Dieppe : autour du port

One of the great advantages the port of Dieppe has is that it's one of just a few ports on the French side of the English Channel that is deep enough to allow boats and ships to come in and out at low tide. Another is that it's the closest port and seaside resort to Paris (2 hours away by train, 2½ by car).

1    2

3    4

Dieppe has also prospered because of shipping traffic with England since the time of the French Revolution of 1789. Newhaven is just 75 miles from Dieppe — the crossing takes four hours. By any standard, Dieppe's port is quite picturesque on a pretty day.

5    6

7    8

Étretat, June 2003 (2)

Photos taken in Étretat, including one with Walt and our dog Collette in it, and one of the house called Le Clos Lupin.

Walt turned 62 yesterday. Collette was born in 1992, came with us to live in France in 2003,

and passed away in 2006 at the age of 14. I don't know how old Le Clos Lupin is.

It's probably not getting any younger. Who among us is?

Enjoy this two-minute slideshow.

Étretat : ses falaises et sa plage

Just 40 miles down the côte d'Albâtre from Dieppe, and about 40 miles northeast of Rouen, is the famous town of Étretat (pop. 1250), with some of the most picturesque white chalk cliffs on the Channel coast. We were lucky in early June 2003, just three days after arriving with our dog from the U.S. to settle down here in France, to be able to enjoy a beautiful warm day in Étretat with bright sun and no wind. We had lunch in a beach-side restaurant, outdoors. Without having been asked, the waiter brought a bowl of water for the dog. After lunch we went on the high ground north of town and took pictures. Here are some of them.

1 

2   3  
4   5  
6   7  

8   9  

Clafoutis ou quiche sans pâte ?

The French sweet confection called a clafoutis and the savory one sometimes called a quiche sans pâte (crustless quiche) are basically made by the same method. The only significant difference is that le clafoutis is sweetened with sugar, and la quiche is flavored with cheese. The two classic recipes are clafoutis aux cerises (cherries) and quiche lorraine, which includes lardons (smoked bacon). Yesterday I made a savory quiche/clafoutis aux brocolis et au poulet.

The primary ingredients were eggs (5 in this case), cream (50 milliliters), and grated cheese — in this case, grated hard goat cheese (Selles-sur-Cher and grated hard Mimolette Vieille, a cow's milk cheese. Optionally, stir 3 or 4 tablespoons of flour into the filling mixture. Don't forget the salt and pepper, as well as a pinch or grating of nutmeg.

Dice up some cooked chicken — or cook some diced up chicken. I cooked some diced chicken tenders with chopped shallot, which gave good flavor. Butter a baking dish generously and arrange the pieces of cooked chicken in the bottom.

Steam or blanch some broccoli florets so that they are tender but not over-cooked. Arrange them over the chicken in the baking dish. Scatter the cooked shallot and drizzle the butter or oil it cooked in over the chicken and broccoli.

Mix the cream, eggs, flour, and grated cheese together if you haven't already done so.
I blitzed the liquid mixture with a stick blender to make sure it didn't have any lumps of flour in it. Carefully pour the liquid into the baking dish so that the pieces of chicken and broccoli stay in place.

I decided to grate some more hard goat cheese over the top of the quiche/clafoutis before I put it in the oven. You can of course substitute Parmesan or Romano cheese for the cheeses I used... or whatever finely grated cheese you want.

Bake the quiche/clafoutis in the oven at 175ºC (350ºF) for 30 minutes or so until the filling has set up
and the top is golden brown. Enjoy it hot, warm, or cold with good bread and good wine.

La plage à Dieppe

    Milky waters from dissolving cliff chalk

   
A pebble beach

    A boardwalk and some surf

    At the beach but not on the beach

La Manche et les falaises à Dieppe

     La Manche means "the sleeve" and is the French name for what we call the English Channel.
Les falaises are the cliffs on both sides of the Channel — falaise derives from a German word
and is the French name for seaside cliffs along the seashore, but cliffs in mountains.
The first photo above shows the pebble beach at Dieppe.

     The port (composed of four harbors) at Dieppe is protected from ocean waves by a breakwater (un brise-lames)
that is usually called la digue (dike). People are allowed to walk out to the end of the breakwater and to fish.
The second photo just above on the right shows the car ferry arriving from the port of Newhaven in England.

     Just above are smaller boats coming back into harbor, and an unobstructed view of a long section of cliff east of Dieppe.
The original port was a particularly deep estuary, and it's not surprising the word "deep"
and the name Dieppe have related derivations from Scandinavian languages.

The port city of Dieppe

The fishing and ferry port of Dieppe on the English Channel is only 23 miles from Neufchâtel-en-Bray and 35 miles north of Rouen. It is also, according to the Michelin Guide, the beach town that is the closest to Paris (100 miles south) of them all. I've been to Dieppe six or eight times in my life, mostly to take the ferry to Newhaven in England or back to France from over there. In 2006 some friends of mine who live in Rouen took Walt and me to Dieppe to spend a pretty August afternoon.

The port at Dieppe (pop. 35,000) is modern, again according to Michelin, but the town has "many old corners and alleys, making it one of the most unusual towns in Normandy." The town apparently has its own boat, as you can see in my picture. It also has a 15th century château and a church that dates back to the 14th. The town was founded in the year 1015 by Richard I, the duke of Normandy back then.

As you can see in this photo, Dieppe feels like a city, or at least a big town. In fact, it has four harbors: the ferry terminal (port des ferries Transmanche), the yacht basin (port de plaisance), the fishing port (port de pêche), and the commercial port (port de commerce). Dieppe's heyday was during the 16th century French Renaissance, when François Ier was king. He sent explorers from Dieppe to faraway places including Canada, Brazil, and Sumatra. The king visited Dieppe in 1534, according to French Wikipédia.

Dieppe is close to the northern end of the area known as la Côte d'Albâtre, or Alabaster Coast, which extends 80 miles south and west to the city of Le Havre. The name derives from the milky white color that the sea sometimes takes on at the base of the chalky cliffs that line the Channel when the chalk starts to dissolve — it rains a lot in this area...

These are what are called "the white cliffs of Dover" on the English side of the Channel. The highest cliffs (at nearly 400 feet) on the French side are just 15 or 16 miles northeast of Dieppe at the town called Le Tréport. The French Wiki article says the white cliffs make this coast unique au monde. If you go there, maybe you'll be lucky enough to arrive on a clear, sunny day like the one we experienced in August 2006.

Just to remind you that this really is Normandy, you come across buildings like this one. One of the most interesting parts of town is the fishing port and fish market, with its early morning criée (fish and shellfish being sold at auction). The commercial port sees a lot of fruit from warmer climes (bananas, pineapples, and citrus fruit) pass through. And you can always take the ferry over to Newhaven, aproximately a four-hour ride, if you want a change of scenery.

Alpine Au Gratin Potatoes

We're having cold, damp, foggy weather here in Saint-Aignan. It's not raining or snowing, but I for one am not going outside unless I really need to. This is weather for comfort foods, and a gratin de pommes de terre is definitely in that category. In the French Alps, this gratin has come to be known as une tartiflette. It's easy to make, but a little time-consuming. It's worth the time spent.

    
The first step is to peel and then cook (steaming or boiling) about a kilo of potatoes. Let them cool
and cut them into cubes or slices. Also chop up an onion and some bacon (or lardons fumés).
Cook that mixture together on low heat in a skillet with some butter or olive oil.

Here's the finished product just out of the oven. Serve it with a cooked green vegetable —
cabbage or other greens, or broccoli, for example.

    
Cabbage on the left, and the tartiflette and cabbage as we had them at lunchtime on the right.

Yesterday I cooked the tartiflette by browning half of the sliced and pre-cooked potatoes in the pan that I had cooked the onion and bacon in. Then I put those potatoes in a baking dish and spread the onion and bacon over them. Next the other half of the potatoes went into the same pan to brown a little.

Then I poured in about a cup of dry white wine in to deglaze the pan. The potatoes and wine went into the baking dish over the layer of onion and bacon. Put half a cup or more of cream on top, and then lay the cheese over that. Bake in a hot oven for about 30 minutes, lowering or raising the heat as necessary to get the tartiflette bubbly and golden brown.

Here's a recipe that I just found. The hardest part in the U.S. would be finding a Reblochon cheese or something similar. You need a mild cheese that sort of liquefies as it melts.

A castle and its chickens

Maybe these birds qualify as "spring chickens" even if their visitors didn't. The birds were residing on the property of the Château de Mesnières-en-Bray, just five miles north of Neufchâtel-en-Bray. The château was built in the first half of the 16th century, in Renaissance style. It's a Loire Valley château located in Normandy. And it's operated as a school for 400 to 500 secondary and post-secondary students, teaching subjuects like horticulture, landscaping, and forestry. CHM and I stopped there for a few minutes on our way to Neufchâtel-en-Bray as we left Picardy.

What I didn't know at the time was that the château had been severely damaged six years earlier by a fire that broke out during a violent windstorm. Three-quarters of the roof burned off. Restoration work continued until 2014. Obviously, the roof had been put back on by the time we visited in 2010. Not only were there chickens on the property but also other birds, and goats too.

Neufchâtel : c'est le fromage !

My title today is based on an old advertising slogan that was used by the Calfornia cheese industry to advertise its products.
Understood was that California cheese was the reason why so many people loved to live in and visit California. Well, that really is true of the Normandy town of Neufchâtel-en-Bray. Neufchâtel cheese is a best reason for going there.
Cheese has been made in Normandy's pays de Bray since the year 1035, according to what I've read.
Pourquoi aller à Neufchâtel ? C'est le fromage ! Évidemment...

    
On the day we spent there, CHM and I decided that what we'd like to have for dinner was a cheese platter composed exclusively of Neufchâtel cheeses of different shapes and sizes and at different stages of maturation.
We were spending the night in Neufchâtel before driving on to Rouen the next morning.
As soon as we got settled in our rooms, I went out and walked around the
centre-ville to see what restaurants I could locate.

    
Here's the one I found: Chez Jean-Pierre. It certainly wasn't fancy. When I told the man I talked to
what my friend and I wanted to have for dinner, he said that would be no problem.
We ordered a pitcher of red wine and he brought us a huge tray of cheeses
and a basket of bread. We cut into and ate all we wanted.

    
The best known Neufchâtel cheeses are made into a heart shape. They've been made that way for centuries, apparently. During the Hundred Years' War (14th-15th century), when the English occupied the area, the young women
of Neufchâtel would give their English sweethearts gifts of heart-shaped cheese to express their feelings.
That is the legend. Local clergymen were scandalized. They insisted that the cheeses
weren't made in the shape of a heart but in the shape of little angels' wings.

    
The man who provided CHM and me with our Neufchâtel cheese feast also told us where we could go to buy some cheeses to take back to Saint-Aignan with us. It was a dairy farm on the road to Rouen just outside the town. We stopped in and bought some cheeses of different shapes — including the one in the photo above, a cube that's called une bonde ("a plug").
The cœur in the first photo of this post is one I bought in a supermarket here in Saint-Aignan.
I buy Neufchâtel cheeses here frequently.