Breakfast in Burgundy, page 8
No meal in France is complete without a glass of wine and we drink Pigneret’s own, a Givry, one of Burgundy’s less-famed villages, but it has a solid reputation for producing good-value wines that often punch above their weight. This is one of them, and it is from the excellent 2005 vintage. The brisk rasp of cherry fruit is the right counterpoint to the fatty richness of the meat, until some heavyweight local competition arrives.
One of the winemakers, Olivier Cyrot-Buthiau, has broached a magnum of Pommard premier cru 1998 straight from his cellar, prompting a gentle frisson, and glasses are discreetly drained before being proffered for a sample. It is delicious, caught at the moment when brash youth has given away to maturity, with no sign of frailty. The morning is bitter and the fingers are frozen, the food is rustic, and the glasses are clumsy, yet nothing can hinder the crowd’s appreciation of the wine. Context is everything.
The bank manager hears that the ravenous guest is from Ireland:
“I have friends in Ireland, in Roscrea.”
“Roscrea? That’s County Tipperary, where my father’s family are from.”
“How is the Irish economy? Your banks?” he asks with professional interest.
“Meltdown. We flew too close to the sun and then we crashed and burned. We were governed by scoundrels and a bunch of rogues held too much influence. At home my default setting is a frown; here it is a smile.”
“I can see that. Santé.”
We clink glasses as the crowd dissolves away and the forklifts get back to work, ferrying in more fresh marc and removing the now tepid waste. I take my leave as another quarter-tonne of skins and pips is loaded into the copper cylinders. Clatters and bangs, groans and wheezes issue from the apparatus, together with more clouds of steam.
“I’ll give this a Christian burial,” I say as I scoop up another truncheon of sausage and gobble it down while trying to speak. An old St. Bernard dog fixes his gaze on me. I hope I haven’t eaten his breakfast.
Breakfast at home is more comfortable, less carnivorous, and begins with an easy amble to the boulangerie. Friends often ask:
“How did you decide where to buy your house in Burgundy?”
The answer is simple and unvarying: “It had to be within a one-minute walk of a good boulangerie. If it’s not, what’s the point in having a house in France?”
“So how did you check it out, apart from buying a baguette there after viewing the house?”
“My methods are more refined than that. Yes, we bought a few baguettes and croissants, but we also ate a couple of times in the local restaurant, Le Terroir, and asked about the boulangerie there. We were told it was tip-top and that people even come from neighboring villages to buy their bread there; the deal was on.”
“Simple as that?”
“Simple as that.”
The easy amble takes me down along Petite Rue and across the village square, finishing with a right turn into Rue Chauchien. Friends and neighbors are greeted with bonjours, but single-minded purpose precludes gossip. Eager nostrils catch on the first waft of baking—particularly enticing on a cold morning—and it reels me in like a fish on a line. Similarly afflicted victims are easily spotted—their purposeful step is the giveaway. Inside it is warm and cozy, and every new arrival opens with a bonjour messieurs-dames, an easy conflation of messieurs et mesdames. There is no queue as such, just an amiable gaggle that shuffles this way and that, everybody sure of their place and content to wait their turn. Now comes the difficult bit.
What to choose? Straight ahead are the breads, standing in clustered ranks with their crusts split and burst where the baker made some deft incisions on the soft dough earlier. My usual choice is a bannette de pays, a country baguette, robustly textured and a little darker in color than the standard model with its snow-white interior. There are numerous variations on the baguette theme. Some have round ends while others are pointed sharp, and I can never remember which is which, nor am I sure if there is any difference between them apart from their stems and sterns.
Then it gets complicated. There’s pain au chorizo, studded with chorizo sausage and comté cheese; fougasse, a bread with its origins in Nice, that consists of a gorgeous concoction of bread, lardons of bacon, and more comté; and Viking, a hobnail brown bread that would feel perfectly at home on a bakery shelf in Ireland.
Then it gets tempting. Plump croissants catch the eye, and here comes a warm trayload, fresh from the oven and tumbled into the glass-fronted display cabinet by the baker. I’ll be having some of those, although their cousins, the croissants aux amandes, filled with an almond custard and topped with flaked nuts, cannot be ignored. Nor indeed the pains au chocolat, chocolate-filled pastry pillows that are counterpoised perfectly by a cup of strong black coffee. Dunking is allowed, though I am not a practitioner.
Then it gets serious. Thoughts turn to lunch at the sight of small quiches whose trembling centers are riddled with nuggets of bacon, and miniature pizzas on sinful puff pastry bases, and béchamel-oozing croque-monsieur . . . Focus, Raymond, focus. There are bite-size quiches too, perfect as canapés if you are entertaining friends for an aperitif, though a dozen of them gently heated, served with a green salad and joined by an excellent glass of Monsieur Bernard Moreau’s Aligoté, once did me very nicely for an emergency lunch when the larder was bare.
Then it gets pretty. Over to the left there is a multi-colored display of sweet treats, fancy constructions of pastry and sponge and icing and cream and custard and fruit and jam. With untypical restraint I usually resist their charms. Seasonal delights also feature: at Easter chocolate bunnies run rampant in the window and on New Year’s Eve, with the line spilling out the door and along the street, you could be forgiven for thinking they were selling tickets for a rock concert.
What everybody is after is a galette des rois, a pastry tart filled with a subtly sweet almond paste and sold together with a paper crown. Concealed in its depths is a fève, which literally means a broad bean but in this case is a lucky charm that traditionally symbolized the infant Jesus. These days it often comes in the form of a tiny animal such as a wolf or a cat. Whoever finds the fève is crowned king or queen for the evening and parents go to elaborate lengths to see that it goes to a child. The galettes range in size from small-scale, side-plate versions to grander models that would spill over the largest dinner plate. They are stacked everywhere and fill the shop with a comforting aroma. Customers are asked: “Pour combien de personnes?” If there are four of you be sure to answer six, or eight if any gluttons like myself are numbered amongst your company. Heat it later in the oven and smack a blob of chilled crème fraîche onto each slice. The velvet texture and taste of the almond will be enlivened by the faint prickle of tartness from the cream. Thus you will be eased from the old year to the new, courtesy of this gustatory delight.
A dropped coin breaks the easy cadence of the crowd and intrudes on my reverie. It tinkles and rolls, teasing eight pairs of eyes as they scan the floor and peer under the counter. Arthritic knees complain as their owner strains forward and down, reaching, reaching, until the shiny little disc can be grasped and returned to its owner, restoring service to normal.
Then I am at the front of the line. I fumble and bumble and blurt out an order that starts as a model of puritan simplicity—une bannette de pays, si’l vous plaît—but ends as an homage to temptation as some other bread, a couple of quiches, perhaps a pizza or two, and a handful of croissants and pains au chocolat are quickly added. It is time to hurry home.
Clutched to torso on a cold morning, the warm baguette doubles nicely as a hand and chest warmer and as soon as I return, the coffee—it’s the house blend from the dim depths of the torrefacteur on Rue Poterne in Beaune—is made. A hunk of bread is twisted off—using a knife is far too refined—and is spread with a pearl of glistening, runny-pungent Époisses. This is Burgundy’s signature cheese, a much-misunderstood delight that is often cast as the stinky villain of the cheeseboard. That’s an unfair stereotype, resulting from sloppy timing, for it is critical that Époisses be properly ripe but not overly so; in the former state it is attractively pungent while in the latter it can curl the hardiest nostrils.
Époisses is a thoroughbred that requires careful handling and even then it sometimes remains surly and won’t come out to play. For a couple of days it is firm and immature; then it flips into wincing astringency, which sees it flipped into the bin. When on song it should hover between a solid and a liquid state, oozing across the plate into a gold-tinged cream blob—if there is a putty-grey, watery sheen, call the undertakers.
Razor shards of crust, hard as flint, punish the gums and palate, but the flavor is too satisfying for caution to intrude. Now is not the time for concerns about personal safety, though a stray worry is that some time-rich, meddling bureaucrat—and they have plenty of them in France—might decide to ban the crackle-crusted baguette on health and safety grounds.
My solution to the problem is more imaginative and, dare I say it, more truly French. I drape a protective canopy, in the shape of a bite-sized square of ham, over the sharpest peaks of crust and then munch away. This is no ordinary ham; it is cut from a hefty slice that itself was hand-carved from a big joint for us by Alain Ruben in the Beaune market. Lissom slices curled decoratively to attract the eye have no place in a Burgundy breakfast. Compared to those wimpy wisps Alain’s is bulletproof, and it is also the best I have ever tasted.
To finish, a flaky croissant is slathered with my mother’s raspberry jam. Pure essence of fruit dances on the palate with the lazier flavors of the buttery pastry. (The secret, she tells me, is a small quantity of quince in with the raspberries.) The coffee chimes in from another flavor angle as the church bells toll, but I’ve lost count. Check the watch. Still time for a final splash of coffee.
6
PARLAY VOO?
“WANTED! For crimes against the French language. This man mangles syntax, confuses grammar, and subverts vocabulary in ways never witnessed before. Do not engage him in conversation. Victims are left bewildered after only brief exchanges. For further information call the Académie française on the Helpline below.”
Any day now I expect to see posters with my face and this message on them at every entrance to the village, yet I blunder on, mangling one of the world’s great languages, content to rely on ludicrous facial expressions and outlandish mime acts to get my message across. My only asset is an ability to get more mileage out of the few words I know than anybody else could. They are bent to every purpose, and in moments of conversational crisis I have even been known to hit upon the correct one, sometimes dredging up the most obscure term from memory where it lodged months before.
I am a “vocabularist,” not a linguist, happy to hoard words like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, jumbled together, but never bothering to see if they can be joined. The more unusual they are, the more I treasure them, content with the pixel of information each contains. I wish I could snap my fingers and assemble the puzzle at a stroke but am unwilling to go the long way piece by piece. Perhaps tomorrow.
If a word is esoteric and virtually useless I have little trouble remembering it. Using it correctly, avec les verbes, is the problem, and I persist in forming ‘word queues’ rather than sentences. Blazing along, one word is placed after another, fired out and accompanied by my pantomime act until my victim is pummelled into understanding, or a polite semblance of it. A shared bottle of wine helps.
Despite this cack-handed approach I usually get the message across and, when it matters, I can receive too. It mattered on August 11, 2009, when a note in our post box said there was a registered letter at the post office awaiting collection. It was from a huissier, which my dictionary told me was an usher.
“What’s an usher writing to us for? And by registered post?” I asked Fionnuala.
“It also says here that in a legal sense huissier means bailiff,” she replied, handing me the dictionary.
“Bloody hell, what’s this about?”
Apprehension replaced puzzlement as we studied the letter, understanding a word here, a phrase there, gradually fitting the fragments together with help from the dictionary. This jigsaw had to be solved. The essence was clear. Our neighbors had complained to the authorities about us parking outside our own door and had secured an order for us to move it. We showed the letter to Corinne at our favorite local restaurant Le Terroir, as she is a fluent English speaker. She was unequivocal:
“Move your car now before it is towed away.”
My imagination took flight as we walked home.
“Japers! They’ll probably seize it and sell it at public auction,” I wailed.
“Raymond, that’s not going to happen,” Fionnuala replied.
“It happened to the vineyards and monasteries after the Revolution.”
“That was 200 years ago.”
“When I read this letter I am not sure much has changed. It’s the ‘bailiff’ word that has me rattled.”
“Take it easy, Raymond. Why don’t I make some lunch? Wasn’t there a white you wanted to try?”
Lunch helped, despite my morose silence, and a telephone conversation with our solicitor triggered a change in mood.
“Hold fast,” was his advice. “Don’t move the car just yet. I need more time to consider this. I’ll call you again before close of play today. Hold fast!”
His advice years before, not to buy the house unless we had unchallengeable access by a route other than through the cour communale, now became clear. I retreated to the garden for a prowl and returned 15 minutes later.
“You remember Roger Belland, who came to our Patrick’s Day party?” I asked Fionnuala.
“The winemaker who owns the house opposite?” she replied.
“Yes, it’s vacant now; I think he’s putting it up for sale. I am going to see him.”
“What good can that do?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, but he speaks English. He’ll know the lie of the land better than we do; it can’t do any harm. If they can box legal I can box clever.”
I grabbed a bottle of German Riesling from the cellar and set off.
Monsieur Belland was all ears as I told our tale, and when I produced the huissier’s letter he called his wife, who had studied law. She read it carefully and they conferred. He scowled.
“You will have to move your car,” he said.
They conferred again.
“Ownership of the cour is not clear. I am not sure in English . . . you have the right to cross over it but you must not stand your car there. You can stop outside your house to unload, but then you must move on.”
This wasn’t looking good, but the Riesling wasn’t wasted. His wife spoke to him again and produced a large-scale map of the village with the five properties surrounding the cour, and jointly owning it, clearly marked. A car-sized patch of ground in front of his house was not communale.
“You can park there,” he was smiling now.
“But?”
“You can park there,” he repeated, “that’s my land, there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“Our car will be closer to his house and in full view, rather than further away and out of sight.”
“Oui.”
His wife drew up a permit which was stamped, dated, and signed and which is still placed on the dashboard every time we park in the cour.
Business concluded, I told them about the Riesling and the beautiful Mosel Valley whence it came and which I had visited earlier that year, and then ran home waving my piece of paper like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich in 1938, only I had been helped by a friend, not outwitted by a foe. A little later I moved the car 20 paces closer to the neighbors’ front door, gave two short parps on the horn, and returned indoors to ring our solicitor.
“I don’t know how you did it. I take my hat off to you,” he said.
“The power of wine,” I replied.
“Well done; it’s a perfect solution and not just from a legal point of view.”
“Thanks for your wise counsel; we’ll crack a decent bottle when we next meet.”
On another occasion, my “understanding” of the French language ultimately gave us a good chuckle. “We’re getting a pub in the village,” I announced, returning from the boulangerie one morning.
“A pub? Are you sure?” asked Fionnuala.
“That’s what the sign said: Votre pub ici, ‘Here is your pub,’” I translated, well chuffed at my progress in French. “It’s on a wall beside what looks like an empty house. There’s a bit of land around it. I reckon they’ll demolish and build from scratch. Let’s hope it’s not an ‘Oirish’ pub, as there’s enough of them.”
“I think there was a pub in the village before we arrived, where the pharmacy is now.”
“That’s right, this must be its replacement. It’s an odd location though.”
Joël set me straight. Votre pub ici is a standard notice placed on empty advertising hoardings to attract new business. Pub is short for publicité, which means advertisement. We got a laugh out of that, and as soon as I learned its true meaning I began to see the notice in all sorts of unlikely locations, where even the most ambitious developer would struggle to locate a pub.
Such outright blunders have been rare enough, but confusions abound. Every now and then I conquer my indolence and make a stab at learning some French, which can be fun. It can also be the most frustrating of experiences. The worst is when you suffer an outbreak of ‘brain-lock.’ Everything seizes, the neurons go on strike and refuse to do any more; they have been asked to drive on the wrong side of the road too often and all that comes out of your mouth is gibberish. A bilingual friend tries to help by urging:
