Le Marché Bio

Last weekend my British friend, who has lived in Villamblard for eight years, took me to the Saturday market in Bergerac and introduced me to the local organic producers. The market stalls circle the church in the center of town, most with awnings or umbrellas in case of rain, and with the exception of a few digital scales, decidedly low-tech -- not so much as a calculator in sight. 

In fact, shopping for food this way feels agreeably like stepping into the Middle Ages. The men and women I met had very small quantities of vegetables out, in baskets or boxes, with the names and prices written on slates or scraps of paper. The church bells sound on the hour. There is as much talk -- about Sarko, about the latest convoluted irritation caused by the bureaucracy, about food -- as there is commerce. The pace of buying and selling is slower than any American can imagine.

Yesterday I went by myself while Chris took care of Nellie and Julian who were home with the flu. I went around the loop twice, because it's easy to miss somebody. I bought a box of fresh chanterelles that I'd have had to take out a second mortgage to buy at home. I bought 5 different spices from the man who only sells spices and tea; I'd forgotten to look the words up at home and was relieved to see that coriander is coriandre and cumin is cumin. The spice man sized me up (and heard my accent) and began chatting to me in English, and I kept speaking in French. This happens all the time. Everybody wants to get in some practice, and although it sounds awkward, it's actually quite a friendly kind of thing.

From the apple woman I bought six different varieties of apple, the only one I'd heard of is Gala. Next time I'll take the time to write down the names. From the sturdy young man in muddy boots, I got brussels sprouts, spinach, and mâche. On Saturday, I'll go back, for this is a twice a week ritual, to get the freshest vegetables, and, if I knew people better, the freshest gossip.

Last night for dinner Chris made a stunning crème fraîche and champagne sauce for some veal, and it was fantastic on the chanterelles. Food is personal here, so personal that even strangers like us know, for instance, that the veal on our plates was raised by a leftist of the Green Party. We finished up with some prunes Chris got last week, that come from Agen, a town a bit south of here. Shockingly, they taste like...plums! Absolutely delicious.

My only regret at abandoning the Mussidan market for the one in Bergerac is that we'll be missing chicken man, who sells the best rotisserie chicken in the universe. But maybe if I take a few extra turns around the church, I'll find a chicken man in Bergerac too.

Les Truffes

Yesterday we drove north, past Périgueux and up to the small village of Sorges, to see the seasonal truffle market, which turned out to be a small tent with about seven or eight people with very small baskets of a handful of truffles for sale. Say, 800 euros for a truffle smaller than a tennis ball. Yes, I wanted one, badly. But not that badly.

 

The microclimates in this part of France are quite dramatic -- it's not the first time we've driven just a bit farther north and been shocked by how much colder it is. So the image I had of the four of us gaily roaming around Sorges and enjoying the market was replaced by the four of us whining about the cold and wanting something hot to eat, preferably by a fire. We wandered around Vergt but found nothing open, and ended up in Pont St. Mamet, a very small village whose boulangerie we know quite well, since it's right on the way to Bergerac and apparently we tend to reach it at the very moment a desperate need for a croissant aux amandes presents itself.

 

Le Petit Jardin had several fires going, lots of glittery pillows to lean against, and a friendly propriétaire whose ponytail Nellie admired. Plat du jour, 12 euros. First course, a wonderful potage, the tiniest bit creamy, with lots of mushrooms chopped finely enough that Nellie happily ate a bowlful of the detested fungi. Second course, boeuf bourguignon and a big heap of creamy scalloped potatoes. Both spectacular. 

 

Julian ran off the rails at some point during the second course, despite having a Coke and despite our strong suspicion that at school he relishes boeuf bourguignon. My pichet of red wine made this a little easier to ignore. And the profiteroles that came for dessert, with both a custard and a chocolate sauce, focused his attention on food again, much to the amusement of the propriétaire.

 

So no truffles for us, at least not yet. But I can settle for those scalloped potatoes any day.

Galette des rois

January 6th is Epiphany, the day when the Three Kings came to visit the baby Jesus. In France, because in France everything ends up being about food, it's the occasion for galette des rois, which of course is delicious and a kind of game to boot. In each galette is a feve, a little ceramic figure, and if you get the slice with the feve, you wear a golden crown for the rest of the day. (Feve means bean, which used to be baked in the galettes before the days of cheap ceramics.) 

 

Even better, there are multiple kinds of galettes des rois so there's no danger of getting tired of it. Our favorite is the puff pastry with frangipane, but the other one, a kind of circular brioche with chunky bits of sugar on top, is good too, especially with a coffee in the afternoon. Maybe after a nap. If you're that kind of person. Julian came back from the boulangerie this morning with tales of a chocolate galette des rois, and since this is the very last day to have them, we may have to send him back to get one. 

Since we are obsessed with all things Astèrix, we got a couple of galettes des rois from the supermarket Intermarché, which not surprisingly cannot begin to compete with the galettes from real bakeries -- but the feves were Astèrix characters. Impossible to miss out on that. We considered eating our way through enough galettes to get the whole set until we saw that there were a dozen. I don't think the baby Jesus would have approved.

The ritual for eating a galette des rois is to put the youngest person under the table to act as the main des innocents (hand of the innocents). The oldest person is the distributeur, who cuts the slices. Then the main des innocents calls out a name, and a slice is handed over. This is to prevent any funny business on the part of the distributeur, who can sometimes feel the feve as he's cutting. We didn't discover this procedure until after we'd made our way through several galettes  by simply hacking off a piece when we walked by, heathens that we are.

Am I making it sound as though we have eaten an ungodly number of galettes des rois? Perhaps we are celebrating Epiphany with all the monarchical and religious fervor it deserves. No? Well, somebody has to get out there and do the cultural research. Am I right? You should thank me.

Pretty-Ugly

In winter, you see trees like these everywhere, down the main streets of tiny villages, in yards, in parks. The process of pruning off every last shoot is called pollarding, a technique of woodland management that allows new wood to be cut off every year and used for firewood. It seems like an awful lot of work when most of the time firewood seems unlikely to be the goal. Perhaps keeping the canopy small also means fewer pests and diseases; at least there isn't any possibility of branches snapping into power lines during ice storms, of which we've had exactly zero so far.

I think the point of pollarding is aesthetic. At first, the sight of those stubby tree trunks depressed me. So ugly! So deformed! But I have four of them in my backyard, and a long line of them in the village, and so I look at them every day. And after some months of seeing them in different weathers, and I suppose with me in different moods, the pollarded trees now look beautiful to me. So many things in France are obviously, easily beautiful. But almost better are the things, like escargots, that take some getting used to. And maybe jolie-laide is especially appealing to the middle-aged.

Partly it's the knobbiness of the stubs that are left, and the way they make such a hard silhouette against the winter sky or the sides of buildings. There's an elegance to the spareness, to the baldness. Partly it's the way the habit of pollarding is one of the French rituals that mark a time of year. These rituals -- mostly I mean agricultural or arboricultural ones, but also religious and otherwise -- are like chimes ringing, giving a rhythm to the passing months the way the village church bells now give a rhythm to my days. 

The other reason I've come to love them is that I know when spring comes, those pollarded trees are going to be sending out shoots in a dramatic frenzy, and I'm looking forward to the thrill of it. The transformation from stubs to a round head of leaves will be fast and furious, and I'm imagining sitting in a chaise, reading and eating an ice cream cone, watching the shoots fly out over my head.