A long-lost recipe: Aillade de veau

A week or 10 days ago, my friend CHM wrote to me to say he had found some photos he took two decades ago on a trip to California. Did I want copies of them? He was using a Kodak camera back then, and they were in a Kodak Digital Camera (KDC) format that is pretty much obsolete now. CHM said he could upload the photos and JPG versions of them to the Cloud and I could then download them. I appreciated the offer.

Brown chunks of veal in olive oil. Chicken, turkey, pork, or beef would work in this recipe too.

That set me to searching in my photo archives. I didn't know exactly in what year the photos were taken , but I thought it might have been the late 1990s. We had taken a trip to the Sierra Foothills in California to see our friend Sue, and also to see the new house that a friend who worked at Apple had bought in Nevada City.

Sixteen garlic cloves go into the tomato sauce for aillade. I added some dried tomatoes.

I finally found the KDC photos on a CD that I had recorded way back when, and realized that at some point I had converted them to JPG format. I found a lot more of CHM's photos from back then too — we always used to share the photos we took on trips together, whether in France or in California. I also found an application on my PC called Fotor that will open the KDCs, and then will save them as JPGs.

I added thyme and bay leaves to the tomato sauce, along with a spoonful of honey and some extra white wine.

In all my searching, I also found a scan of a recipe that didn't seem to be in our recipe database. It was for a dish called aillade de veau — veal and garlic stew. At first I thought the recipe must have appeared in an American newspaper, but when I read it for the third or fourth time, I realized that it had both a French title and an indication that it came from the Bouches-du-Rhône, which is the département down on the Mediterranean Coast where Marseille and Aix-en-Provence are located. But the recipe itself was in English. Somehow, that jogged my memory.

Dried breadcrumbs, browned in the veal drippings, serve as a thickener for the tomato sauce.

I thought about a book that we've had for probably 25 years. I found it on a shelf with a lot of other neglected books. It's called Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook. I noticed that it was edited by Richard Olney, who became legendary among U.S. cooks like Alice Waters and James Beard. I also have his book Simple French Food, and I consult it regularly.

We had bow-tie pasta with the veal and garlic stew.

So there was the recipe for aillade de veau in Olney's Provence Beautiful book. I don't think I had ever made it before. I wonder how many other recipes in there I'll make, now that I've re-discovered it. I recently bought both French- and English-language copies of another book that Richard Olney edited, The Good Cook's Encyclopedia. You can be sure I'll be exploring all these books for recipes over the winter. Above are some photos the aillade de veau I made yesterday and here's the recipe for it that I scanned all those years ago.

Vouvant : l'église

Vouvant, the only (I believe) fortified town in the Vendée, is also officially one of the most beautiful villages in France. Les plus beaux villages de France is an association to which villages apply to win that designation. It was created in 1982, and now 158 villages are members. The rules are strict.

The church in Vouvant dates back to the late 1000s and early 1100s. Like most French buildings, it has been significantly restored, enlarged, and rebuilt over the centuries. There were great wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants in the 1500s, and many old churches were laid to ruin. And then the French Revolution came, and further damage was done.  Still, the Vouvant church is historically significant and was one of the first churches in the Vendée to be classified as a historical monument. That happened in 1840.

Walt and I drove to Vouvant on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. We had a picnic lunch on a park bench on the grounds of the old fortress, almost in the shadow of the Tour Mélusine. The Mélusine tower was erected nearly 200 years after the first church in Vouvant was built. Notice how in the photo above the church seems to be crowned with a halo.

We couldn't do much in terms of going inside places like the church and the tower because we were traveling with the dog, and it was too sunny and warm to leave Tasha in the car for even a short time. However, we could walk around and take in the scenery — in other words, take some pictures.

I really enjoy taking long zoom photos of historical monuments like these churches and then editing them to reveal details that I can't see with my naked eye. The photos above are examples. The carvings in my photos represent, on the lower level (in each photo), The Last Supper, and on the upper level, Christ's Ascension to Heaven. They are Gothic in style (1400s). You can enlarge them to see more details. It's pretty amazing that they have survived for so long, but then I don't know how many times they have been restored over the centuries..

Vouvant et Mélusine

Vouvant, a village in the Vendée just 7 or 8 miles north of the big town of Fontenay-le-Comte, is the only fortified village in the département. In the 1200s, a huge fortress was built at Vouvant, but it fell into ruin over the centuries and most vestiges of it were obliterated in the mid-1800s.

It's all gone except one element, called La Tour Mélusine, built in 1242. This was the donjon of the demolished château-fort. According to legend, the 36-meter-tall  (120-ft.) tower was built by a mythical figure — a fairy — named Mélusine. The story says she built it overnight out of a few rocks and a mouthful of water.

The mythical Mélusine ended up married to Raimondin, the count of the Poitou province, who had accidentally stabbed his uncle as the two men were trying to kill a wild boar. The uncle died, and Raimondin, grief-stricken, was wandering aimlessly in a nearby forest when suddenly water bubbled up from the ground. Over the gushing new spring appeared the frail white silhouettes of three damsels, one of them Mélusine. Raimondin took her as his wife.

Mélusine had magical powers, and she kept them even after marrying a human.  She could just wave her wand and a new château would appear on the landscape.  She waved her legendary wand in many places — Lusignan, Pouzargues, Parthenay, Mervant, and Vouvant among them — creating  a collection of local fortresses and castles.

Alas, Mélusine had a secret. Having long ago murdered her father, she was condemned forever to be transformed into a femme-serpent — a snake woman — every Saturday of her life. No one was supposed to see her in this form, but one Saturday, Raimondin, in a fit of jealousy, broke down Mélusine's bedroom door and was horrified to find that his wife had been transformed into a mermaid and was washing her long golden tresses. 

Mélusine suddenly flew out the window, turned into a fearsome serpent, and circled the town and the castle three times before crashing into a tower and disappearing into thin air. In the photo above, you can see her above flying over the donjon she built in Vouvant. Anyway, all this is what I read in the French-language Michelin Guide this morning. Believe it or not.

Meanwhile, in Saint-Aignan...

We've had a couple of inches of rain over the 10 days since we came back home from the Vendée, and it's done the local landscape a lot of good. We've also had some nice sunny days, including yesterday and the day before. The weather seems to be returning to normal. The fall colors are beautiful right now.

The laurel hedge and the bay laurel bush have been trimmed one more time. The grass has started to green up again. Mornings can be chilly — we had a heavy frost a few days ago — but one morning the temperature is in the 30s in ºF and the next it's up closer to 50, like right now. Today's high temperature is supposed to be in the mid-teens in ºC (low to mid-60s in ºF) — pas mal pour le mois de novembre.

There's nothing like getting away from it all for a few days to make you appreciate where you live when you return home. The Vendée and the Atlantic coast definitely have a lot going for them, and I have more photos to post that prove that. Stay turned. It's amazing how we left here on October 20 when it still seemed like summer, spent a week near the coast where it really felt like July because people were strolling and even sun-bathing on the beaches. Then we returned to enjoy weather that really feels autumnal. It was a clean break. We lucked out with our timing.

At the same time, our area, the eastern edge of the Touraine province, the southern edge of the Loir-et-Cher, have are definitely beautiful too. In this season, morning and afternoon walks are not good times for taking photos, because it's just too dark. The days are short, with sunrise at 7:45 a.m. and sunset at 5:30 p.m. These days I'm trying to spend time driving around the area, as I've said before, like a teenager in the 18-year-old Peugeot to blow the carbon out of the pistons and get it ready for inspection. This is something I have to do, and enjoy doing, every second year in November. The countryside and fall colors make it a pleasant task.