Les gîtes du Clos Chassepline

Here's the rest of the segment of the recent Maison France 5 about a new B&B and gîte business in Saint-Aignan run by a couple named Létitia and Charles. They also have three B&B rooms in the main house on their big property just across the bridge from Saint-Aignan. The name of the property is Le Clos Chassepline.

A gîte is a vacation rental or guesthouse. One dictionary defines the term as meaning Endroit où l'on couche, réside, temporairement ou habituellement. The expression le gîte et le couvert means "room and board." The gîte is where you sleep — it derives from the verb gésir which means to lie down (and sleep) — and the couvert is a place setting at the dining room table — we use the same term in English when we talk about a "cover charge" — which is a flat entrance fee charged by some restaurants, clubs, or bars.

These gîtes seem reasonably priced to me. The larger one (the first one in the video) is a two-bedroom, one-bath, 1300 ft² house that can sleep eight — one bedroom is furnished with a queen-size bed and two single beds — starting at 100 euros per night. The smaller one is an 850 ft², two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on two levels that sleeps four with prices starting at 120 euros a night. You can read about them and see photos here. I'm sure prices are higher in summer and lower in winter.

This is not an advertisement; I'm just trying to give you an idea of what French gîtes and prices can be like. The gîtes we stay in normally charge between 300 and 500 euros for a week's stay. We take our own bed and bath linens with us, as well as food so that we can have dinners in the gîte. We can also go to local supermarkets and outdoor markets for food.

The last place we stayed in, at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne region, had three bedrooms and a big kitchen and living room, plus a good-sized yard. The one where we're going to stay for a week in April up on the English Channel coast is a 1400 ft² two-bedroom house with a big yard for 450 euros for the week. Here's the description:

Gîte indépendant (140 m²) aménagé dans une maison picarde ancienne, sur terrain clos de 1800 m², commun à l'habitation des propriétaires. Au rez-de-chaussée : cuisine, séjour, salon, salle de bains (douche et baignoire), WC indépendant. A l'étage : 2 chambres (1 lit 140, 2 lits jumeaux 90), 1 lit 140 en mezzanine. Un cabinet de toilette avec lavabo et WC. Chauffage central au gaz, sèche-linge.

In other words, two bedrooms upstairs (one double and one twin), one bathroom (tub + shower) downstairs with the kitchen and living room, and two half-baths, one on each floor.  There's also an extra double bed on a mezzanine upstairs.

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Here are links to the five clips from the recent La Maison France 5 show

about the Saint-Aignan area that I've posted over the past week.

1. Saint-Aignan introduction
2. A B&B in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
3. Gîtes ruraux in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
4. A "cave dwelling" near Amboise
5. A farmhouse at Pontlevoy

Nouvelles chambres d'hôtes à Saint-Aignan

Here's another segment from the Maison France 5 show about Saint-Aignan and the surrounding area. It's about a young couple, Létitia et Charles, who moved to the area three or four years ago. They bought a big old house just across the river from central Saint-Aignan, in the town called Noyers-sur-Cher. Before coming to settle here, they lived and worked in the Paris area, he in print journalism and she in environmental affairs, they say in this segment.

C. says that his family was originally from this area and that he always loved the forests of the nearby area called La Sologne. He spent part of his childhood in the city of Orléans, 50 miles to the north. The house L&C found to buy and renovate over in Noyers was not owned by his family; L&C found it on the market and bought it. It's less than a mile and a half from our house, but we haven't actually met the couple.

Apparently, the house was built by an architect from Paris in the 1890s. It sits on 3 hectares (7½ acres) of land. The new owners wanted a big property where they could keep animals (sheep, chickens, etc.) and plant a big vegetable garden. They wanted to turn the place into a B&B (chambres d'hôtes) as well as turn two outbuildings (dépendances, communs) into vacation rentals (gîtes, guesthouses).

They have done a lot of the renovations themselves, they say, starting with the outbuildings before tackling the main house, which they wanted to live in for a while before beginning to restore and renovate it. The prospect of re-doing such a house was intimidating, they say. In Paris, they lived in a 400 ft² apartment, so moving to such a big place in a basically rural area was a real life change for them.

They furnished the place with items they found in second-hand shops (brocantes), antique stores, and charity shops, especially the Emmaüs organization (similar to Good Will or the Salvation Army in the U.S.). They use the verb chiner to describe the process of making the rounds of brocantes, antiquaires, and charity shops, searching for furniture and other items they liked. Chiner means to shop, to hunt for bargains, especially second-hand or antique items.

Here's a link to the web site advertising the chambres d'hôtes and gîtes business that Charles and Letitia have recently opened. Some of the site's pages have been translated into English.

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Here are links to the five clips from the recent La Maison France 5 show

about the Saint-Aignan area that I've posted over the past week.

1. Saint-Aignan introduction
2. A B&B in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
3. Gîtes ruraux in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
4. A "cave dwelling" near Amboise
5. A farmhouse at Pontlevoy

Mangeons de la brioche

When you come to France from the United States (and probably from other countries), and you taste brioche for the first time, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. I know I did. Nowadays in the U.S., you can find "real" bread — what they call pain in France — at least in the cities. Back in the 1950s and '60s in the U.S. — at least in North Carolina, where I grew up — what we called bread was a sliced loaf of slightly sweet, soft-crusted "spongecake" that didn't at all resemble either the Parisian baguette or French pain de mie (sliced sandwich bread). It was more like what is called brioche in France.

So I never understood why such a big fuss was made over brioche here. It was just bread, as far as I could tell. People here didn't make sandwiches with it — that was about the only difference I detected. Brioche was a special treat here. It was considered to be a kind of cake. That's because French pain, whether made into a baguette or a bigger loaf, included just four ingredients: flour, yeast, water, and salt. Brioche is bread with eggs, butter, and a little sugar added to the dough.

Queen Marie-Antoinette, before she went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, supposedly said, when told that the French people were suffering because of famine and couldn't even get enough bread to eat to stave off hunger, said something like: "Well, why don't they just eat cake if they can't get bread?" In French, that was "Let them eat brioche!" She didn't get it and, actually, she might never even have said that. Ten years earlier, in one of his books the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau had told the story of a legendary princess who had said the same thing about the starving peasants of her day.

I've learned to appreciate and enjoy brioche now, since the bread we eat daily is made with just flour, water, yeast and salt. Brioche is not something that knocks your socks off the way a good French croissant can. It's too familiar to an American palate. And it's not always certain that you will find brioche in a French boulangerie (bread bakery). I don't think there's a lot of demand for it. As with pain de mie, you'd do better to place an order for it in advance rather than just assuming you could go buy some from the bakery on the spur of the moment.

That said, there are loaves and loaves of brioche available at the supermarket. Lately, I've been trying some of them, and I've found some that I think are very good. Some are not so appetizing; those have a slightly chemical taste that's fairly off-putting. One criteria for choosing a brioche is that it must be labeled as being pur beurre — made with butter, not margarine or vegetable oil. The one in my photos is a braided loaf, like a traditional Jewish challah. In fact, the main difference between challah and brioche is that the French recipe includes dairy products (butter, cream. or milk).

The situation is the same with French croissants. Look for the ones that are made with butter, not other fats. And don't assume that the croissants you find in French bakeries are really made from scratch on the premises. I just saw a documentary on television where it was claimed that fully 80% of the croissants sold in France are made from dough"manufactured" in factories  and shipped frozen to supermarkets and, yes, bakeries. That doesn't mean that brioches and croissants made from factory dough aren't good, but you can't just expect them to be delicious.

The brioche in my photos here is very good, to my taste. There's a recipe on the plastic bag it's sold in at the supermarket. I paid 3.20 euros for the loaf, which is sliced like American sandwich bread (loaves of American-style sandwich bread are also a supermarket staple in France nowadays — some are good, others not). The recipe on this package is the traditional one: it calls for flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and yeast — plus a tiny bit of rum or orange blossom essence (arôme de fleur d'oranger) for flavor. I plan to make brioche following this recipe soon.

The actual ingredients in the brioche pictured here are flour (with gluten), fresh eggs, butter (15% of the dough by weight, if I understand correctly), sourdough starter (made with flour and water), flavoring (?), yeast, and salt. Not bad. And the brioche is tasty. I'll buy it again. In her famous cookbook called Je sais cuisiner (1970), Ginette Mathiot gives a recipe for brioche rapide made with baking powder instead of yeast, and cream instead of butter. I'm not sure about that...

Another brioche I've bought recently is called brioche de Nanterre — that's a town on the western edge of the Paris metropolitan area — which I found at Intermarché once but haven't yet found again. It has less sugar and less butter in it, if my taste buds are working right. I thought it was as good as this brioche from the Vendée region, but different. It was made with all natural ingredients too. I'll keep trying to find it.

A couple of years ago, when we went and spent a week in the Vendée, on the Atlantic coast, the man who owned the gîte rural we rented for our stay gave us a loaf of Vendée brioche as a welcoming gift, but I don't have a particularly good memory of it. It's a local specialty, but I thought it was too sweet. From what I've read, brioche was probably originally made in Normandy, and two towns long famous for their brioches are Gisors and Gournay, both 40 or 50 miles north of Paris, near Rouen. Both towns are famous for their dairy cows and the butter made from their local milk.

La Maison France 5

France 5 is a public TV channel described as une chaîne généraliste broadcasting programs that are principalement composés de magazines et de documentaires... axés sur l'éducation et le partage des savoirs et des connaissances. One show that Walt and I often watch is called La Maison France 5, which Wikipédia calls un magazine télévisé français consacré à la décoration et à l'aménagement intérieur — décoration and interior design, that is. What I like about it is that each episode is set in a city, town, village, or region of France and features history and culture as well as interior design and decorating.

You'll understand that I was surprised last week when I was searching for interesting programs on France 5 to see that the February 20 show focused on where? Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher — our town — and the surrounding region. I recorded it and have started editing the video to pull out some segments about Saint-Aignan itself. Here's one — this clip runs for about eight minutes and the narration and dialogs are, of course, in French. (Unfortunately, you might have to wait two or three minutes for it to download.)

Many episodes of La Maison France 5, covering many regions, are available on YouTube here.

Credit and thanks to France 5, and to La Maison France 5, hosted by Stéphane Thebaut.

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Here are links to the five clips from the recent La Maison France 5 show

about the Saint-Aignan area that I've posted over the past week.

1. Saint-Aignan introduction
2. A B&B in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
3. Gîtes ruraux in Saint-Aignan/Noyers
4. A "cave dwelling" near Amboise
5. A farmhouse at Pontlevoy