An unexpected okra treat

“Okra is an annual flowering hibiscus (Abelmoschus esculentus) native to Africa. Its flowers, whose bright yellow petals deepen to rich burgundy red at their base, are some of the loveliest of all the hibiscuses. Of course, okra isn't grown for its ornamental qualities, but for the mucilaginous seedpods that develop after the brilliant flower has faded.”

Okra, the seedpod of an annual hibiscus plant

That's how Damon Lee Fowler introduces the Southern U.S. specialty vegetable okra in his book Classical Southern Cooking. Okra (a collective noun) is actually a fruit (like the tomato) and is known by the plural count noun « gombos » in French, but is not much known in France at all. It's something we don't find here in Saint-Aignan — at least I never have.

Here's a close-up of the okra pods...

However, a friend of ours went to Blois the other day and went shopping in a grocery store called Grand Frais. It's a new shop and I haven't been there yet. What our friend found was a bin full of gombos — fresh okra. She was kind enough to buy about a pound of nice fresh okra pods for us and leave them by our front door later that afternoon.

She told me on the phone that evening that okra isn't something she and her husband eat, but she knew I did because she remembered reading about okra on this blog.

...and here's what the okra looks like when you slice them.

“We tend to think of this vegetable as peculiarly Southern and African-American,” Damon Fowler writes, “but it can be found in Central and South America wherever Africans were settled and is also known to the cooking of the Middle East.” Well known is the Louisiana seafood stew called “gumbo,” in which okra serves as a flavoring and natural thickening ingredient.

Sliced okra cooking with wedges of yellow tomatoes and
red tomato sauce, along with onions and garlic

I've blogged about okra before (2010 and 2009, for example), and pointed out that a woman I knew and went to university with in Paris back in the 1970s surprised me one day when she cooked what she called bamia or bamies — it was okra. And the woman who cooked them lived in the city of Thessaloniki in Greece when she wasn't studying French in Paris.

I may soon have to stop stating so categorically that okra is hard to come by in France. I haven't yet found it, fresh or frozen, in our Saint-Aignan SuperU or Noyers-sur-Cher Intermarché, however, or in the farmers' markets. It seems to be sold only in specialty stores, in the cities.

This is the stewed okra and tomatoes you end up with.

Okra is good pickled in vinegar; dredged in cornmeal and deep-fried; stewed and served with rice; or, my favorite way, cooked with tomato sauce and chunks of tomato and onions.

I made okra and tomatoes yesterday, using sliced onions, sliced garlic, a pinch of dried thyme, and a pinch of hot red pepper flakes. It needs lots of salt and pepper, of course, as well as the one ingredient that makes the dish very Southern (the U.S. South, I mean) and also typically French: fried smoked bacon or lardons fumés, along with some of their cooking fat.

And here's a close-up. The okra seeds are tender, not hard.

We'll eat the okra and tomatoes not with rice but pasta — linguine, specifically — and an escalope de dinde à la milanaise. That's a thin slice of turkey breast that is breaded — in my case, just dredged in cornmeal — and panned in butter. Turkey scallopini, I guess, is the term used in American English — we call so many foods by more or less Italian names.

The okra and tomatoes will make a good sauce for the pasta and for the turkey. “The pairing of these two vegetables has all the makings of a great love story...,” Damon Fowler writes. “What they do for each other must be tasted to be understood; tomatoes lend their sunny tartness while the okra, in turn, enrobes with its silken texture, blunting the [tomatoes’] acid bite...”

Here's the recipe from Fowler's Classical Southern Cooking book:


Notice that I didn't use the S-word even once in this post. Happy eating!

Crêpes, just crêpes

The crêpes with cornmeal in the batter turned out to be a big success. They were delicious. I can say that objectively, because Walt did all the work. He made the batter and cooked the crêpes, about a dozen of them. We ate them all!

Before I go any further, let me post the recipe. Funny name but great crêpes:

Easy Corn Tortillas (Cornmeal Crêpes)

1 cup* flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 egg
1 tsp. salt
Milk (approx. 2½ cups)

Mix dry ingredients together with a wire whisk,
and then add milk to desired thinness.
The result is a crêpe batter.

Pour a small amount into preheated, buttered or oiled skillet.
Spread thin by tilting pan. (A small pan works best.)
Flip tortilla once when batter loses its glossy look and
the edges of the crêpe look a bit dry and start to curl.
Cook a few seconds longer and tip out of pan.
Yields about 14 tortillas or crêpes.

* Note: a U.S. cup is 8 fluid ounces, or 240 ml.
So 2½ cups = 20 fl. oz. = 1 British pint = 600 ml.

A filling of pork, zucchini, and grated cheese

Walt used about a cup of skim milk, a little less than a cup of liquid cream — the crème liquide we buy comes in containers that hold 200 milliliters — plus enough water to bring it all up to the right quantity. All that because we didn't have any whole milk in the house — that's what you should use, whole milk. If you use polenta rather than cornmeal, make sure it's a fine (not coarse) polenta. The batter should have the consistency of heavy cream.

Note that there's no sugar in the crêpe/tortilla batter. You could make the standard French crêpe batter with the same proportions by using 2 cups of flour rather than 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of cornmeal. As you can see from the pictures, the cornmeal crêpes look exactly like standard French crêpes.

A crêpe folded up around that savory filling

We will make these again soon and use them as tortillas with Mexican food. They really aren't Mexican-style tortillas, which don't have eggs or milk in them, but I think they will be good. In fact, yesterday we each ate two crêpes stuffed with savory ingredients: some cooked zucchini, sautéed pork lardons (plain, not smoked), and some grated French Comté and Italian Parmesan cheese.

Walt cooked all the crêpes and stacked them on a plate. They don't stick together. He used melted butter in the non-stick pan he cooked them in. And once the crêpes were stacked on the plate, he covered them with a thick dishtowel to keep them warm and soft. We didn't want them to dry out get brittle because we planned to fill, fold, and reheat them either in the oven or in the crêpe pan before we ate them.

Filled savory corn crêpes or tortillas, ready for the oven

As a main course, we put some of the pork, zucchini, and bacon filling in several crêpes, folded them up, and heated them on an oven-proof plate in the oven. We just needed to melt the cheese, really.

For dessert, we spread some jam on some crêpes, and just sprinkled others with sugar and melted butter. We reheated them and then folded them up in the crêpe pan. The last one I had was one I doused with some Triple Sec (orange-flavored liqueur). That was good.

Cooking a cornmeal crêpe

Wow, 27 comments yesterday. I can't answer them all, but I've read and enjoyed them all. Judy, I'm going to the supermarket this morning and I'll have a look around the sugar section to see what different varieties are sold there. What we buy for everyday use in cooking and baking is called sucre (blanc) en poudre. That's just plain, white, granulated sugar.

BettyAnn, I believe that that bag of white cornmeal from Abbitt's Mill in North Carolina is one I brought back the last time I went to the States. The ones you brought in 2008 (I was so grateful) got used up a while back. Now I can get fine-ground yellow cornmeal here and I keep a supply in the freezer. So I only bring back the white meal nowadays.

CHM, I'm glad you are not superstitious. Who needs all that bad luck? Sue, grits are just corn mush, like polenta. Grits are normally white, while polenta is yellow. I'll write more about grits one day soon. I think I still have some grits that I brought back from North Carolina last year.

Candles, crêpes, and corn meal

Today, February 2, is La Chandeleur. It's the Catholic celebration of the presentation of the baby Jesus at the temple by his mother, Mary, 2000 years ago. Candles were lit. That's where the name comes from: chandelle is an old French word for candle, derived from the Latin candela, that gave us La Chandeleur in French and Candlemas in English.

The more modern, generic French term for candle is bougie, which is the "frenchified" name of a town in Algeria that exported great quantities of wax to Europe for candle-making in the Middle Ages. The older chandelles were made with tallow (fat, suet), according to the dictionary. And the name of the candles that the faithful burn in churches is cierges, which are typically long and thin. The name cierge derives from the same word as "wax" in French, which is cire.

These are cierges, in a picture Walt posted on his blog in 2006.

But back to La Chandeleur. By tradition, everybody makes crêpes today in France. In England, those are called pancakes, but in America we use the word crepe (with or without the accent over the E) to describe the typically thin French-style pancake. I think our American pancakes, thicker and more floury, came to us from Scotland. Crepe batter is very liquid and the crepes can be almost paper-thin, and therefore not so filling.

Walt and I have decided to make cornmeal crepes today and fill them with savory rather than sweet ingredients. It's a recipe I came across on the Internet when I was looking for recipes for making Mexican-style corn tortillas.

This is the cornmeal we are using for our crêpes today. Just to
confuse things, it's labeled « farine de maïs » — "corn flour" —
but it is definitely a meal, not a flour, of corn (or maize). It's
French (Moulin des Moines) and organic (biologique).

Meal is also an interesting word. It's typically American, I think. When I look it up in the English-French dictionary, the translation given for "meal" is farine, or flour. I've had a hard time explaining what meal is to people who speak British English. They immediately think of "corn flour," which I think is what we call "corn starch" in America.

In Great Britain, for example, oatmeal is called porridge, and the oats you use to make it are called porridge oats. In America, we buy oatmeal or Quaker oats (a brand name) at the supermarket and we cook them to make the oatmeal we eat for breakfast.

Actually, I bet most Americans don't know what "porridge" is — a soup or gruel of some kind, they might think. In fact, the word is evidently a corruption of "pottage" or the French potage, meaning a creamy vegetable soup, under the influence of an older term like porreie or poree, which is a form of the French name for leeks, or poireaux. How about that? Nowadays, in England, porridge is oatmeal.

I went down to the freezer and I found these two bags of cornmeal,
one American (from North Carolina) and white; the other
Italian (purchased at the Paris Store in Blois) and yellow.

But back to corn (or maize). We don't have any everyday product in America that we might call "corn flour." Flour is automatically wheat for us. And by the way, corn in American means "maize" in British. (In the British Isles, the word "corn" means, or used to mean, any grain — wheat, barley, oats, etc. Maize is "Indian corn," the grain the Amerindians used. In Québec, I've seen and heard it called blé d'inde, "Indian wheat.")

So when we say just "flour" in the States, we mean wheat flour, and when we say just "meal" we mean, at least in the U.S. South, cornmeal. Cornmeal (also written corn meal, as two words) can be white — made from white corn — or yellow — made from yellow corn.

Rummaging through the freezer, I also found this bag of
"instant" masa harina that I had completely forgotten
we had. Now we can make Mexican tortillas.

But I shouldn't mention corn "flour" without mentioning Mexico's masa harina. That's what you make corn tortillas with, and it's more and more widely available in the U.S. nowadays. It's called masa harina, which is, literally, farine de maïs or "corn flour." It is not at all the same thing as cornmeal. It's made by a different process (which includes a step called "nixtamalization"), and it is much more finely ground, resembling wheat flour rather than cornmeal.

Corn is made into meal in the U.S., or into starch. In French, the word for "starch" in this sense is fécule, and you can buy, for example, fécule de pommes de terre, or potato starch, at the market and use it to thicken your sauces. You can also buy fécule de maïs, cornstarch (or corn starch), but nobody ever calls it that. It is always referred to by a brand name, Maïzéna (pronounced [mah-ee-zay-NAH]).

Cornstarch (Am.) or, I think, "corn flour" (Br.),
or fécule de maïs (Fr.) is called Maïzéna in France.

In fact, the English-French dictionary gives both farine de maïs (corn flour) and maïzéna (with a lowercase M but marked with an ®) for "cornstarch" — and that's what I think our British cousins call cornstarch: "corn flour." That is not at all the same thing as cornmeal.

In the American usage, a "meal" is a coarsely ground grain — coarser than a "flour." The word "meal" is obviously related to the word "mill." I don't know if British English uses the word "meal" in this sense. Somebody will tell me. The terms "corn meal" and "cornmeal" are absent from the (British) English-French dictionary.

Masa, polenta, and meal

In French, a grain that is coarsely ground is called une semoule — semoule de blé, semoule de maïs. I just looked, and the French-English dictionary actually does give "corn meal" as the translation of semoule de maïs (at semoule). Semoule is also translated as semolina and is the term used to describe the couscous "grain" we've all become familiar with. I put "grain" in quotation marks, because couscous is actually a form of pasta, not a grain, meal, flour, or semolina.

So if you say "corn meal" to speakers of British English, they are often not sure what you are talking about. And if you say semoule to speakers of French, they think either of couscous "grain" or semoule de blé dur, which is "durum" wheat semolina. Semoule means a sort of farine granuleuse, a coarse flour, according to the dictionary, and sucre semoule is a coarse-grained sugar. Durum wheat semolina is used in the manufacture of pasta, including couscous.

At the end of the day (as the British say), what you look for in France if you want to make American corn bread (a.k.a. cornbread, cornpone, etc.) goes by an Italian name: polenta. How's that for convoluted? But you need to find finely milled polenta. The coarser varieties, which resemble what we call "grits" (or the older form, "hominy grits") in the American South, won't do for cornbread. Coarse polenta resembles grits in texture, but not it color — it's yellow, not white. You boil it and eat it as a kind of porridge.

Here in France, I can buy finely ground polenta, or corn meal, at the shop in Blois called Paris Store, which specializes in products imported from China, Vietnam, Japan, and other Asian countries. What's up with that?

Oh, back to the corn meal crêpes. They are made with equal quantities wheat flour (farine de froment in French) and corn meal (semoule de maïs). There's no British corn flour (maïzéna) in the mixture. Otherwise, they are just like the standard French crêpes.

February starts out gray

Just as January ended gray. January was a dry month, though, with less than 25% of the rainfall we got in December. And the beginning of January was mild. The end turned out pretty cold. So I guess the average was okay.

Yesterday morning's icy walk

We have a high pressure system over us right now, but all high pressure does in the wintertime here in France is hold a layer of low gray cloud and haze close to the ground. La grisaille est plaquée au sol. It's like some kind of inversion. The sun just barely shines through at different points during the day, but it's basically gloomy 90% of the time.

The sunset looks like some kind of radioactive cloud.

This too shall pass. The days are longer now. Sundown is around 6:00 p.m., so there's a little more daylight. Still, it doesn't get light in the morning until about 8:30. And even then, it's a dim light.

Callie enjoys her walks, gray or shine.

This is the price we pay for the good months of warmth, long days, and short nights, and for all the good things we enjoy about life in France. We just have to keep reminding ourselves why we decided to come live in the Loire Valley. No regrets. But with each passing winter.... well, each winter seems longer.

Scenes like these will be a vague memory in a few months,
after the weather turns warm and the landscape turns green.