Le 11 novembre

Today, November 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne that ended the Great War, also known as the First World War. The Allies had managed to outlast Germany. More than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians were left dead.

Nearly every town and village in France has monuments to the military personnel who died in the Great War. This one is in the little town of Vouvant in the Vendée.

It stands in front of the village hall (la mairie) and across the road from the village church. Nearly 1.5 million members of the French military forces were killed during the war and another 2 million were injured, many gravely.

About 900,000 British military personnel also lost their lives. U.S. losses included nearly 120,000 members of the military. Tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in many countries, including France and Germany, were killed. It took Europe many decades to recover from such losses. Lest we forget...

La mijoteuse, or "slow cooker"

The first time I ever used a slow cooker, called une mijoteuse (a "simmerer") in French (or, sometimes, un mijoteur), was in 2014. I decided to order one from amazon.fr. It was a Kenwood appliance with a capacity of 6 liters. The porcelain insert or cuve (vat or pot) that you cooked food in was heavy and, as it turned out, fragile. In other words, it was made of crockery (stoneware or earthenware), and that's why slow cookers are sometimes called crock-pots (Crock-Pot is actually a brand name).

After about three years of use, the porcelain cuve developed a hairline crack. I'll never know if the crack was simply caused by temperature changes, or if I cracked it when washing it in our porcelain sink. The vat, while it worked well as a cooking vessel, was simply too big and heavy to be practical. Once the cuve developed its hairline crack, which was basically invisible, it starting leaking cooking liquid into the slow cooker's heating unit (the "housing"), which was messy and dangerous. Prematurely, I had to get rid of the Kenwood cooker. The one in these photos is the one I use now.

So when I ordered a new mijoteuse, I looked for one with a light-weight cuve. On amazon.fr, I found a Russell Hobbs model that has an aluminum cuve with a non-stick cooking surface. It's great. Its capacity is also 6 liters (same as 6 quarts, basically) and a cooking vessel of that size works well for us because we usually make large quantities of simmered or slow-cooked dishes and plan on having leftovers. In addition, the aluminum pot is light-weight and unbreakable, so it's very easy to wash in the sink, despite its size. (I'm not sure if Russell Hobbs slow cookers are sold in North America...)

The other great thing about the aluminum insert is that you can put it on the stove over a gas flame or on an electric burner and cook in it. That's it above, as it looks when you put it on the stove top. In other words, you can brown meats and vegetables in the metal "crock" and then set it, hot, in the slow-cooker's electric heating unit, add just a little bit of liquid, and let everything braise or simmer slowly. You have just one pot to wash when the cooking is done. Besides, it has high sides so fat doesn't spatter all over the stove when you brown ingredients in it. (Reminder: it's made of aluminum so won't work on an induction burner.)

Actually, I find that meats brown in the slow cooker anyway if you don't add too much liquid to the pot. Let the food make its own liquid. For example, the two turkey legs above cooked in the mijoteuse for 8 hours and came out browned. The key is to add very little or no liquid, and in this case the liquid I added was just a splash or two of white wine (Chardonnay) vinegar and a couple of splashes of Worcestershire sauce. I of course put in herbs (thyme, bay leaf) and spices (cumin, cloves, hot red pepper flakes, black pepper, salt...) too. It's easy to take the meat off the bones of slow-cooked turkey legs and thighs and then make it into pulled meat (that's what we call "barbecue" in North Carolina).

Vouvant : l'église (2)

Here are a few more photos of details of the church at Vouvant, en Vendée. Vouvant is only about 15 km (10 mi.) north of where our gîte was located. The first church was built here in the 11th century, but not much remains of that building.

Above is the north portal of the church, which is called L'Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption. The lower, street-level part of the north portal is one of the oldest surviving elements of the building, dating back to the second half of the 12th century.

The Vouvant church was declared a historical monument in 1840, and it was the object of major restorations in the late 1800s. The north portal was restored but it doesn't seem to have been greatly modified, just cleaned up.

The rounded arches of buildings like these signal that the architecture is in the style that has been called Romanesque since about 1820. The style is descended from Roman building traditions and pre-dates the development of the Gothic architectural style of the 13th and 14th centuries.

The upper part of the church's north portal is Gothic. I posted some photos of the whole portal and details of the Gothic portion day before yesterday.

As I've said before, these are crops out of larger photos that I took on Sunday, October 21, 2018, on a bright sunny afternoon in Vouvant. The camera I was using is a Panasonic Lumix ZS40 (TZ60 outside North America). I took the pictures at a resolution of 18 megapixels. As always, you can enlarge the photos to see more detail.

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.

Two churches in Niort for a Sunday

These Niort landmarks are not ancient churches. The first one is the Église St-André. It was an important Romanesque edifice in the Middle Ages, and then it was drastically altered and enlarged during the Renaissance. Worse was to come: St-André was reduced to ruins during the Wars of Religion in the late 1500s. It was rebuilt and then enlarged again in the late 1600s. During the Vendée Wars of the late 1700s, at the time of the French Revolution, the church was used as a barn for the storage of livestock feed. Finally, St-André was again rebuilt between 1855 and 1863. It is considered to be a fairly faithful copy of a 13th century Gothic church. Thanks to French Wikipedia for the history.

The church below is called St-Étienne du Port. It was built in the neighborhood called Le Port, north of the donjon de Niort, on the other side of the river, where there was no church at the time, but only a small chapel. The people of the neighborhood protested the fact that they had to cross the river and go to churches in other neighborhoods. Napoleon III gave permission in 1853 for the construction of this new church. It was nearly 30 years later when land was acquired for the project by the bishop of the city of Poitiers, who personally borrowed the money to purchase it. Groundbreaking happened in 1893, and by 1896 the church walls were standing. During the excavations for the church's foundation, the tusk of a prehistoric woolly mammoth was unearthed on the site. The church's organ and bells were in place by 1902. Thanks to Wiki-Niort for the history.

I'm cooking sauerkraut for lunch today. I put the raw choucroute in the slow-cooker last night with white wine, onions, carrots, and spices. It looks and smells pretty good this morning. Now I just have to steam some potatoes, and Walt will cook some sausages and chicken on the barbecue as accompaniments. The weather is supposed to be spring-like today and until Wednesday, so we want to take advantage of it by cooking on the grill. Bon dimanche...

The Vendée gîte : cette foutue poutre

If there were one thing that I could change about the Vendée gîte we stayed in, it would be this low beam at the top of the stairs that lead up to the bedrooms and bathroom. No matter how careful I tried to be, I banged my head on it 4 or 5 times over the course of the week we stayed there.

The beam runs across two rooms and the hallway. One of the  rooms is the second bedroom, where you surely noticed the low beam over the head of the bed in the photo I posted a couple of days ago. In the photo above, taken from the hallway, you can see through the stair rails down into the kitchen — those are the stairs. The beam is not much more than 5 feet — shoulder height to me — above the floor. The little yellow plastic tag hanging by a string off the beam helped me remember to duck, but if I got distracted... well, bang on the noggin.

And the beam ran across the bathroom, right in front of the shower area, at that same height. I'm not sure I hit my head on it more than twice, but the last one was on the last morning we were there as I was packing toiletry articles up for the trip home. I must have leaned over the pick up the two shower gel/shampoo bottles off the steps leading down into the shower, and when I stood back up I nearly knocked myself out cold.

It's too bad about the beam, because other than that hazard, the house was very pleasant to live in. It was quiet, spacious, and well furnished. Overall, we enjoyed being there (except for my aching head). The dog was welcome to stay with us. Above you see the stairs down from the upstairs hallway into the kitchen. The owner of the gîte is a very nice young guy who was very helpful in giving us information about the principal sights to see in the area. (He's also a major fan of U.S. football and watches a lot of games on TV.)

Finally, here's a Google Maps aerial view of the property, which is called Les Gîtes de Brillac. If you enlarge the image, you'll see my labels. That's the Vendée river, with its river walks, at the top of the photo, We stayed in La Petite Maison. The other gîte, called L'Etable ("The Stable"), was also occupied while we were there, by a French family from Toulouse. If we were to go back to Brillac, I'd definitely want to try staying in that gîte.

The Vendée gîte : la salle d'eau et les W.C.

Here's the bathroom in the gîte. It was upstairs with the bedrooms. It was spacious, and there was a nice electric towel warmer on one wall. That was the only radiator in the house that we turned on during the week we were there. It was nice to have a warm towel to dry off with after the morning shower.

All the woodwork upstairs was beautiful, and the bathroom walls were nicely tiled. The upstairs floors, however, were just boards laid down and nailed or screwed to ceiling joists or beams, with no air space, insulation, or moisture barrier under them. It was noisy when the dog or Walt walked around up there and I was down in the living room, but no big deal. One morning, though, both of us were sitting in the living room, directly underneath the bathroom, and we suddenly started hearing a tap-tap-tapping noise.

At first I thought it was my laptop going haywire, but I quickly realized that the sound was being made by water dripping down from the ceiling and hitting the coffee table right behind the laptop screen. At least it wasn't dripping into the keyboard! I had just come downstairs after brushing my teeth. We raced upstairs to see if the water was running up there. Maybe the sink was overflowing. But no, it was just a small leak in the sink faucet. Water was running down across the sink counter and dripping onto the floor. Then it just went right through the floor and dripped into the living room. We were very careful about that faucet from then on, and we told the owner about it when we were leaving. He said leaks like that are always really hard to find and stop. The leak was minor and intermittent, seeming to depend on what position the faucet's control wand was in, and we didn't have any more trouble with it because we made sure to dry off the countertop after each use.

Here's the shower. It was definitely one of the most unusual features of the house. Because the bathroom is built under the slope of the roof of the house, there wasn't enough overhead space to put the shower in at floor level and still have enough headroom. So it was set down into the floor, meaning that the ceiling in the downstairs half-bath (les W.C.), right under it, had been lowered to accommodate it. By the way, there was no bathtub in the house.

So you had to step down three steps to get to the recessed shower pan. And it was a pretty tight space too, but we're used to that in France. These are the kinds of solutions you have to find when you are trying to install modern conveniences like plumbing, heat, and electricity in old stone houses like this one (built in the 18th century) and dealing with cramped spaces. Anyway, the water was good and hot and the pressure was fine. However, there was no light in the shower. Some light came from one of the bright halogen or LED bulbs in the fixture over the mirror and sink, across the room. It was strategically aimed.

This is what the downstairs WC, just off the kitchen, looked like. It was clean and functional. There was only cold water in the little sink, but the kitchen sink with hot water was just steps away. Both upstairs and downstairs baths had perfectly fine toilets. The biggest problem with the upstairs bathroom was actually a very low ceiling beam. I banged my head on it a couple of times as I was climbing up out of the shower. More about that tomorrow.

More about the Vendée gîte : les chambres à coucher

One thing you have to understand about French gîtes is that they are designed as short-term accommodations for people who arrive by car. Some owners don't provide bed or bath linens. People bring their own, packed in the trunk of the car. Other owners provide sheets and towels upon payment of a surcharge. We usually take our own, now that we live in France. There are always blankets, bedspreads, and pillows in the gîte.

A gîte is normally located out in the countryside — hence the name gîte rural — so you need a car anyway, just to get around. You can bring your own computer, your own food, your own knives or other kitchen things, and even your own TV. The ads for gîtes normally tell you what conveniences are provided and how the place is furnished. If something you need or want is not on the list, bring it yourself. If you don't want to bring all these things, stay in a hotel or find a more expensive, luxurious vacation rental. We paid the bargain price of 300 euros for 7 nights in this gîte. Usually, the minimum stay in a gîte is a week, but sometimes weekend (3 nights) or mid-week (4 nights) plans  are offered.

In the case of the gîte we stayed in, a good television and a satellite system were provided. The beds were completely made up when we arrived, and bath and hand towels were provided. The kitchen was equipped with everything you'd need, plus a dishwasher and a washing machine. There was no dryer but there was a folding rack for hanging wet laundry up to dry.  (French people mostly don't have clothes dryers. It's cheaper and more environmentally friendly to hang clothes up to dry.)

I posted a floor plan of the gîte a while back. There were two bedrooms upstairs, with sleeping space for 5. In the bigger bedroom, there was a queen-size bed as well as a single bed in a little nook off to the side. There was a wardrobe (armoire) too. The smaller bedroom was furnished with a double bed and a big chest of drawers (all drawers empty). The door into the smaller bedroom isn't shown on the floorplan; it was directly across from the bathroom (S.E. = salle d'eau, meaning there's a shower but no bathtub.)