Les Murs de Môlay, and Christmas (food) shopping in Saint-Aignan

As villages go, and even though it is not fortified as such, Môlay (near Chablis in Burgundy) felt very much walled in. You can see from the Google Earth aerial view below that the village's borders are very clearly defined, with only a few buildings lying outside its "ring road" (la rue des Fossés). The population now is about 120, but in the second half of the 1800s, three times as many people lived in Môlay.

Below, a closeup of a dry stone wall — there's no mortar to hold the stones together, they are simply stacked.

Other examples of walls around the periphery of Môlay

On the home front, we went to the market in Saint-Aignan yesterday and picked up our Christmas turkey along with some beefsteak for Walt's birthday lunch today.

At the poultry vendors' stall, I asked the woman in charge whether she thought I could keep the turkey in the fridge until Wednesday night, or would it be better to freeze it. In the refrigerator is fine, she said, but unwrap it completely and put it in the fridge « toute nue » — completely naked. I don't know if an American butcher would advise that strategy. The turkey cost 34 € for 3.5 kg. That's over $40 for a little less than 8 lbs.

At the butcher shop, we saw a nice looking rolled and tied beef roast that carried a sign saying « Façon Tournedos ». It was 24 € a kilo, and we decided to get some. The butcher wrapped it up, weighed it, and told us the charge would be 31 €. As we left the shop, I stopped and looked at the butcher's receipt and saw that the piece of beef weighed 750 grams — less than a kilogram. The price didn't make sense. Looking again, I saw that the butcher had charged us 42 €/kg instead of 24. Forty-two euros a kilogram is the equivalent of slightly more than $23/lb., and was nearly twice the advertised price!

I turned around and went straight back into the shop (which was a madhouse of people buying food and others placing orders for their Christmas foods). The butcher saw me walk back in and said to me: Est-ce j'ai fait une erreur ?  Oui, I told him — you got the price wrong. He apologized, said it was an honest mistake, and refunded us 14 €, bringing the price of the piece of beef roast down to 17 €. I wonder what I would have done if I didn't speak French as well as I do.

The morning walk in Môlay, and my new passport

First, I want to announce that I received my new U.S. passport day before yesterday. It all happened very fast, in other words. I sent in the application, a photo, and my old passport on December 10, and the new passport was delivered to our front door on December 18. I obviously filled out the paperwork correctly. The consular staff in Paris accepted my "home-made" photo (which isn't very good, really). Voilà. C'est un souci en moins...

Now back to Burgundy. On our first morning in Môlay, it was my turn to go out for the walk with Callie. Even though the weather was very gray and the light was dim, I took my camera of course. Here are some photos of the village. I have others for other blog posts.

This was the house across the street from the B&B/gite where we were staying.

As you can see, it was early enough that the street lights in the village were still on.

To my eye, most of the architecture of the village is pretty austere.

There were a lot of old stone walls like the ones above and the one below.

We noticed and admired dry stone walls (murs de pierres sèches) like these all around the area of Burgundy we were visiting. The flat rubble stones are carved limestone, I think, but I might be wrong.

Le gîte à Môlay

Gîte is a word you hear often in France, especially when you are planning a trip including a longer stay than you would want to spend in a hotel. The full term is gîte rural, and there's a French association of property owners called Gîtes de France (web site in English or French) where you can choose the place you want to spend a weekend or a week or more in when you go on vacation. A gîte rural [zheet ru-RAL] is a vacation rental out in the country.

Notice that the word is pronounced with a "soft" G, which in French is pronounced [ZH], like the G in bourgeois or the S in English treasure, measure, or pleasure. It's not the hard G of give or gift. In French, a G before an E or I is always a soft G. In English, there are no rules about whether the G will be "hard" or "soft" before those two vowels. (Why is is the G of gift, gizzard, or Gilbert different from the G of gist, giraffe, giant, or gin?) Before A, O, or U, the G in both English and French is a "hard" G.

Our gite was an apartment in this outbuilding in the owners' back yard. The car on the left is our old Peugeot and the one on the right, a Renault Twingo, must have belonged to people staying in the B&B.

Anyway, the American Heritage Dictionary says that a gite (no accent in English) is a "simple, usually inexpensive rural vacation retreat especially in France." An apartment in Paris wouldn't be called a gîte in French. By definition, a gîte is located in a rural setting. In fact, one of the meanings of the word is 'den' or a 'lair', describing the place where a wild animal takes shelter from the weather or from predators. You shouldn't expect a gite to be luxurious — it should be a little rustic but comfortable.

The gite called Le Nid was tiny but well arranged and amply furnished. It was comfortable for a three-night stay.

So I had found a gite on the Gîtes de France web site for our short trip to Burgundy. It is called Le Nid (The Nest), and it is owned by a couple who live in the village called Môlay. They also operate a B&B in the larger house on their property. Here's their web site in French and in English. Their gite has a full kitchen, a full bathroom, and a small living room downstairs. The bedroom is a loft up a narrow, steep staircase (almost a ladder) over the kitchen. The owners of Le Nid are pet-friendly, so Callie was welcome.

On our four-day trip, we went to exactly one restaurant. Otherwise, we had dinner (and one lunch) at the gite. At lunchtime, when the weather permitted, we had picnics either outside or just in the car. That was easier with Callie, less expensive for us, and a less time-consuming way to get something to eat but continue spending as much time as we could driving or walking around to see the sights. (Lunch can take a couple of hours in a French restaurant, and going to restaurants was not the point of our trip.)

This is the owners' house, part of which is given over to guest rooms (chambres d'hôtes or B&B).

Le Nid cost us 200 € for three nights. That's less than many hotel rooms rent for, of course, and we had use of a kitchen. We could get something like 200 channels on the flat-panel TV set — mostly French of course, but some in English or German. There was wifi for the Internet on our tablets, but no phone (almost everybody brings a cell phone these days, including us).

Here's Callie waiting patiently to be let in while I take photos. She knows Walt is in there...

Gites vary widely in the number of modern conveniences they offer. They are really designed to accommodate people who drive in and who can bring a lot of things with them. For example, we took our own sheets and towels rather than paying the owners to rent linens for the three days and nights. We also took food with us, but not wine — this was Burgundy, after all!

Bienvenue à Môlay

Môlay is the name of the village where we had rented a place to stay during our short trip to Burgundy. The village is not far from Chablis, and even closer to the medieval town of Noyers-sur-Serein — more about those later. When we arrived at the gîte, I asked the owner how many people lived in Môlay. One hundred and twenty-three, he told me. Then, no, only 122, he said, because we're having a funeral tomorrow for one resident who just died.

This was our first glimpse of the village. We drove in from the east, crossing over the Serein ("serene") river on the edge of town. A few minutes later, Callie the collie and I took a walk down the road and I snapped this photo from the bridge. My photos are not very sharp, because it was almost dark by now.

Callie was very happy to be out of the car and to be able to stretch her legs as we strolled through the village. She was nervous though. Where is Walt? Why are we walking away and leaving him behind? (He was getting us settled in the rental and starting to make dinner.) Callie is happier when all three of us are together. She needed the exercise though, and she had business to take care of after a long ride in the car.

While the dog was happy to be out and about, the cat below was not thrilled to see a new dog loose in the village. He sat very still, and I'm not sure Callie even saw him perched up on a high wall along the road. Seeing him made me think of Bertie, but I knew Bert was in good hands at home. Our Australian friends Sue and Leon, who happened to be visiting the Saint-Aignan area, were looking in on him twice a day. We had left them the keys and a box of cat food so he wouldn't get too hungry.

More about the gîte (vacation rental) in Môlay tomorrow...

Daube provençale

Daube [DOHB] is derived from a Provençal and/or Italian word that meant "seasoned" or "spiced" — that's according to the Robert dictionary of the French language. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a linguistic link between the Provençal French term daube and the Mexican Spanish term adobo. A daube de bœuf or bœuf en daube is a kind of beef stew cooked à l'étouffée — cooked slowly in a tightly covered dish for several hours.

As the etymology of the term indicates, the daube is a southern French specialty. Other regions might cook beef or other meats the same way and call the stew une estouffade, which also means à l'etouffée. If you know about Louisiana cooking, you know that term. One translation is "smothered". Bœuf bourguignon is another example of an estouffade,and I've seen it called that in Paris restaurants.

Daube de bœuf with carrots, shallots, garlic, and olives cooked in red wine and tomato sauce

I made bœuf en daube in the slow cooker yesterday. I put an 800 gram piece of basse-côte de bœuf (a chuck roast) in the cooker the night before, with a couple of carrots and a couple of whole shallots, a big clove of garlic, and some orange and lemon peel. Those are the main ingredients, along with red wine and tomato sauce (or whole tomatoes, which will be sauce by the time the cooking is finished).

I set the timer so that the cooker would start at 4 a.m. and go off again at 8. In other words, the beef marinated overnight before the cooking started. Oh, and I had browned the beef in a skillet beforehand. When I got up, I checked the meat and judged its doneness. Well, it ended up cooking for another 4 hours — 8 hours in all, mostly on the low temperature setting. The carrots and shallots held up well to that amount of cooking. Toward the end, I put a handful of olives into the pot to plump up and give their flavor to the cooking liquid. Olives are a typically Provençal ingredient, of course.

Speaking of the liquid, in the fridge I happened to have some red wine that I had spiced up and cooked for a different recipe. I had poured a whole bottle of red wine into a saucepan with a sprig of thyme, a couple of bay leaves, an onion, some lemon and orange peel, some black peppercorns, cloves, and what all. I strained that and used 1½ cups of the spiced wine with equal quantities of tomato sauce and beef broth to cook the daube.

Here's a recipe. I'm not sure where I found it or when. The original is in French. I'm translating:

Daube de bœuf provençale

2 lbs. of chuck or other stew beef, browned
1½ cups red wine
1½ cups tomato sauce
1½ cups beef broth (a bouillon cube in water will do)
4 cloves (or allspice berries)
2 strips of lemon peel and 2 strips of orange peel
3 onions (or shallots)
2 carrots
3 cloves of garlic
1 sprig of thyme
3 bay leaves
12 black peppercorns
15 or 20 olives (pitted or not)

Put the beef in the cooker and pour on the liquids. Add the spices and herbs (or cook them first in the red wine and then strain them out to make a neater sauce). Add the carrots, garlic, and onions or shallots. Let the beef marinate for 6 or 8 hours.

Turn the cooker on at low temperature and let the beef and vegetables cook for 6 to 8 hours. Toward the end, add the olives and let them cook for 30 to 60 minutes so they they swell up and give their flavor to the sauce. Salt the sauce at the end, after tasting it — the beef bouillon, tomato sauce, and olives are all salty, so be careful with the table salt.

You can thicken the cooking liquid at the end by boiling it down in a pot on top of the stove after taking out all the other ingredients, or by using a slurry of water and potato starch or a flour roux. Serve the daube with rice, pasta, or potatoes, along with a green vegetable or salad.

Avallon (5)

Here are a few more photos of Avallon scenes. We really just buzzed through. With the threatening weather we couldn't do much, and we decided to drive on to our gîte and get settled in for the evening. Callie hates riding in the car, so we were anxious to get to our destination and take her out for a long walk before night fell. Travelling with a dog is a pretty limited experience in many ways.

I'm sure there was a lot more to do and see in Avallon. A walk around the fortified city's old ramparts would have been picturesque and interesting if we had been able to do it. As it was, I managed to snap these photos from the end of the Promenade de la Petite Porte. Views from the park there are panoramic.

The great French military architect and engineer Vauban (1633-1707) was born in the Avallon area. I noticed a plaque commemorating the 300th anniversary of his birth. He is buried at Bazoches, a town in the Morvan just south of Avallon and Vézelay. I snapped the photo below as we drove around the town to the north, looking back up toward the old fortified town.

Today, I'm cooking a daube de bœuf in the slow-cooker. It will simmer for at least four hours, maybe six. The cooking liquid is about a third red wine, a third tomato sauce, and a third beef broth, and it's flavored with shallots, carrots, thyme, bay leaves, and orange and lemon zests. To go with it I plan to make some cornmeal gnocchi (dumplings). If it's any good, I'll post some photos and a recipe soon.

Avallon (4), and a seasonal report

Here it is December 15 already. We're planning Walt's birthday dinner for next Sunday, and we have already ordered a turkey for Christmas. We'll pick that up this Saturday, the 20th. As for it being mid-December, it's pretty cold outside this morning. The temperature is below 0ºC — in other words, just below freezing, here at the house. Out in the vineyard, it will be even colder when I go for my walk with Callie in about an hour. I have to wait for the sun to come up.

Walt's 55th birthday dinner will be French steak au poivre with an armagnac sauce. We make it every year, and have done so for more than 30 years now. Armagnac is a brandy like cognac, but has a much longer history — it comes from southwestern France, between Toulouse and Bordeaux. Walt wants to buy some tournedos steaks this time. We'll go get them at the butcher shop in Saint-Aignan where we bought our Thanksgiving leg of lamb.

For the Christmas turkey, we ordered a three- to four-kilo bird (7 or 8 lbs.) from the volailler at the Saturday morning market. (Volaille means poultry or fowl.) This particular market vendor, who sells poultry at Montrichard on Friday mornings and Saint-Aignan on Saturday mornings, has some of the best chickens, turkeys, guinea hens, and ducks available in the area. All the birds are élevés en plein air (free-range), and the prices are comparable to supermarket prices, if not lower. We plan to make a cornbread stuffing to go with the bird, and probably a baked squash and a green vegetable (kale or haricots verts from our garden).

The pictures here are of the old town in Avallon, in Burgundy, and I took them last October 21. It's nice to look at all the colorful scenes. These are the dark days of December here in northern France, which is farther north than Quebec City or Duluth, MN. The sun comes up today at 8:35 a.m. and goes down at 5:05 p.m. When skies are cloudy, it is really gloomy.

And it's supposed to rain this afternoon. The forecast for the week calls for a series of cloudy gray days, with intermittent rain. We might see the sun again by Saturday. That'll be good, because going to the open-air market in Saint-Aignan (or anywhere) when the weather is cold and rainy isn't a lot of fun. It's worth it for the good food you can buy, but you have to hope that you won't have to stand in line in the rain for very long.

I'm going to continue posting photos from our Burgundy trip for a while. Even though it rained while we were over there (late October), the colors are so much brighter than what we are seeing these days that it boosts the morale to look at them. At this season, it's hard to take photos outdoors around Saint-Aignan because there just isn't enough light. I'll probably mix in some kitchen pictures along the way as we get into the heart of the holiday season.

Avallon (3)

This is the Eglise Saint-Lazare in Avallon (Burgundy). A church was first built on this site was built in the 4th century. Remains of a 10th-century crypt still exist. The Saint-Lazare church was consecrated by the pope in the early 1100s.

Just to the left of Saint-Lazare are a portion of what used to be the Eglise Saint-Pierre, now a gallery for temporary art exhibits. I think the statue in the photos below represents Saint Peter.

For a few minutes, the rain stopped and we took a walk in a park out at the end of the street in the fortified city. Callie enjoyed getting out of the car.

Avallon (2)

An almost silent Saturday. Here are three more photos of that yellow house next to the church in the old town at Avallon.

The "window washer", as Tim called him, has to be a recent addition to the façade, because when I look up the area on Google maps street view, he's not there.

Avallon (1)

Our first real stop in Burgundy proper was at Avallon. It's a large town, pop. 8200, located south of Auxerre and north of Autun. Avallon is perched on top of a granite outcropping, overlooking the valley of the Cousin river. The gîte we had rented for three nights was just 30 minutes north, and we had time to stop before continuing the drive.

However, it was still raining on and off, so we didn't feel like we could wander far from the car. We drove through the central shopping street and into the old fortified city, with its clock tower and old houses. It was nice weather for frogs, apparently. Maybe it rains a lot in Avallon.

This part of the town is called La Promenade de la Petite Porte, which is at the other end of the street. The arch you see here is called la porte de la Boucherie (15th century).

Vézelay etc.

If it hadn't been raining off and on, and pretty windy, we would have happily left the car behind and walked up the hill to the top of the village of Vézelay on October 21. As the Michelin Green guide says, "The charms of Vézelay don't come for free. They reveal themselves to those who take their time and seek them out, who make the effort and pay attention to every detail, every old stone — each ray of sunlight makes the visitor admire and adore the colline éternelle that much more." The name Vézelay might be related to the name Vesuvius, because the village is on a steep hill that reaches for the sky, dominating a river valley. About 500 people live there.

The original abbey church at the top of the hill was consecrated by the pope in the year 878. In 1050 the church was rededicated to Saint Madeleine, and on her tomb there many miracles were performed. Crowds of pilgrims have made the trip to Vézelay over the centuries. We, unfortunately, couldn't hike up the hill in such stormy weather, but we've done it before, about 20 years ago. Maybe we'll get another chance one day.

On more mundane subjects, I'm happy and relieved to say that my old car passed inspection yesterday. And that I actually got my passport renewal application sent off to Paris.

The car, which is 14 years old this month, is a little Peugeot with a diesel engine. It has more than 170,000 kms (100K+ miles) on it. French law requires cars more than four years old to pass a rigorous inspection every other year, and for different reasons mine failed in 2010 and in 2012. Neither time was the reason for failure very serious, and the car finally passed after minor repairs and adjustments were carried out.

This time, the Peugeot came through with flying colors. It passed safety inspections and an emissions test. I credit both my good mechanic and the trip to Burgundy. Obviously, the mechanic has kept the vehicle in good working order. Driving it back and forth to Burgundy in October, a round-trip of some 1000 kms, with the help of a bottle of additive poured into a full tank of diesel fuel to clean the injectors and cylinders, probably helped it pass the emissions test. Most of my driving consists of short stop-and-start trips around the Saint-Aignan area.

The inspection, called le contrôle technique or CT is very thorough and costs 72 € for a car with a diesel engine. That's just over $90 U.S. at current rates. I'm good to go for two more years.

Renewing my passport cost more: 131.55 € in all. And that was after we finally managed to take a decent photo of me and print it at the size specified in the instructions supplied the U.S. Embassy in Paris. I won't be too surprised if the passport people at the embassy reject the photo, but maybe I'll get lucky. Otherwise, I'll have to try to find a professional photographer who can produce an acceptable photo and print it at the required size.

The cost of renewing a U.S. passport is 94 € here in France — almost $120. Sending the papers and old passport to Paris cost me 12.50 €, and the self-addressed Chronopost envelope I had to send with the application for the return of my passport cost 25 €. So in all, about $160. Ten years ago, for my previous renewal, it cost much less than half that much. Isn't it nice that inflation rates are as low as they are?

Pouilly-sur-Loire wines

After our lunch at Les 200 Bornes, we had at least a two-hour drive ahead of us. We talked about stopping in Vezelay, but the weather was rainy and windy. We've walked up to the top of Vézelay before, years ago — you have no choice but to walk, as far as I know — so we weren't as motivated to climb up there in bad weather as we might have been. Besides, we didn't want a sopping wet Callie in the car for the rest of the afternoon.

The map shows our route that afternoon. From Pouilly-sur-Loire we drove along the edge of the Forêt de Bellary (or Belary — the spelling seems to vary) to the little town of Varzy, which I visited with CHM a few years ago. The museum in Varzy possesses one of CHM's grandfather's paintings. From Varzy we continued to Clamecy, past Vézelay, and on to Avallon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we left Pouilly, I wanted to buy a bottle of Pouilly-sur-Loire wine. It's made from Chasselas grapes, and not much of it is produced these days.

Rather than search for an individual producer's winery, and risk getting lost in the stormy weather, I thought it would be a lot easier just to go to the wine cooperative in Pouilly, which was right up the road from the restaurant. Luckily, it was open. I bought my bottle of wine, and we were back on the road by two o'clock. 

The primary wine of Pouilly is a Sauvignon Blanc known as Pouilly Fumé. I thought I had never tasted the Pouilly-sur-Loire wine before. 

So there we were in the car carrying a bottle of white wine along with a container of my home-made Bœuf Bourguignon for our dinner at the gîte rural (vacation rental in the countryside) that we had rented — taking white wine to Chablis and Beef Burgundy to... well... Burgundy. As it turned out, we had just eaten the last restaurant meal of our three-day trip.

And it turned out too that I had actually tasted Pouilly-sur-Loire wine before, but didn't remember. Just a couple of days ago, searching through old blog topics for I forget what photo or nugget of information, I came upon this post about a lunch I had in Paris in 2008. It featured a bottle of Pouilly-sur-Loire white.

So here's my photo of the wine cooperative building in Pouilly-sur-Loire. You'll notice a drawing of the same building on the label of the wine bottle above. We enjoyed the Chasselas wine as an apéritif on our first evening in the little gîte we were staying in — before we heated up some Bœuf Bourguignon and cooked some pasta to go with it. We were glad we had decided to take the beef with us. We didn't have too look for a restaurant, and we didn't have to do any heavy-duty cooking. Besides, there weren't any restaurants in the tiny village where we had landed.

Little white vans?

It wasn't that the food was bad at Les 200 Bornes in Pouilly-sur-Loire. It just wasn't exciting. I think we had our hopes up about the other restaurant, which couldn't seat us because we hadn't reserved.

Les 200 Bornes is a French formula restaurant. There's one much like it over in Noyers-sur-Cher, not far from our house. And there's one in Sambin, between here and Blois, where we had lunch with Australian friends just a couple of weeks ago (because the restaurant we really wanted to go to was fermé exceptionnellement that particular day and we had to find someplace to have lunch).

The formula in these places is a salad bar for the appetizer and then a choice of one of three main courses. We chose the curried chicken and rice at Les 200 Bornes. One of the other choices was andouillette grillée (a kind of chitterling sausage) and I've forgotten the third. Then there's a dessert bar, including standard items like mousse au chocolat, île flottante, tarte aux pommes, and a Paris-Brest pastry.

There's nothing wrong with such a menu, but it's not special either. The place is a truckstop — un relais routier — the kind of restaurant where all the little white vans driven by workers and contractors are parked at noontime, and where working people can get a decent meal for not much money. The food is standard French fare that I've been familiar with for 45 years now. It's better than a McDo burger. One sign that Les 200 Bornes might not be the best relais routier was the total absence of little white vans in the parking lot.

The one special thing about the truckstop in Pouilly was that it had a very nice wine selection — Pouilly and Sancerre whites (Sauvignon Blanc), plus some Sancerre reds (Pinot Noir). We were driving, and we had left Callie out in the car, so we couldn't spend a lot of time tasting and didn't want to over-indulge. We had a two-hour trip ahead of us, and the weather was wet and windy, so caution was the watchword.

What does Les 200 Bornes mean? A borne is a milestone — une borne kilométrique — a distance marker along a highway that usually tells you how far you are from the nearest two towns. By extension, borne also means kilometer in everyday language, as in Pouilly-sur-Loire est à 200 bornes de Paris. There's a dice-and-cards game called Mille Bornes that has all to do with cars, flat tires, breakdowns, and that kind of stuff.

Why 200 bornes? It's because Pouilly-sur-Loire is 200 kilometers south of Paris on the old Route Nationale 7, which was the road heading south that people drove on to get to Provence and the Côte d'Azur way back when for their vacations. The route has been replaced by wider and faster autoroutes now, but the Nationale 7 still has the kind of cult status that the old Route 66 has in the western U.S.