Souvenirs en noir et blanc

I have to walk the dog this morning (in the rain) and then we are going to try to leave early to drive over to Loches to do some shopping. So I'm posting something short.

Last night I was looking around in my photo archives — on the computer, of course — to see what kinds of pictures I took in Januaries past. Instead, in a folder dated January 2003, I found this picture of me from 1977:


That's the caption that appeared with the photo. Somebody facetiously called me "professor" the other day, but let me say I never actually became one. I was a teacher for a dozen years, however, in Illinois and in France. I loved it but gave it up to move to Washington DC, where I ended up working as an editor, translator, and writer. What I never gave up was France. Or plaid shirts!

Notice that fancy word processor on my desk. The AATF was and is the American Association of Teachers of French. I worked in the association's offices in Champaign, Illinois, for three years. I was in my late 20s, and I left there to return to France in 1979 at the age of 30.

Loir-et-Cher, the song by Michel Delpech

The singer and songwriter Jean-Michel Delpech was born in Courbevoie, in the well-to-do westside Paris suburbs, in 1946. He chose Michel Delpech as his stage name and starting performing in the 1960s. He was the opening act (la vedette américaine in French) for Jacques Brel, for example, when Brel gave his final concert at the Olympia theater in Paris in 1966.

Michel Delpech continued his career with a string of hit songs in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. I came to France in 1970 for six months, and then returned to spend the 1972-73 school year in Rouen (Normandy). Delpech's songs were on the radio all the time. Some of his biggest titles were:

• Pour un flirt (1971) — I remember this one because it was kind of racy for the times and it taught me that the English word flirt got a different meaning when it was imported into the French language. In French, « un flirt » is what is also called « une aventure » — what the dictionary calls "a brief romance." It's an old-fashioned term now, and might already have been back then.
• Les Divorcés (1973) was about a man whose wife is leaving him for another. He's getting a divorce and has accepted the situation, even though his lawyer says he has to testify against his wife. « La vie continue, malgré tout », he sings. Divorce by mutual consent was not yet possible in France then, unless I'm mistaken.
• Que Marianne était jolie (also 1973) is one I remember for the music and the style. It's a song about the symbol of the French Republic — the New Regime, after abolition of the monarchy in the 1790s. I was always a little mystified by the subject and words, but Delpech's refrain « Dieu ! mais que Marianne était jolie ! » was catchy and memorable. It's a song about Paris and the revolutionary spirit. Here's a live version from a couple of decades ago.

And finally, there was the song called Le Loir-et-Cher, in 1977. Now Walt and I live in the Loir-et-Cher, which is the territory around the old royal town of Blois. It straddles the Loir River in the north and the Cher River in the south — both are tributaries of the major local river, the Loire. Here's the song on YouTube:



These are the lyrics in French:

Le Loir-et-Cher

Ma famille habite dans le Loir-et-Cher,
Ces gens-là ne font pas de manières.
Ils passent tout l'automne à creuser des sillons,
A retourner des hectares de terre.
Je n’ai jamais eu grand chose à leur dire
Mais je les aime depuis toujours.
De temps en temps, je vais les voir.
Je passe le dimanche dans le Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain:} Ils me disent, ils me disent :
« Tu vis sans jamais voir un cheval, un hibou. »
Ils me disent :
« Tu ne viens plus, même pour pêcher un poisson.
Tu ne penses plus à nous.
On dirait que ça te gêne de marcher dans la boue,
On dirait que ça te gêne de dîner avec nous.
On dirait que ça te gêne de marcher dans la boue,
On dirait que ça te gêne de dîner avec nous. »

Chaque fois que je m’arrête dans le Loir-et-Cher,
Ils ne me laissent plus partir de chez eux.
Je leur dis qu’il faut que je rentre sur Paris,
Que je ne fais pas toujours ce que je veux
Et qu’il faut que je trouve encore un poste d'essence,
Que je n'ai pas le temps de finir ma bière
Et que je reviendrai un de ces dimanches
Passer la nuit dans le Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain}

And here's my loose translation:

The Loir-et-Cher

My family lives in the Loir-et-Cher,
They're the kind of people who don't put on airs.
They spend the whole autumn working the fields,
Plowing up acres and acres of soil.
I've never had much to talk to them about
But they've always been dear to me.
Once in a while I go to see them.
I spend a Sunday in the Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain:}
And they'll say to me, they'll say:
"You live your life without ever seeing a horse or an owl."
And they'll say:
"You don't come see us any more, not even to go fishing.
It's like you've forgotten all about us.
It's as if you're afraid you might get mud on your shoes.
As if you don't really care about sharing a meal with us.
It's as if you're afraid you might get mud on your shoes.
As if you don't really care about sharing a meal with us."

Every time I stop off in the Loir-et-Cher,
They don't want to let me leave again.
I tell them that I have to get back to Paris,
That I can't always do exactly as I please.
And that I need to find one more place to fuel up my car,
So I don't have time to finish that last beer
And I'll be sure to come back some Sunday soon
To spend another night in the Loir-et-Cher.

{Refrain}

Here's a much more recent live performance by an older Michel Delpech:



I'm a true believer when it comes to songs like these as a way to learn French pronunciation and expressions. They can teach you the music of the language. They are full of historical and cultural references. And they're fun, at least to me.

So rural there's a song about it

It will soon be eight years since we left California and started a new life in Saint-Aignan. We found the house we now live in and put a deposit down on it in December 2002. Then we decided we really didn't want to stay any longer in San Francisco — France was too tempting. So we sold our house in S.F. in March 2003. A month later, we signed on the dotted line and became owners of a house in the country near Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher. By July 2003, we were all moved in.

What a transition! We not only went from living in the U.S. to living in France, but we also moved from the city to the country. We used to live near the ocean, and now we live well inland. We lived in the temperate, nearly seasonless, kind of monotonous climate of the San Francisco Bay Area, and now we live in the much more varied, exciting climate of the Loire Valley, with clearly marked seasons. We're still getting used to that. Winter can be cold and snowy, and summer can be hot and arid. But you can't count on much of anything, weather-wise.

The rural Loir-et-Cher département, southwest of Paris

When we first arrived in Saint-Aignan — we live about 3 miles from the town, on a dead-end road on the edge of a big vineyard — I remember how quiet it was here. I'd go to bed at night and lie there listening for some sound, any sound. There were none. The silence was deafening. It must have been really noisy where we lived in San Francisco, but I had never particularly noticed.

Now it doesn't feel so quiet any more. I must have adapted. When I listen carefully, I can hear the little train across the river toot its horn. If the wind is right I can hear the train running along the tracks. I can hear church bells from down in our village. In the daytime, I can hear chainsaws or tractor motors off in the distance. I hear owls hoot at night and a neighbor's donkey braying. The other neighbor's rooster crows every morning. Green woodpeckers "laugh" out back when they are startled. Geese honk in another neighbor's yard. Birds, that's mostly what I hear. Once in a while a car drives by in front of the house. Or a light plane, a low-flying military jet, a helicopter, or a hot-air balloon goes by overhead, always startling me.

In San Francisco, we lived one house over from a street that ran at a very steep angle up and down a hill — as streets in San Francisco tend to do. Cars made a lot of noise on that hill, at all hours of the day and night. You got used to it. We lived maybe a quarter of a mile from the 280 freeway, which was down in a valley below our house. There was a constant roar of traffic, but you hardly heard it after a while. And we were only 10 miles from the airport, so we had a lot of planes in the sky overhead all the time. You didn't hear them much, but you heard them, sort of subconsciously — in the background, like the freeway noise.

The so-rural Loir-et-Cher is framed by three major
French cities: Tours, Orléans, and Le Mans

The fact is, the French département we live in is just a little larger, geographically, than the three-county area we lived, commuted, and worked in for many years on what they call "The Peninsula" out there in the Bay Area. Those counties are San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, and they cover an area of about 5,000 square kilometers (2,000 sq. mi.).

Our département, called « le Loir-et-Cher », is — you might have guessed — basically rural. Okay, entirely rural. It covers some 6,000 square kilometers from near Le Mans on its northwest side to Saint-Aignan in the south and Vierzon on the southeast end. Blois, in the middle, is its biggest city, with a metropolitan area (called an agglomération in French) of about 75,000 people. San Francisco — and I mean the city itself, not counting any surrounding area, is 10 or 11 times larger.

The whole Loir-et-Cher département, which is barely bigger geographically than the three-county area where we lived and worked in California, has a population of about 325,000. The area in California that I've described has a population of 3.25 million! (The Paris area, by comparison, is twice as large geographically (12,000 sq. km) and has a population of 11.5 million.)

Speaking of the country vs. the city, you might not know that our département, the Loir-et-Cher, has had a popular song written about it. I can't think of any other French département (there are 100 of them — they are like counties or little states in U.S. terms) that can claim that distinction. Except Paris, of course, but that hardly counts.

The song was a big hit in the 1970s and I remember it from back then, although I didn't yet know where the Loir-et-Cher was located. I had been to Chambord and Blois to see the châteaux in the early 1970s, but I didn't know what département they were in. Now I know that the name Loir-et-Cher is known by nearly all French people, and it is synonymous with rurality, farming, and the old-fashioned life out in the country.

More about the song later...

Bitter greens in salads

One of the best salad greens we get here in France on a regular basis is scarole — escarole in English and it's sometimes called that in French too. We've been enjoying it for the past few weeks, and it's a wintertime product. It's a member of the chicory family, along with frisée (curly or frisée endive) and endive (Belgian endive).

The chicory family gives salad greens that are on the bitter side. Much of the bitterness of the original plants has been bred out of them by selective propogation, but some remains. Often they are "blanched" — in other words, protected from sunlight so that they leaves are whiter and more tender. Other bitter greens, from different plant families, are pissenlit (dandelion leaves), cresson (watercress), and mâche (lamb's lettuce). All these are treated the same way in French salads.

A standard French salad of escarole and red beets

To counter the slight bitter taste, people make salads of escarole, frisée, or Belgian endive that include sweet, salty, or other strong-flavored ingredients. The classic salade lyonnaise, for example, is curly endive with smoked pork lardons (bacon) and a poached egg, with a vinegary dressing. Hard-boiled eggs pair with Belgian endive or escarole salads, and so do cheeses like Roquefort or cubes of Gruyère or Comté. The saltiness of bacon or cheese mutes the bitterness of the greens.

Often the dressings served with bitter greens of this type are made with a good amount of garlic or shallots, which also take off the bitter edge. Sometimes garlic croutons, called chapons, are added to the salad for both their crunchy texture and their taste, which are good with the bitter greens. Walnuts are very good in these bitter salads too, for their sweetness and nuttiness.

Smoked pork lardons and a garlicky vinaigrette dressing
make another standard French escarole salad.

Mild lettuces like batavia (green leaf lettuce), laitue (Boston lettuce), or feuille de chêne (oakleaf lettuce) are too tender and delicate to stand up to such strong, assertive ingredients. The more tender lettuces are usually just dressed with a mild vinaigrette, made with less vinegar and more good oil, and sometimes flavored with fresh herbs or a little chopped shallot.

One salad ingredient that lends sweetness to bitter greens is betteraves (beets or beetroot). Beets are tossed with Belgian endive, frisée, escarole, watercress, or, especially, mâche. The beets themselves are usually dressed first with vinaigrette and chopped shallots. Red wine vinegar goes especially well with beets, and toasted walnuts are good in a salad with them and escarole or frisée, for example.

Escarole, beets, vinaigrette, and good bread... oh là là

The nice thing about beets in France is that you normally buy them already cooked. They are sold out of a paper-lined crate at the markets and even at the supermarket, but sometimes you get them shrink-wrapped (sous vide). They are a standard item and available everywhere. Buying them pre-cooked means you are saved the long cooking time they require. One of my French books says that raw beets need to be boiled for three hours!

That's a very long time and I think that the raw beets we get today don't need more than about an hour's cooking, whether in boiling water or wrapped in foil and roasted in the oven. In her cookbook from the 1920s (I think), the woman who called herself Tante Marie wrote this about beets:

Tante Marie says beets are better cooked in a slow oven,
where their sugars develop more fully. She says to leave
them in the oven to cook for at least seven hours!

Roasted for seven hours! I bet the beets are really good cooked that way, but the instructions date back to a time when the kitchen stove was also a source of heat for the whole house. There was always a fire going in the kitchen when the weather outside was chilly. So you had the luxury of putting beets in a place in the oven where they wouldn't burn and leaving them there all day, or overnight.

If you can get endive, escarole, or frisée (curly endive) where you live, try them in salad with the flavor ingredients they are served with in France. They are good for you, interesting in texture and taste, and they make a good change from everyday tossed salads.