Exotic sauces and sugars

I know this is France and not England (but with so many English or British people living around here around, sometimes that's not obvious!). However, there are certain British products that we really like to have on hand.

So the other day, when we ran out of black treacle, I immediately put it on the shopping list. Both the SuperU and Intermarché supermarkets here have an imported foods aisle where you can find many British, Portuguese, Asian, and Mexican products. I figured I'd pick up some English black treacle on my next shopping excursion.

Exotic sauces and sugars in France

"Wooster sauce" by Heinz

Then I ran out of Worcestershire sauce. That's a staple in most American kitchens, and it's pretty much a staple in France too. In fact, since the pronunciation of the word Worcestershire is a real tongue-twister for French speakers — it's not obvious which syllables and consonants are silent — they just call it sauce anglaise — "English sauce." In American, we sometimes just call it by its brand name: Lea & Perrins. British people sometimes just call it Worcester ("wooster") sauce.

I'm not sure many Americans know what treacle is, much less black treacle. Well, it's basically molasses. I'm sure there are technical differences between the two sugar products, but treacle can stand in for molasses, and vice-versa. Black treacle comes in a little gold and red tin, and the similar product called golden syrup comes in the same tin but in green and gold.

Golden syrup has the color and consistency of honey, but not the same flavor. You can use it to replace corn syrup in a pecan pie, for example (using walnuts for the pecans, if you need to).

Black treacle is what we use to make Boston baked beans, in the place of molasses. Along with ketchup, of course — what the French sometimes call sauce américaine — "American sauce." I remember back in the '70s it was hard to get ketchup in a restaurant. Now it has taken France by storm. All the French kids like it on their hamburgers and fries.

Golden syrup from England

65% tomato puree

I like the SuperU store brand of ketchup. It comes in a plastic squeeze bottle, the size of, well, a ketchup bottle, and it sells for about 50 cents (euro cents, of course, so in American cents about 65). It's a bargain, and it tastes good. It's 65% tomato puree. Once I bought some ketchup at Intermarché and it was terrible. I read the label and it was just 24% tomato — the rest was sugar.

So starting a couple of weeks ago, I've made several trips to SuperU, figuring I'd pick up some black treacle and some "wooster" sauce while I was there. But there was none to be found. I went back a few days later, and checked again. Zilch. There was a store employee doing some kind of inventory of the imported foods shelves, so I asked her for assistance.

Sauce anglaise she understood immediately. She said she was in charge of ordering British products for the store, and she was glad to get input from a customer. When I tried to tell her about black treacle, she was completely mystified. I pronounced it sort of in French — [tree-kuhl] — and that didn't help. I decided to sound out the letters as if it were a French word — [tray-AH-cluh] — but that didn't work either.

Contains 616 grams of sugar

I mentioned that it was similar to golden sirop [see-ROH] and that rang a bell. « Ah, la petite boîte rouge qui ressemble à la petite boîte verte », she said, the light coming on. I spelled the name for her in the French alphabet — tay-ehr-euh-ah-say-ehl-euh — and she wrote it down.  She said she would get in a shipment of British products late the next week, so to please come back.

Meantime, I went to Intermarché. No luck there either — no treacle, no Worcester sauce. And the next time I went back to SuperU, there was no more Worcestershire sauce or black treacle on the shelves than there had been two weeks earlier.

Finally, I found Heinz Worcestershire sauce at Intermarché a couple of days ago. It's not Lea & Perrins, but it will have to do. It wasn't with the imported products, but over by the French bouillon cubes and the Viandox. I still haven't found any black treacle, and I have some navy beans cooked and ready to be eaten that I want to turn into Boston-style beans, which requires both the British products.

Luckily, I have now found a replacement for black treacle that I think will work, and it's a French product. It's called sirop de canne roux — brown sugarcane syrup — and it's made by a company called Dillon that also makes rum and other alcoholic drinks. This kind of sugarcane syrup goes with rum and lime juice to make a Caribbean cocktail called un ti' punch — a little punch.

I've tasted and used some of the sirop — I made glazed carrots with it yesterday — and it's very tasty. It's thinner than treacle, with the consistency of maple syrup, but then it will boil down and thicken up very quickly in a pot on the stove or in the microwave. It's basically a caramel syrup and it should be good instead of molasses in baked beans. And it costs only three euros for a 70 cl bottle (the size of a standard wine bottle). Look for sirop de canne roux (as well as sirop de canne blanc) with the rums in the beverage section of a French supermarket.

Belgian endive and beets in salad

Salade d'endives aux betteraves is a salad that would also be very good made with iceberg lettuce. The beets go well with a crispy, slightly bitter lettuce like iceberg, endive, chicory (escaroble, scarole), or curly endive (frisée). It's a classic combination in France.

The dressing is a vinaigrette made with red wine vinegar and either olive or a neutral vegetable oil, plus salt and and a generous grind of black pepper. Some diced shallot is good with the beets. You can use a different vinegar — balsamic, for example, brings out the sweetness of the beets and complements the bitterness of the greens.

Another addition that dresses up the salad is some toasted walnuts or pecans. And if you're adding those, you might want to put some walnut or hazelnut oil in the dressing to perk up the vegetable oil.

We've been eating salads like this all week because Belgian endive is such a good buy at the supermarket right now. Endives are going for just over a euro per kilo, or about 60 cents a pound, at Intermarché. I like them raw in salad, but also braised in butter and lemon juice as a cooked vegetable.

Another, completely different and more elaborate salad is the same Belgian endive (or iceberg lettuce) with toasted walnuts, a diced apple, and some little cubes of cheese — either Cheddar, Swiss (Comté or Gruyère), or Gouda. If you like it, use Roquefort or another blue cheese. And make the dressing with some garlic and cider vinegar, as well as a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. We've had that version a couple of times this past week too, since Walt got some good eating apples (pommes à croquer) at SuperU.

This is The Weather Channel's forecast for our village this week, viewed on my

Android tablet computer in Fahrenheit.

Temperatures are finally back above freezing this morning, but you can't quite call it a heat wave. Rain is supposed to start later today, or maybe in the evening, and last all week. The good news is that temperatures are going to be spring-like by Thursday.

Road closed, but not because of snow

The gravel road through the vineyard is still closed. The village authorities are putting down new gravel to repair potholes (nids de poule or "hen's nests" as they are called) and ruts caused by all the rains of the past six months.

The road is closed to cars, trucks, and tractors, but not to pedestrians. It's kind of funny that the sign says the road is closed off à 00 m — not a hundred meters or a thousand meters farther on, but starting right here. Such a sign doesn't prevent us from walking out there with Callie.

ROAD CLOSED

If you look closely and squint a little, you might notice that it was snowing in all these photos that I took yesterday afternoon. We were having giboulées de neige as big puffy but dark clouds blew over in the deep blue sky.

Our decorative backyard well est un vrai faux puits.

Nothing was really sticking to the ground, and none of the snow showers lasted more than five minutes. There was a frigid wind blowing.

"Popcorn" or "hominy" snow on the marquise (awning) over the back door

Oh, and I think I figured out why the village is fixing up the road at this particular moment. On the way back from the doctor's (routine visit) and the supermarket yesterday morning, I saw a big sign out on the highway announcing a randonnée pédestre scheduled for this Sunday morning. That's an organized hiking event, and the village sponsors such events several times a year. My guess is that they don't want anybody to trip and fall on the gravel.

Dead wood

There's an expression that has a different meaning in my vocabulary today compared to years ago when I worked in academia. In the vineyard, the dead wood is pulled up or cut down, and then hauled away for burning or ground up into mulch. It doesn't have tenure.

One thing is for sure: we are going to have a late spring. Last year, March was warm and sunny. April and May were warm and rainy. This year, March couldn't be more different. It's been cold and is still cold. The northern part of France — well north of Saint-Aignan — has been snowbound for a few days now. Drifts have covered the roads. Hundreds or thousands of big-rig trucks were immobilized on the main highways up there yesterday and the day before.

Down south, the cold Mistral wind that blows south off the Alps to the Mediterranean coast is predicted to sweep down at 80 mph this afternoon. I can do without that. And it snowed in Toulouse yesterday as well. Here in the center of the country, we got a lot of rain and our low temperatures have been just below freezing for a day or two now. Afternoon temperatures aren't much higher. Otherwise, it's just gray and damp and chilly. Complain? Me?

Our neighbor who's disabled with MS has not returned to his house. Who knows if he will one day. Our neighbors who spend the winter in Blois haven't come down here more than once this month, for an hour or two. Our neighbors who have residences in the Paris region are up there, not down here. One house in the hamlet is for sale and another is hardly ever occupied at all, even in summer, but the people who own it don't seem to want to let go of the place.

That leaves us, the neighbors across the road (a 92-year-old woman and her daughter), and our neighbor the mayor and her retired husband. We see their cars go by a couple of times a day, but that's about it. And now that they are filling in potholes out on the gravel road through the vineyard, we don't even see vineyard workers. The road is closed — Route Barrée, the sign says. The winery crews must be pruning vines on other vineyard plots around the Saint-Aignan area.

I'm off for my semi-annual visit with the doctor this morning, in preparation for my trip to North Carolina in early April. Don't want to run out of pills... Next week, I'll need to go see Madame Barbier for the quarterly haircut. I want to be presentable enough to get through security at Roissy and immigration and customs in Charlotte. I'd like to get some tilling and trimming done out in the vegetable garden before I leave, but the ground is too wet and the air is too cold. March. Phooey.