Haricots de Soissons

A special variety of beans has been cultivated in the Soissons area since the middle of the 18th century. At the beginning, the beans were planted among grapevines wherever there was a little extra space. Soissons ([swah-SÕ] — Õ is the French nasal O) is in northeastern France, 100 km/60 miles northeast of Paris and 60 km/35 miles northwest of Reims in Champagne. They don't really grow many grapes up there any more.

Soissons beans are a kind of giant white lima bean. They resemble the beans called « pois du cap » — "Capetown peas" — that are sometimes available in France. The Soissons beans I found up in Picardy seem to be about the same size as pois du cap but are fatter and not as flat. I don't know if you've ever cooked and eaten giant white lima beans, but I know we ate them when I was growing up. They're nutritious, filling, and tasty.

Bags of haricots de Soissons and haricots noirs

I've also been buying and cooking giant white limas in France for a few years now — here are three posts I've done featuring them (one, two, and three) I use them in the place of smaller white beans (haricots blancs, lingots) in Southwestern France's cassoulet and with Touraine's version of pita bread called fouées.

While I can buy giant lima beans here (in Blois, actually) I had never seen haricots de Soissons in the supermarkets or on the open-air markets in Touraine. They're a regional specialty, I guess. But about two weeks ago I was in the town of Soissons with CHM. Here's a link to the post. That made me think of the Soissons beans again.

Giant white beans named after the French town of Soissons

A couple of days later, I found them just by accident in an Auchan supermarket in the town of Péronne, about 50 miles north of Soissons. I was just looking around to see if there were any local specialty products to be had, and I found not only a bag of dried haricots de Soissons but a bag of dried black beans. I'd never found black beans here in the French countryside before.

It seems that since 2003 a group of farmers around Soissons (in the Aisne département) has started growing these giant white beans again. Never mind that the ones I bought came from a distributor in Spain! This is the new Europe. It doesn't say on the package where the beans were grown. Maybe in Spain, maybe France, or maybe even in America. Some of the dried beans I get here come from Portugal, but on the label it says they are grown in the USA.

Soissons beans need to be soaked for 12 hours
in cold water before being cooked.

The Soissons bean was a major source of dietary starch for generations in northern France. It lost some of its popularity when the potato gained acceptance as a food in France in the 19th century. Like white, green, red, pinto, and black beans, the Soissons bean plant originally came from South America. I'm going to cook some for tomorrow's lunch and have them with rabbit, duck, and chicken sausages that we can buy at the Saturday morning market in Saint-Aignan.

The church in Mézières-en-Brenne

Mézières-en-Brenne, on the banks of the Claise River, is the biggest town in the Brenne [BREHN] region in the Berry (central France). Before going to the restaurant on the shores of the Etang de la Gabrière in the Brenne to meet Susan and Simon the other day, CHM and I had a look around in the church. We were early and there it was.

Along the way, I got interested in the etymology of the word « étang » in French. We don't have an equivalent word in English. If you look in the French-English dictionary, you learn that un étang is a pond or, if the étang is big enough, it's a lake. French also has words for pond — une mare — and for lake — un lac.

All these pictures show the church at Mézières-en-Brenne

The crucial characteristic of an étang is that it is very shallow for its size. Many étangs are man-made, or have at least been modified by the hand of man, as they say in French. Both our nearby Sologne region and the Brenne to the south of us feature many of these small artificial lakes or ponds. Both areas used to be essentially marshy or swampy, and for centuries yellow fever and malaria were carried by the mosquitoes that bred in those wetlands.

Over the past 500 or 600 years, the marshes and swamps have been drained. Natural depressions and low spots in the land have been dammed with low earthen levees at one end to allow water to collect and form a pond or lake. Fish — carp and others — have been introduced. The result is shallow bodies of water in which fish control the mosquito population by feeding on the wrigglers. And the fish have often come in handy as a food source when famine was a problem in past centuries.

Anyway, the word étang comes from the French word for "impermeable" or "water-tight" — that word is « étanche ». You can see the resemblance. The fact is that the chalk-and-clay soil of the Brenne is basically impermeable. Water collects rather than seeping in — hence the old swamps converted into shallow lakes. The English word from the same root as étanche is the verb "stanch" or "staunch" — as in stanching the flow of, for example, blood or tears.

Back to the church: it has a Renaissance-style chapel to the right of the choir, with period stained-glass windows. Other windows in the Mézières church date back to the 14th century; some of them underwent restoration work in the 19th. The wooden choir stalls were moved here from the nearby abbey of Saint-Cyran-en-Brenne.

The Saint-Cyran monastery was officially abolished in 1712, when the disbanding of the religious community there was ordered by the archbishop of Bourges. In 1739, the furniture and fittings were sold off. Saint-Cyran had been presided over by an abbot who preached Jansenism in France in the 1600s. The Jansenist movement, which emphasized original sin, human depravity, divine grace, and predestination, had been declared heretical by the pope in 1655.

Two people praying in the Renaissance chapel of
the church in Mézières-en-Brenne

Mézières got the choir stalls. While CHM and I were in the church taking pictures the day before yesterday, two people came in to pray. The woman was older, the man younger. I assume they were mother and son. We didn't stay much longer, and they didn't stay long either. I saw them exit the church just as we were pulling out of our parking space.

Carvings on the old wooden choir stalls from the Saint-Cyran abbey

The Brenne region, by the way, is named after Geoffroy de Brenne, who was the lord of Mézières in the 13th century. The 30,000 or so people who live in the region are called les Brennous [breh-NOO].

The wild life in La Brenne

Here's something that has made me happy: the speed of our Internet connection doubled yesterday. I placed an upgrade order with Orange.fr and 24 hours later it was filled. Now don't think we are speed demons. Our old connection was 1 Mbps. We live out in the country, pretty far (as DSL goes) from a phone switching station. We are lucky to have broadband Internet service at all.

Now we have 2 Mbps for downloading data and 260 kbps for uploading. I can feel the difference when I open certain sites and when I upload pictures to my blog. The funny thing about the upgrade is that we were paying 26.46 euros a month for the slower service. The price of the faster service is 21 euros a month. What's not to like about that?

Simon, Susan, and CHM posing in front of
the Auberge de la Gabrière after lunch

Another thing that makes me happy is a good lunch with nice people in a not-too-expensive restaurant. That's what CHM and I had yesterday. Walt decided to stay home. He's not big on car trips. CHM and I drove down to an area called La Brenne, an hour south of Saint-Aignan, and met up with Susan and Simon of Days on the Claise for lunch at a place called L'Auberge de la Gabrière.

A grenouille looking up at me from the edge of the water

A little jackdaw sitting on the steps of the church
at Mézières-en-Brenne

La Brenne is an area of small lakes and lots of wildlife. The little lakes are called étangs in French, and there are 1300 of them. Some are more or less natural, and some are completely man-made. The largest étang in the Brenne is L'Etang de la Mer Rouge, at 160 hectares (400 acres or .6 square miles). The Brenne is the site of a 550 sq. mi. Parc Naturel Régional, so birds and other animals are protected there. The environment is made up of infertile prairie, wetlands, marshes, and heath.

Le Château du Bouchet on a hill overlooking the water

The restaurant is on the shores of the Etang [ay-TÃ] de la Gabrière. After lunch, we drove down to a place called Le Bouchet, where there's a nature center and an old château, and then on to the Etang de la Mer Rouge, where we walked along a levee that holds back water to form the shallow lake. The lord of Le Bouchet, who owned the château and artificial lake, had been to the Holy Land on a crusade and held prisoner for a while near the Red Sea.

L'Etang de la Mer Rouge, dans la Brenne

We saw a lot of birds, including a couple of kinds of herons, some egrets, grebes, and other waterfowl. We saw frogs and turtles (terrapins). We saw some kind of muskrat or other aquatic mammal swimming along the shore. And luckily for us, we ran into and talked to a young man and his grandmother who had a telescope on a tripod to get close-up looks at different birds and other animals. We chatted with them for a while and they let us look through the telescope too.

There's insect and plant life, too, in the Brenne

I'm not a naturalist or birder at all, but it was fun to see the wildlife and take some pictures with my little travel camera. It does a good job, as I've said, and with Photoshop I can sharpen, saturate, and crop the photos to make them even better. Some of the ones I took yesterday are posted here.

A night heron, first sitting on a branch of a dead tree
and then watching me from the shore

Oh, and lunch. CHM had a rabbit terrine with prune compote as his starter course, and I had a salad with duck gizzards and a raspberry vinaigrette. We both had a bavette d'aloyau steak with stewed shallots as our main course. The steak came with mushrooms in a cream sauce and a little broccoli soufflé. It was delicious.

There was a huge cheese cart — Susan took a picture of it and might post it on Days on the Claise. CHM and I both had a selection of goat cheeses: Sainte-Maure, Valençay, and Pouligny-Saint-Pierre, all more or less local. The wine we drank was a rosé from the Châteaumeillant vineyards, which are located just to the southeast of the nearby town of Châteauroux.

Two old guys (like me) sitting on a bench and taking in
the views of the Etang de la Gabrière

There was an adventure with CHM's Visa card too. The young woman who waited us on at the restaurant took one look at it and pronounced her judgment: it won't work in my machine. These cards sans chip never do.

She swiped it through anyway, and said: « Vous voyez ! Ça n'a pas marché ! » Just then, the little paper receipt started coming up out of the card reader. Wow! That's the first time such a card has ever worked, she exclaimed. CHM had to explain to her the necessity of a signature — she didn't have a clue.

Comment ça se passe...

That means more or less "what's happening." CHM and I got back to Saint-Aignan last Friday afternoon, after spending a week driving around northern and eastern France, going pretty much from church to church to church. CHM loves churches for their architecture and history, and there were many that he wanted to see again after many years of living in the U.S.

When we got to Saint-Aignan, we had to turn the rental car in. We had rented a sort of mini-SUV for the trip so that we could transport the paintings and other things CHM was donating to the museum in his family's home town of Péronne in the Somme. When we took the car back to the SuperU store where we rented it —10 miles north of Saint-Aignan — I thought it was in pretty good shape. We hadn't scratched or dented it, and it was fairly clean.

Yesterday was supposed to be showery, but we had
skies like this all day and no rain at all.

It was not clean enough for SuperU, though. "You are expected to return the car as clean as it was when you took it out," the woman said when she inspected it. "No, it's not clean enough at all!" She said they charged a 70 euro cleaning fee — that's 100 American dollars. Since we were, luckily, early turning the car in, I had a couple of hours during which I could wash the thing and vacuum it out. It actually took only about 15 minutes.

SuperU has a gas station and a car wash. It cost 2 euros to pressure-wash the outside of the car, and 2 euros to vacuum it out. That was a lot better than paying the 70 euro cleaning fee. I'd never had to worry about washing and vacuuming out a rental car before, since the big companies like Hertz or Europcar don't charge a cleaning fee. There aren't any car rental agencies in the Saint-Aignan area, so SuperU is the most convenient option.

A bee on a cornflower at the edge of the vineyard

One of the things CHM wanted to do here in Saint-Aignan was to go to the local SNCF (the French national railway system) station and buy tickets for the rest of his travels around France this summer. It's a lot easier to buy train tickets in Saint-Aignan's station than it is at, for example, the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. In Saint-Aignan, you don't have to deal with crowds and stand in long lines. We went to the gare Saturday afternoon.

CHM was buying about $500 worth of SNCF tickets for trips down to the Mediterranean coast, to Bordeaux, and to Normandy. Everything was going along fairly smoothly until he handed over his Visa card. The man behind the counter swiped it through the machine 6 or 8 times to no avail — the message on his computer screen said « Paiement refusé ». CHM had used the card three times the day before, and it had worked fine.

The grapes as they are at this point

We drove back home — it's only about three miles — and CHM got his debit card, which he had left here. We drove back to the train station. That card wouldn't work either — paiement refusé. We figured the problem must not be the cards, but the train station's card reader. So we drove over to my bank in Saint-Aignan and CHM used his debit card to withdraw some cash from an ATM machine. It worked just fine.

The next day, we went back to the bank — a different one, actually — and CHM withdrew the rest of the cash he needed to pay for the train tickets. Again, there was no problem with the debit card. At the train station, the man behind the counter tried CHM's Visa card one more time. No dice. « La SNCF n'accepte pas toutes les cartes, Monsieur », he told CHM. Great.

A butterfly resting on a grape leaf

Another hassle we haven't been able to solve involves connecting to the Internet. In Paris, an employee of the Orange telephone boutique — Orange is the brand name used by France Télécom for its mobile phone and Internet services — had sold CHM a USB gizmo that she said would give him high-speed Internet access "anywhere" in France. It's in fact a modem that connects to the Internet over the cell phone network.

Problem was, it wouldn't work with CHM's Mac in his apartment in Paris. He brought it to Saint-Aignan. I tried using with my Samsung laptop on Sunday, but it wouldn't work here either. It wasn't clear what the problem was. After that attempt, I uninstalled the software because I didn't foresee trying to connect with the USB "key" again.

The grape-grower's shed out behind our house

Yesterday (Monday), I tried again. I reinstalled the software, plugged in the gizmo, and after a minute or two it connected just fine.

Now, I have some American friends who own a house about 12 miles south of Saint-Aignan, way out in the country. They live in California for the time being, and they come spend the month of July in their house here. They can't get DSL or any other high-speed internet service out there. I thought the USB cell phone thingy might be perfect for them. They arrive in about two weeks.

So yesterday CHM and I drove out to their house. I have the keys. We went in, hooked up my laptop, and plugged in the USB device. No dice. I think they don't get cell phone service out there. So they are still out of luck. We drove into a nearby village, turned on the laptop, and the cell phone Internet connection worked just fine there.

Bertie the Black Cat, out exploring yesterday

The USB thing works at our house on my Windows laptop, but I don't need it. However, we still can't get it to work on CHM's Mac laptop. We- don't know why. It's very frustrating. Maybe we should go to another church and pray about it a little bit. We need a miracle at this point.