One hot afternoon, the box in the village being out of order, I went to the farm to use the phone. My number was engaged and while I waited talking to Claudette I was about to lean on the table behind me when I was stopped by a great shout and throwing up of hands. Looking round I realised that what I had taken to be a white tablecloth was in fact a covering of the thinnest of pastry pulled out and left to dry. I had almost caused a major disaster.
‘C’est pour la tourtière,’ laughed Claudette, the danger averted. We had seen these splendid almost sculptured apple pies in the pâtisserie and at the farmers’ markets but a price of between six and seven pounds each had stopped us actually trying one. ‘Venez voir,’ she said. In the kitchen was another equally long table already covered with a floured cloth. As though making a television programme she took a lump of soft dough from a box in the refrigerator and said, ‘I shall start this one while I’m waiting for the other one to dry.’
Sprinkling a little more flour on the cloth she then lifted the supple dough. She put it across her upturned palms and wrists and, like an expert juggler, raised them alternately while gradually moving them apart. When the pastry was about two feet long she laid it gently down in the centre of the table calling, ‘Eh, Oh!’ over her shoulder. In an instant Grandma appeared to help her. ‘Doucement! Doucement!’ she said softly as together they began to pull the pastry outwards to the edges of the table. Round and round they moved in harmony, Grandma clicking her tongue and muttering in patois when the smallest of holes appeared.
Twenty minutes later the long farm table was completely covered and the pastry hung several inches over the edge. Grandma trimmed it. ‘The edge is far too thick to be used,’ she said. ‘Now we must leave it to dry.’
‘For how long?’ I asked.
‘Usually an hour and a half. It depends on the temperature and the humidity. Now we can continue with the other one.’
The pastry on which I had almost sat was now transparent enough to show the white cloth underneath. Grandma appeared satisfied. She lined a large round baking-tin with foil and used a turkey feather to oil it. Then she dipped the feather into a small enamel saucepan of melted butter and covered the whole surface of the pastry. ‘You’ve missed a bit over there,’ cried Claudette.
Grandma sighed and moved round the table. ‘My eyes are not what they were,’ she said. She sprinkled the pastry with fine sugar and poised her knife for the first cut.
She removed a circle large enough to cover the base and sides of the tin, then put in three more, one on top of the other with the edges placed deliberately to look a little haphazard. She carefully arranged thick slices of raw apple over the base and sides, and then fourteen large sugar cubes were evenly spaced between them.
‘Couldn’t you use powdered sugar?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Certainly, but fourteen lumps is our système.’ Grandma was definite. I should have known better than to ask. Claudette sprinkled on a packet of vanilla sugar and then poured in two small tumblers of liquid. These were eau-de-vie and rum, each glass being diluted with an equal quantity of water. Circle number five was placed on next and then came the fascinating decoration.
They cut the remaining pastry into small shapes: strips, squares, triangles – ‘n’importe’ – and, working from the outer edge, they folded and curved the pieces, standing them up to gradually cover the entire surface. They worked in absorbed excitement, like children on a beach, until with little sighs they stood back to admire their creation.
‘Pas mauvais,’ they grinned at one another. Grandma gave it a final sprinkling of sugar. I noticed there were still some pieces left.
‘Plus tard,’ said Claudette, anticipating my question. She explained that the pie must be cooked for fifteen minutes at gas mark 6, a further half hour at mark 5 and then those last curls would be piled even higher before the final fifteen minutes in the oven. ‘Sometimes it works better than others,’ she said, ‘you’ll be able to judge for yourself tomorrow.’
We had already been invited for Sunday lunch. ‘Nothing special,’ Claudette had said, ‘just a few friends and some of the family.’ But we’d never had la tourtière before. Was she sure they weren’t celebrating something? ‘No,’ she laughed, ‘I just felt in the mood.’
The next day the sun was even hotter and what little breeze there had been the previous day had dropped. At exactly twelve-thirty we drove down to the farm and joined a leisurely gathering in the flowered courtyard. Raymond was serving apéritifs to two town cousins and their children and to Grandma’s jolly brother and his wife. He paused to introduce us to the only people we had not previously met, the local taxidermist and his ample wife.
In flowered aprons Claudette and her mother appeared for a brief ritual kissing and then hurried back to the kitchen. After a single aperitif we processed expectantly into the dining room on the veranda. Clearly this was not to be just an ordinary Sunday lunch. Our names had been written on torn scraps of paper and placed in the soup plates. RUHT, clearly they find my name as difficult to spell as to pronounce. We eventually settled, picked up our napkins and smiled at each other.
‘Servez-vous! Servez-vous!’ called Claudette from the far end of the table. The taxidermist’s wife was quick to oblige. The soup was a thick bisque de crevettes and there were immediate murmurs of approval. Once it was finished and the plates collected by Véronique the first wine of the meal was poured. It is deféndu here to drink wine before soup. There was a glass of local red to start and then a Sauterne ‘76 to accompany the foie gras entier de la maison which followed.
‘Fai calou!’ agreed the old folk in patois and it was indeed hot even for early August. The small, thick creamy pieces of duck liver were eaten with an intense pleasure and compared favourably with last year’s. Next came huge slices of my favourite Charentais melon from the garden. I watched Grandpa sprinkle his with salt and take the first bite from the end of his personal folding knife.
‘Oui, c’est bon,’ he declared. It was delicious and just the thing to cleanse the palate before the next course, a careful arrangement of oeufs farcis and curls of smoked salmon on a bed of tiny vegetables in mayonnaise, with which we drank a very dry Côte de Duras. What next we wondered.
‘Moi, je mange trop de pain,’ sighed Raymond reaching for another slice as Grandma carefully carried to the table a shallow tureen, steam rising from the dark aromatic sauce. This was our first experience of a civet de lièvre. It had been made from a hare shot by Grandpa and the flesh fell from the bones. It was extremely rich and thinking about the tourtière I took a very small helping. We drank a red wine from the Cave Coopérative at Monflanquin, which seems to improve every year since it first opened in 1978. In the kitchen Claudette was busy carving a huge rôti de boeuf. She piled up the thick slices and surrounded them with a great quantity of haricots verts which were gleaming with oil and dotted with garlic, while Raymond dusted off a hand-made bottle without a label. Eyes widened.
‘What is it?’
‘Un vieux Corbière.’ He tried to look nonchalant but failed. The excitement mounted.
‘Mais de quelle année?’
He shrugged. ‘Je ne pourrais pas le dire.’ He turned to Grandpa. ‘Quarante-huit? Quarante-neuf?’ The old man nodded. It was he who had bottled it when he returned from the war. The Corbières was a dark brownish red. It gleamed and was wonderfully smooth and was savoured with reverence. The beef was wonderful too. A town cousin, his chin glistening, asked if it came from one of the farm cows. ‘Of course,’ Raymond answered with pride. ‘Don’t you mind?’ enquired one of the children. He shook his head, smiling at the boy.
After a simple green salad Claudette, to many oohs and ahs, carried in the tourtières, this superb south-west France version of an apple pie which I had so nearly ruined the previous morning. They were masterpieces, the golden curls of tissue thin pastry standing five inches high. We all applauded.
‘C’est ma fantaisie,’ said Grandma modestly. This tiny, tough old lady who can drive a tractor, kill a duck and harvest in the field with the strongest has little enough opportunity for fantaisie in her busy life. The pastry melted in the mouth and the interior was soft, sweet and extremely alcoholic. But we had not finished. Sorbet de cassis was in its turn followed by bowls of peaches and apricots and we drank our last wine, sweet and golden and made from the family vines on the hills above Bel-Air which had once belonged to Anaïs and her son.
When the coffee was finally poured into the tiny Limoges cups it was almost four-thirty and still the conversation rolled around the table. We struggled to understand as much as possible but were defeated when the old people slipped into patois. As we were offered digestifs there were impassioned discussions of the relative merits of Armagnac haut or bas, and the town cousin tried a Calvados brought back from a visit to the dreaded area north of the Loire. Raymond refused to touch it complaining bitterly about the lack of sobriety among the Bretons and Normans.
‘If it weren’t for them,’ he muttered darkly, ‘the law wouldn’t have been changed. We wouldn’t have lost the right to distil our own spirit.’ French law was changed in 1960 and only proprietors existing then may keep the right to distil. Unfortunately this was just one year before Raymond and Claudette were married and took over the farm so the right will disappear with Grandpa when he dies, and the travelling still or alambic will no longer trundle into the courtyard to distil the fermenting barrels of plums and pears.
Lunch finally over we staggered outside to rest under the trees. Conversation languished for a while but soon the boules appeared and fierce games were played, English versus French, old versus young and town against country, with many a Gascon shout of rage or triumph as minute distances were checked with a ruler. Later some of us strolled through the farmyard to inspect the pigs, the rabbits, quail and guineafowl and on across the fields to admire the lake, newly dug for irrigation. In spite of government grants it was so expensive that the pump must wait for next year. In the next meadow a herd of Blondes d’Aquitaine regarded us inquisitively, flicking their creamy tails. We wandered back through grass alive with butterflies and grasshoppers and were about to make our farewells. Raymond looked surprised.
‘But you can’t go now. It’s almost time for supper.’ We were staggered. We had barely recovered from lunch. We tried to explain that we didn’t think we could eat any more that day.
Claudette giggled. ‘Wait and see. Now it’s cooler. About nine o’clock you’ll feel like a little something.’
It was with a certain sense of déjà vu that we once again assembled round the table. We were however one short. The taxidermist, accustomed it would appear only to stuffing other creatures, had gone home with a crise de foie but his wife was already seated, smiling and eager. ‘How could I resist?’ she appealed. ‘I just left him tucked up in bed. He’ll be all right.’
And so we began again, this time with a delicate beef consommé and, miraculously, our appetites returned. We drank no fine wines, just last year’s local red, judiciously watered by all. But there were other treats, roasted guineafowl served on thin garlic rubbed toast was followed by a dish of cèpes, brown and crisp. Raymond closed his eyes as their perfume reached him.
‘Ah, ils poussent de bonnes choses dans les bois,’ he murmured. The cèpes were compared with chanterelles, morilles, girolles and a host of other fungi which they were amazed to learn are largely unappreciated in England.
‘And you don’t even collect les trompettes de la mort?’
We had to admit it. ‘Are they good?’ we asked.
‘Formidable!’ They sighed. There was no understanding the English. Raymond insisted that much of the tinned pâté truffe was actually flavoured with these trompettes, so named because they are black. We ate our cèpes dutifully but as they needed liberally flavouring with both garlic and parsley, I could not see that they were as delicious as a fresh field mushroom that needs nothing to improve it. After bowls of chocolate mousse and crème anglaise we were still talking and drinking coffee with Raymond who was as lively as at midday. We knew that he would be hard at work soon after six the following morning but we felt that we would take a little longer to recover.
Towards the end of the holiday Hugh Fowles, a colleague of Mike’s, visited us en route to play in a tennis tournament in Bordeaux. A young and energetic craftsman, he helped us solve the problem of our corridor which, now the window was incorporated into our bedroom, was always dark unless the outer doors were left open. Unfortunately these were on the west side of the house which caught the prevailing wind. Each time the door between the corridor and the living room was opened, anyone standing in the kitchen corner, usually me, was almost blown away. Clearly what we needed were glazed inner doors but anything remotely modern would have been wrong.
Hugh and Mike went to see M. René who thought he might have a few old doors stacked in the derelict Boulangerie in the village. They finally unearthed a pair of glazed doors nine feet tall which were ideal. They built a frame with one door to be fixed and the other to be hinged open. The frame was huge and heavy and Hugh, who always reminds me of an El Greco figure, looked positively Christ-like as he edged it in on his shoulder. The frame was inched into place and the doors attached and now we can have the western light flooding in without the draught.
We did not get a great deal of work done on the house that summer. It was extremely hot – we had almost seven weeks of continuous sunshine – and also we were inundated, not with toads this year but with visitors. Visitors I have decided, give pleasure in every way; in the looking forward to their arrival, in the enjoyment of their company, and even in their eventual departure. Each group arrived hot, exhausted and often highly strung from the long journey and we watched the peace and the space begin to soothe them as it soothes us. Matthew brought a gorgeous blonde who slowly turned a pale burnished gold. Adam, by now working for his degree, came with Tom Harvey, a fellow student, and in one of their more energetic moments they built us a stone barbecue which, to everyone’s surprise, still stands and works well. Les Fostaires returned, this time without mishap, and Tony too found yet another route to Bel-Air. Early one morning I counted eleven people quietly reading in various corners of the garden.
Although we were not in the mood for work it did not stop us planning. The new glass doors had improved the whole aspect of the west side of the house and we began to consider building a partly-covered terrace. It seemed the obvious use as it was an evening suntrap. Too hot in July, as August passed the halfway mark and the occasional breeze filtered down from the north, this protected spot became favourite for an evening drink. Of course it was still covered in weeds and the outer beam sloped wildly and was too low but the germ of the idea was sown. Even the old outhouse with the narrow wooden doors, which we used as a wood store and was home to a family of hedgehogs who snuffled nightly in and out, might be large enough to be converted to further accommodation. We were always considering the next task.
We were very happy with our new, enlarged bedroom except for the floor which, with a mixture of old and new cement, was an eyesore. Dark, quarry tiles would, we thought, be a mistake and we looked for something pale and neutral, and finally found them in a strange emporium in a field outside Fumel. It sold job lots of anything, including Spanish floortiles, which were so cheap that we bought enough to tile all the bedroom floors.
We saw our last visitors onto the train for Paris and as we stayed a few weeks longer that summer we were initiated into the most important harvest of the region, the plums.
‘On va ramasser les prunes la semaine prochaine,’ said Raymond, with a knowing smile. He knew that we were not involved in a major project at that moment. We had watched the trees grow heavier, the branches bending beneath the weight of the large, lavender-coloured plums. In each village and at every market the conversation was all concerned with les prunes.
‘In Lot-et-Garonne over the next six weeks we shall harvest over ninety thousand tonnes,’ said Raymond proudly. This special, local plum, called la prune d’Ente has a lavender bloom which rubs off to show the dark red skin beneath, accounting for its old name of Robe Sergent. Originally brought back to France by the Crusaders, most of its cultivation now takes place in this rolling countryside between the two rivers. The flesh is golden and very sweet, making it perfect for preserving by drying.
‘Then they are called les pruneaux,’ said Raymond.
‘What we call prunes,’ we told him.
He laughed. ‘Que c’est compliqué.’
Harvesting plums filled each September. Before the Coopérative was built to buy the plums and dry them by gas in great quantities, each farm had its own wood-fired oven or étuve. The one on Raymond’s farm was built in 1928 to replace a much earlier one. ‘But you have one up at Bel-Air,’ he said. Of course, we had forgotten. The small outhouse where the hedgehogs lived in the wood-pile, Raymond had always called that l’étuve. We now saw that the sloping roof had an inner flat roof of smoke-blackened terracotta tiles; a crude tin chimney protruded from the end wall. Now the curiously narrow doors were explained. It was through these that the plum-laden trolley would have been pushed.
Down on the farm Grandpa had been pottering about for days tidying up the year’s accumulation in front of the doors of their étuve. ‘This year is the last time I’ll do it,’ he declared, ‘It’s too much work.’ He lights the oven every year to cook a few hundred kilos of plums, especially the half cooked or mi-cuit which will be preserved in eau-de-vie, but once it is alight he must get up twice a night to replenish the wood.
Next day his old comrade from his time as a prisoner of war arrived to help him. They reminisced as they mended broken trays and oiled the wheels of le wagonet, a long, iron trolley which has eight shelves for the trays and holds over 300 kilos of plums. He showed us how he would push it on the rails through the high wooden doors into l’étuve where thick iron pipes line the walls and carry the heat from the fire pit next door.
We greeted each other in the early morning sunlight. Fernande was there, stolid and smiling in flowered hat and apron, also Grandma and Claudette, barefoot M. Demoli unusually prompt, M. René’s sister and a friend, Philippe and Véronique and two cousins from Agen. The women chatted as we collected our green plastic baskets, familiar from the potato harvest, and strolled down to the orchard where Raymond waited, a small iron ladder propped against the first tree. The first day of the harvest was clearly an occasion, and he was doubly pleased to begin by initiating us.
‘Eh alors,’ he said with a grin. He shinned up the ladder and shook each branch with his strong brown arms. A cascade of lavender plums covered the carefully raked earth and we bent to pick them up. Before we had finished he moved on and shook the next tree, and so it continued. We tipped our full baskets into crates which were placed in rows to make them easier for collection later with the trailer. It was not hard work to begin with and unlike potatoes you could eat as many as you liked, but as the morning wore on the aching began. I watched Fernande, easily the strongest and quickest worker. Thick legs astride, she never bent her knees but would occasionally rest one forearm against her thigh to relieve her back.
Raymond delighted in tricking her. It was clearly a ritual appreciated by all, even Fernande herself. High in the tree hidden by the thick branches he would call her, ‘Eh Fernande!’ Innocent and glad of a chance to straighten she would gaze upward shading her eyes. A quick shake and down rained the plums. She never minded the laughter but she never remembered either. He caught her every time.
The dogs chased imaginary rabbits and each other. The women gossiped and, as usual, exchanged recipes; poule au pot, alouettes sans têtes, which turned out to be beef-olives, and compared the various sauces in which to cook them. The recipes went on and on as we slowly moved up the rows of trees. Cardigans and pullovers hung abandoned on the branches as the sun rose higher and wasps buzzed round the baskets. Our hands were stained and sticky and the smell of ripe fruit was almost overpowering. At last all fifty crates were full and Mike drove slowly between the trees while Raymond and M. Demoli swung them up onto the trailer.
It was midday and everyone straightened gratefully, groaning and stretching. ‘Maintenant,’ said Grandma, ‘on peut redresser les reins.’ I really did feel as though my kidneys had floated up somewhere between my shoulder blades. We left the plums to the wasps and trailed back to the farm and into the cool kitchen. There was a pleasurable jostling at the sink to clean our sugary fingers before a welcome aperitif.
In the forty minutes or so since Claudette had left us she had managed to prepare a meal for fourteen. We sat down to sorrel soup, melon, home-cured ham, macaroni cheese and grilled steak followed by tomato and onion salad and finally for desert, pears from the orchard. We were ravenous. There had been as usual no mid-morning anything. Each of us was concerned with replenishing energy for the afternoon.
By two-thirty we were en route to the next orchard about a mile away. Matthew and I bumped slowly along sitting on the high mudguard of the old tractor with Grandpa behind us in his battered old 2CV van. Fernande whirred past us on her mobylette and M. René’s sister and her friend, still exchanging recipes no doubt, had managed to cram themselves into M. Demoli’s disreputable car between all the scrap metal.
M. Demoli took on the job of shaking the trees in the afternoon. Half hidden in the leaves he braced himself and sent down the plums. With his wild, gleaming eyes and wheezy shouts one looked again to make sure that those bare black feet were not in fact cloven hooves. In the days that followed the smell of wood smoke and cooking plums filled the air for miles. The bulk of the harvest was taken to the Coopérative and there were races each evening to be the first tractor and trailer on the road to Monflanquin.
Grandpa was constantly busy, filling the large flat trays or claies, loading them into the wagonet after washing them and pushing the filled wagonet in and out of l’étuve. Were they cooked enough? Perhaps a little longer. They normally cooked very slowly for twenty-four hours. I began to learn the language of the prunes. The smallest, hardly worth the drying, were les fretins. Grandpa called the largest les impériales. Le triage, the grading of the dried fruit, was done by Grandma and her friend, Antoinette. Antoinette was part of le système. She had once lived in the village but was now looked after by her daughter and son-in-law in Paris. Each September she returned pour les prunes and the two old friends sat hour after hour sorting the still warm glistening fruit as they talked inevitably about autrefois.
Claudette was busy preparing the jars for preserving les impériales in eau-de-vie which had been distilled the previous year. First she packed the still warm prunes into the jars and stood them on the hot step in front of the oven. She then prepared the syrup, 300 grammes of sugar dissolved in one litre of eau-de-vie for each two litre jar of plums. She stirred it very carefully as obviously it could easily catch fire. The syrup was poured gently over the warm fruit and the jars sealed immediately. ‘They are best left for two years,’ she said. ‘After five years they begin to disintegrate but we never manage to keep them that long.’ I could understand why.
The smallest and any damaged plums were collected in large barrels. These were covered and left to ferment for at least a month before being distilled into the eau-de-vie for the following year. Everywhere one looked les prunes and les pruneaux were the centre of attention.
The night before we left, after eating with the family which had by now become a welcome ritual after a day spent packing up the house, we sat nibbling more prunes. ‘Why don’t the English buy more of our prunes?’ we were asked. It was difficult to try to explain their school dinner image and their lack of chic, in this region which dedicates a month every year to this purple harvest and even writes poems to la prune. ‘How do they prefer them, the English?’ they enquired, thinking of their own noix de veau aux pruneaux or terrine de lapin Gascon, the rabbit flesh laced with prunes.
‘Mostly stewed with custard,’ we admitted. They shook their heads.
Who knows? Perhaps we might be tempted by the advice of the Due de Guise who in 1588, it is said, after arduous nights spent with Madame de Noirmoutiers ate prunes in the morning as a restorative from les fatigues de l’amour. Next morning as we left Claudette presented us with a jar to keep us all going through the coming winter.