they paid their rent, but he told me that they didn't pay the water bill. The water company is requiring the landlord to pay it, and the arrears amount to 420 euros. We ourselves pay about 600 euros annually for water and sewerage services.

At the back there's a big patio with a roll-out awning.

"Young people can be very wasteful," the man said. "They used a lot of water. They didn't take care of the house or yard. I can't face renting it out again, so I'm selling it." The house is small, and it sits on an odd-shaped triangular lot that must be about a quarter of an acre. There are neighbors on one side, pretty close, but the other side is all woods and vineyard.

This morning's sunrise at La Renaudière

This wouldn't be a dream house for many people, but it might make a good retirement place or résidence secondaire. I've never seen the interior, but you can be sure that it will need some "freshening up" or even significant renovation. We have sewer mains, town water, broadband Internet access, and garbage pickup in the hamlet. I see a satellite dish on the chimney of the house.

I'll be curious to see what the asking price is. It might be a bargain.

Pumpkin cannelloni

Cannelloni are pasta tubes that are filled with various ingredients and then baked in the oven with a sauce to keep them moist and tender. Walt made these yesterday, stuffing them with the cooked pulp of a winter squash.

Pumpkin cannelloni with goat cheese, sage, and walnuts

You can roll out your own pasta or you can use fresh or soaked and softened lasagne noodles from the supermarket. You can probably buy cannelloni tubes in dried form, too, like other pasta shapes. In this version, the stuffing is made with:

• 500 g (just over a pound) of cooked winter squash pulp, mashed
  
• 150 g (5 oz. by weight) of soft goat cheese
• 1 finely chopped shallot
• pinches of spices including cumin, cayenne pepper, and nutmeg
• 2 Tbsp. finely chopped fresh sage leaves
• salt and pepper to taste
  

Other spices and herbs might be just as good. Curry powder, for example, or Moroccan raz el hanout. Ricotta could replace the goat cheese. Basil would be good in the place of sage. Mix the pumpkin filling up and let it sit for 30 to 60 minutes so that the flavors will blend. Then put a log of it on each cannelloni or softened lasagne noodle and roll them up.

Arrange the stuffed cannelloni in a pan and pour in chicken or vegetable broth so that it comes half-way up the sides of the cannelloni. Drizzle some olive or vegetable oil over the tops of the cannelloni. Bake in a medium oven, covered, for about 20 minutes.

One possibility for a sauce to serve with the filled canneloni is melted butter with a little cream, some more sage or other herbs, and some coarsely chopped walnut meats. Pecans or hazel nuts would also be good. Serve some grated parmesan at the table.

French franc notes

Otherwise known as "folding money" — not just coins. Higher denominations. Paper money. Bank notes. Bills. Billets de banque. Cash. People who collect paper money in France can be called billetophiles.

I'm not a collector — I've never had enough — but I do have a few French franc notes left over from the earlier days when I lived in Paris. Or when I lived in California and came to France every year on vacation. They are just souvenirs.

One bill that I saved is a five-franc note. It was in circulation from 1966 until 1970, the year I spent a semester in Aix-en-Provence as a student. I turned 21 there. And talk about a starving student; I was. Somehow I managed to get back to the U.S. that summer with a five-franc note — the equivalent of one U.S. dollar.

This paper note was replaced by a 5 FF coin about 40 years ago.

I've had that five-franc note ever since. The man on it is Louis Pasteur, and the building is the Institut Pasteur in Paris. I have a friend whose apartment is very near there. There's also a Pasteur museum there, which I only recently heard of for the first time.

Another franc note I saved somewhere along the way is a billet worth 100 FF. It was the equivalent of our $20 bill in the U.S. I always liked the fact that French bank notes were different sizes — they got larger as their denomination went up. The 100 FF note is a lot bigger than the 5 FF note was, or the 10 FF note.

A Corneille/Rouen-themed French franc note from the 1970s

Sometime in the 1990s I was in a café in Paris with Walt and I pulled this bill out to pay for what we had consumed. I had found it in a drawer at home in San Francisco. The waiter looked at it wide-eyed. He was a young guy, and he said he didn't think he'd ever seen this particular bill before. In other words, it had gone out of circulation 20 years earlier. The waiter called it « un monument historique ». I don't know how it was that I ended up saving it all those years.

The man on the 100 FF note is the 17th century playwright Pierre Corneille. He was born and lived in Rouen in Normandy, where I lived for a year in 1972-73. I actually taught at the Lycée Corneille as an assistant d'anglais. The other images on the bill show the Rouen cathedral, the Seine river, and some other buildings.

December sunrise

One big raison d'être for this blog is that I take so many photos and really enjoy taking them. I take photos both outdoors on my walks with the dog, and indoors, mostly in the kitchen.

This time of year it's nearly dark when I go out with the dog either at about 8 a.m. or about 6 p.m., depending on the day. Right now in Saint-Aignan, the sun comes up at 8:22 and goes down at 5:06. That makes for a pretty short day.

Sunrise over the vines on December 1

Often, the sunrise is very beautiful. Now we're going into a rainy weekend, but temperatures are still mild. They say we've had the warmest autumn ever. We still have flowers growing in planters and window boxes outside. It's amazing, when you think that we are actually located at a more northerly latitude than Montreal or Minneapolis, for example.

Le canapé est arrivé

Back in October, when we again started spending a lot of time at home — and indoors — we realized that a year without having a sofa downstairs in our main living area was long enough. After we had the loft space finished last year and moved our old living roof (oops!) room furniture up there, we just put four armchairs in the sitting area of the living room.

They were nice chairs, and when we had people in it worked out pretty well as a sitting area. But something was missing. That arrangement made the area seem more like a waiting room than a cozy corner. Almost on the spur of the moment, we decided to invest in a new sofa.

The living room avant...

Rather than driving up to Blois or over to Tours to look around in furniture store showrooms, we decided to do the 21st century thing: we surfed the web. Our first thought was Ikea. Then I thought of a French mail-order company — I guess Internet store is the new term — called La Redoute. That's where we ended up finding a sofa that looked like the one for our space, and the price was good. We were lucky to find just the kind of sofa we needed when it was marked down by 30%. Shipping was very also very reasonable at 25 euros.

...et après

La Redoute is a company that specializes in la vente à distance, which used to be called la vente par correspondance. The company was founded in the 19th century by a family in the city of Roubaix in the north of France. They named their business after the street where they first set up shop, la rue de la Redoute. Nowadays, the company is an e-vendor, with something like 700,000 visitors a day coming to its web site. It still sends out a paper catalog, but I wonder how long that will last. La Redoute operates in at least 15 European countries as well as in Japan, South Korea, Canada, and the United States.

All cleaned up and waiting for the delivery truck

One thing about getting a new piece of furniture, especially a fairly large one, is that it gives you an opportunity to do some spring cleaning. We moved two of our armchairs up to the loft, and then moved the dining room table out of the way. Walt got out the new vacuum cleaner — which we ordered from Amazon in the U.K. a couple of months ago. He gave the rugs a good going-over, and then he wiped down the tile floor around the edges of the room.

In all these pictures you can see evidence of the
nice sunny weather we've been having.

The vacuum cleaner, by the way, is an upright which I think we would call a carpet sweeper. It's the kind of vacuum cleaner we had in California. Such appliances are not easy to find in France and, from what I read, fairly uncommon all across the continent in Europe. Go figure. After eight years of using a little canister model vacuum that we bought at Darty in 2003, I finally went on the Amazon UK site and had a look around.

Here's Walt "hoovering" with the new Hoover
upright vacuum cleaner.

There I found a Hoover model, sans sac, that fit the bill. It also was very reasonably priced — just 99 109 British pounds (about 165 euros U.S. dollars) including VAT and shipping — less than we paid for the Panasonic canister vac eight years earlier. Having it to use has made cleaning so much easier, especially when it comes to vacuuming rugs to get the dog hair off. And we don't have to go driving from store to store here in the region — Tours, Blois, Romorantin, Loches — looking for the right size vacuum cleaner bags. The only explanation I can think of for the lack of such machines in France is that most houses have tile floors.

I guess one point of this post is to say again how much easier it is to live out in the country and enjoy the peace and quiet now that we have high-speed Internet access and a range of e-vendors to choose from. We've come a long way. And this is also for a post for all of you who have visited over the past few years...

The French franc

The French franc — le franc français — still exists in a couple of ways, even though you don't see the coins and bills any more. If you look at certain currency exchange rate sites on the 'net, you'll see the French franc still listed. I checked this morning, and the U.S. dollar is trading at 4.92 FF today. The currency is designated as obsolete, replaced by the euro. But there it is.

The franc still exists on price tags all around France. So that older people, who had spent many decades buying, selling, earning and counting francs on an everyday basis, wouldn't get confused about prices, merchants have been required to post prices in francs alongside prices in euros for the past 10 years. Euro coins and banknotes became the legal tender in France in January 2002.

An old 20-centime coin, worth about a nickel
back in the 1970s

As for the franc, it became the only legal tender in France in 1795, during the Revolution, and remained so until 1998. At that point it was declared a division of the new euro. The official value of the euro in France is 6.56 francs. It was only on January 1, 2002, that euro coins and banknotes started to be circulated in France and the franc disappeared as legal tender.

During World War II, French coins carried the fascist
slogan "Work, Family, Country", which replaced the
revolutionary « Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité »

My memories don't go back to the 18th century, but I do remember having to learn about francs more than 40 years ago, when I was a student in Aix-en-Provence in the spring of 1970. In those days, I didn't have a lot of francs — or dollars either — so every one counted. The dollar that spring was trading at about 5.50 FF. All through the 70s, until the Carter years in the U.S. late in the decade, the dollar-franc rate stayed approximately the same.

In the late '70s, however, the dollar declined and fell to between 4 and 4.5 francs. Then, a few years later, France elected its first socialist president in many decades — François Mitterrand in 1981 — and he appointed communists to important ministries in his government. International financial and currency markets spooked, and for a while the dollar was worth as much as 10 francs.

Voltaire on a 10 FF coin of the 1990s

The same kind of thing happened when the euro first came into circulation. There was a lot of doubt about its stability and its future. Besides, the U.S. under Bill Clinton had been running budget surpluses and the American economy was "a rising tide lifting all boats" — too bad that didn't last. The dollar was worth more than 1.15 euros for a while there, which meant it was worth between 7.5 and 8.0 FF. It was good to have dollars in those days.

By the time Walt and I moved to Saint-Aignan in June 2003, the U.S. dollar was worth only about 90 to 92 eurocents — that was still more than six francs. The euro started its big move upward, and the dollar moved down because, I guess, budget deficits were so high under the George W. Bush administration in Washington. At its low point five years ago, the dollar was worth only about 62 eurocents, or four francs, as back in the late 1970s.

Several of the franc coins carried this image called La Semeuse —
"the sower". The same figure appears on French euro coins now.

The French franc I'm talking about here is what was called « le nouveau franc » back in the 1970s. That's because the French economy had suffered such high inflation in the 1950s that the old franc became fairly worthless. In1960, newly elected president Charles de Gaulle enacted a reform under which the old franc became a centime, and 100 old francs became one new franc.

General De Gaulle on another 1990s-era 10 FF coin

For several decades, people in France continued to think and talk in terms of old francs. One franc in slang was « cent balles » — 100 "bullets", I guess, coins being made of metal as bullets are, as well as being round like a ball. Ten francs was « mille balles » — mille means a thousand. Early in the decade, a beggar on the sidewalk in Paris would ask you for « 100 balles ». By 1980, more often you'd hear beggars asking for « un franc ».

Ten thousand francs — an astonomical sum for many of us back in the 1970s — was « un million d'anciens francs ». Or « un million de centimes ». Or just « un million », also known as « une brique ». For us Americans, « un million » in francs was about two thousand dollars, and if you could earn that much per month, or if you had that much money in the bank, you were quite prosperous. You could buy a new car for a couple of "bricks".

The 5 FF coin was the closest equivalent of the U.S. dollar

French people have a very different relationship with their money compared to Americans. It's hard to imagine the American population dealing with all this messing around with the national currency. Re-value the dollar so that a dollar is suddenly a cent, a $100 bill is suddenly $1.00, and $1000 is just $10? Or abandon the dollar altogether for some other currency? Can you imagine?