Food, fabulous French food...

Two days ago we bought truffle oil (olive oil from Provence infused with the aroma of truffles) from the Ecomusée de Truffe in Sorges. For our first taste of truffle oil at dinner time, we sprinkled a little over a mix of salt-and-peppered avocado, mozzarella cheese and tomato. Oh yum! Last night, we used it on tomato only, but the effect was still subtle and magnificent. I’ve heard people describe the flavour of truffles as ‘earthy’, and that’s the best I can do too. Coming down the wooden stairs of our gite the next morning I could still detect the soft truffle aroma like the best truffle pig or dog. It made me want salted truffle oil on grainy toast for breakfast. I resisted, and, thinking of mon transit as all good French people do, had All Bran instead.

Yep, ugly truffles

Being in this amazing food-rich area where regional loyalty towards its products is somewhat feverish, food just tastes different. It’s walnut harvesting time here, and we see these amazing sweeping/sucking machines gathering the nuts from under the lanes of stately trees, which results in the grass being soft, green and nicely combed after each sweeping. With the dappled autumn light coming through the slowly dropping leaves, it all looks amazing. I’ve grown up with walnuts being foisted upon me as cheap and readily sourced snack food (walnuts and Vegemite sandwiches for school lunches, for Pete’s sake). I tolerated them but that’s all, and mostly I didn't really even like them. But here, now, they taste fabulous. Our gite hosts gave us a basket of locally gathered walnuts on our arrival, and we all tucked into them with great pleasure. Since then, we’ve also bought a walnut apéritif, a walnut and cassis apéritif, a walnut oil for salads, and croquants aux noix du Périgord (crunchy sugary egg-y walnut-y biscuits).



We’ve now eaten meals with various local Dordogne ingredients, including: truffles, chestnuts (oh more yum!), foie gras (the kids for lunch), cèpe mushrooms, confit de canard, aiguillettes de canard (strips of tender duck breast – the kids for lunch again), and Bergerac red wine. We visited a gourmet food filled shop yesterday in Domme and were treated to tastes of different apéritifs, and those crunchy biscuits. The manager was large, accommodating and lovely, and I’d recommend a visit there (top of the main street, opposite the Office du Tourisme). The views from Domme would have been amazing, had it not been for the fog! After lunch and once the fog cleared, we also saw wild, side of the road apple trees, laden with sun/tree ripened fruit (so delicious if you are able to ignore the creatures that like apples too), and dozens of wild fig trees, that had obviously been laden in their earlier peak time. I want to live there!

Our friend from the Dordogne, Pascal, said he would walk 500 miles for the taste of some good cèpe mushrooms, and I agree. At a frightfully posh restaurant in Sorges I really enjoyed salmon with cèpe mushroom sauce, plus a side dish of broad beans, parsnips, chestnuts, artichokes, purple potato, and carrot. Delish. (How did they know that broad beans, parsnips, chestnuts and artichokes are some of my all-time-favourite foods?!) Lovely husband had a truffle omelette, which is apparently one of the best ways to ‘carry’ the truffle flavour. It was soft and melty.

Cèpe mushrooms

And as for chestnuts, I grew up gathering chestnuts with my sisters from our small-town neighbourhood, and they were the best treat on a cold winter’s night, heated in a beaten old lidded pan over our open fire in the living room, and, before they exploded, eaten quickly off spread-out newspaper. We would all end up with blackened and singed fingers but it was worth it. In France in the winter time you will often find street vendors roasting chestnuts, and the aroma is wonderful. You can buy un cornet de châtaignes (a twisted roll of paper filled with roasted chestnuts) from the vendor, and walk on your happy way munching them. I’m not sure there’s anything better; except, perhaps, if you’ve got a glass of vin chaud (hot red wine) in your hand too.

Oh yum, roasted chestnuts

And incidentally, Pascal-from-the-Dordogne’s-wife, Marie, had us to dinner at their house recently. I’m going to write more about that meal another time because the food was just soooo good, but for now a little aside to say that her duck and cèpe mushroom with pureed chestnut topping for the main course was simply heaven and very ‘Dordogne’. In my opinion she is quite seriously practically a multiple-starred chef, working at IKEA and living quietly in Muret. For the cheese course Marie had bought a nice selection, including brie with a layer of truffles. I absolutely love(d) it.

Truffle brie

This afternoon we visited the Maugein accordion factory in Tulle. My husband couldn’t contain his excitement. It was a real factory with real workers, fabricating everything on site and to unique specifications, and not in China! The tour was free, the sights were special. Nothing to eat there though but enough beautifully crafted squeeze-boxes to keep us happy for a lifetime.

© Sara Crompton Meade 2013

Sweeties, please?

It was the night of Halloween. We were staying in a tiny village near Terrasson, in the Dordogne, France. ‘Tiny’ meant a scattering of houses only, with one of them built in 1786 going by the date scratched above the front door. Halloween is not something I really care for as I didn’t grow up with the tradition, but my daughter loves the makeup and the dressing up so I agreed to take her around the small neighbourhood to scare the bejesus out of the neighbours. We interrupted four elderly folk from their dinnertime preps (closing the shutters, arranging furniture for the evening’s TV viewing, chopping the carrots, checking the chickens were back in their coup for the night, etc).

My beautiful ghoulish daughter

Couple no. 1 took it gamely in their stride when my daughter asked in her most polite French for des bonbons, s’il vous plait? They found a few wrapped sweets and we chatted for a while at the door as the temperatures quickly dropped with the setting sun. Madame was wearing one of those housecoats that you see a lot of old women in France wearing, as if they are endlessly tackling housework. Monsieur was very elderly, fine-looking and tall, but clearly shrinking.

We moved on to their elderly lady neighbour (no. 2) who maintains the most amazing vegetable/flower garden from her enormous four-storied home. I just love old people, and I love seeing the way they live and the treasures they choose to surround themselves with. This 79-year-old (she told us) lady lived alone as her husband had died some years ago, with her two grownup children now living as her neighbours and running four farming properties. She rattled a few jars (really) and presented my daughter with a pile of sweets that smelt suspiciously like mothballs, but that we later realised were cough lollies mixed in with the good stuff. Having been invited into her home, we also chatted a while, as I’ve found that you can’t just dash out the door to the next house when you are begging for bonbons. Eventually, she stepped outside with us, and then burst into tears.

Not expecting this, we stayed a little longer, offering the warmth and support of human company. I guessed that she was missing her husband and she explained that everyone else had died; she was all alone… Thankfully my French is now adequate enough to manage a few commiserating sounding words, and we talked about the village, her farm, her family, thanked her again. My ghoulish daughter wanted to give the old lady a hug but she said later that she didn't want to frighten her any more. After watching Madame finish checking on the chickens, we moved on to frighten our (no. 3) immediate gite-owning neighbours.

Madame was suitably horrified-but-delighted, and showered my daughter with all the treats in her cupboard that her own grandchildren usually help themselves to. We were again invited to come out of the cold and we chatted a while inside her beautiful, centuries-old stone and slate-tiled home. Madame kissed my daughter warmly on her ugly, blackened cheeks before we left, and she said how beautiful she looked, even so. She asked if we were visiting other houses in the tiny village, and I said that we would probably go home now because darkness had fallen fast. She agreed, saying that we were very prudent. (I love that word in French and they use it a lot.)

We got home, divvied up the loot with the boys (separating out the foul-smelling, probably past their due date cough lollies) and settled in for an evening of gorging. The kids, that is. I had a cup of camomile tea to calm myself down after the shock of making a lonely old lady cry.

p.s. I don’t usually try to change the world with these blog posts but for this one I just must say: Visit or hug an old person today!

Lascaux vs Lascaux II

What did I expect? I knew that the original Lascaux caves had been shut some years ago as the heat and carbon dioxide from all the clamouring tourists had been damaging the paintings. I felt really sad about that, and didn’t know until just recently that they had been meticulously recreating the interior and the paintings in an underground space on practically the same site. Great!

Staying in the Dordogne, and being 20 minutes’ drive from Lascaux, caused great excitement in our house. We have a children’s book that covers all of the regions in France and the highlights of each spot. Our eight year old son has practically memorised the book, which has in it an image of the fallen tree covering the entrance to the cave at the time of its discovery. The paintings are thought to be around 17,300 years old and are mostly images of large animals, which are known from fossil evidence to have lived in the area at the time. In 1979, Lascaux was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so it’s pretty important.

Here’s an excerpt from a website worth reading more of www.savelascauxl.org, about the discovery of the cave:

In September 1940, four boys and a dog (called Robot) set out on an adventure in Dordogne. The boys - Marcel Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel and Simon Coencas – where intrigued by an old legend about a tunnel running under the Vézère River linking the old Castel of Montignac to the Manor of Lascaux. According to the legend, this tunnel would lead to a second tunnel and a treasure hidden deep in the woods of Montignac.

As they walked through the woods the little dog, Robot, ran ahead toward a deep depression in the ground covered with overgrowth and began sniffing the sunken hole. The depression had originally been created by an uprooted tree. The boys hurried to catch up with Robot. When they saw the deep hole, they immediately thought it might lead them to the legendary tunnel and the hidden treasure.

After trying to determine the depth of the hole by tossing rocks in the opening and listening for contact with the bottom, they decided to explore it. They enlarged the opening by removing a few stones around the edges with their penknives. Then, each one of the four boys slid through the hole in turn, along a semi-vertical shaft embedded with stalagmites down fifteen meters to a dark underground chamber. “The descent was terrifying,” recalled Jacques Marsal who was just fourteen years old at the time, the youngest of the four boys. Inside the chamber they used their oil lantern to look around shining it on the walls and ceiling.

Marsal remembers this first encounter describing what they saw as a “cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving.” The ceiling was pure white, covered with calcite. And the paintings were brilliantly multicolored in reds, blacks, browns and ochres. The boys were standing in The Hall of the Bulls. Mesmerized by their findings, the boys ventured to the end of the cave. By then, the light from the oil lantern was fading and they realized they needed to return to the surface….

What a wonderful story!

In a slightly different version on Wikipedia, it says that the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, who returned to the scene with his three friends to investigate the cave further.
Lascaux II, is a replica of two of the cave halls (the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery) was opened in 1983, 200 metres from the original. Yesterday in the underground cavern entrance, our most handsome French guide with a dreamy documentary voice-over voice, took us on the Lascaux II adventure. Having already visited the wonders of Pech Merle in the Lot in the real, original breath-taking setting (http://www.pechmerle.com/english/introduction.html), we all found the Lascaux II experience to be (and I’m really sorry to say this…) a little underwhelming. The children all said afterwards that they preferred the paintings in the original caves because it felt like you were really ‘there’, seeing what the original artists saw. But for anyone who hasn’t seen original pre-historic paintings in original pre-historic caves, this is an exceptional experience.

The colours, the forms, the use of the natural dents and chips of the cave walls to create the shapes of the animals, the animals themselves, well, it’s all incredible. The paintings were recreated over several years to depict the original paintings. Apparently Pablo Picasso said (in awed humility) after visiting the original Lascaux:

“We [contemporary artists] have learned nothing."

So, onward and upward, we bought our fridge magnet, and wended our way through the Valley of Vézère passing a number of other UNESCO World Heritage prehistoric sites along the way. So much to see in the Dordogne. It’s really beautiful here and it’s no surprise that floods of Englishmen and women have made this part of France their home.