Thursday, April 22, 2010

progress

Time to stand back and gaze in amazement what can only be called progress.  Here is the house when it was still for sale (note the for sale sign).  When I used to go past, I always thought the same thing: "Pity the poor bastard who gets stuck with that house and has to figure out how to keep that awful looking area under the slanted glass from dripping and leaking all over the place. "



In this second picture, the porch, installed last year, supports the right hand end of the scaffolding.  It was tricky setting the left hand sice since the planks and stretchers didn't quite go across what was left of the slanted glass part.  The far left side was supported mostly by religious faith.  The two chimneys were the first things to go, but this left an empty place where there should have been a gutter and necessitated rebuilding the edge of the roof a little.



By this point, Robert and I have dropped the stucco (crepi).  It was that or fix it up and because of the damage from removing the chimneys and many loose and cracked places, we decided to demolish it, dig out the joints, and repoint with lime mortar and local yellow sand.  This is the finish on the rest of this house and on most of the places around here that have been renovated.   

Crepi is definitely out of fashion;   exposed and repointed stone is in.  I love all this exposed stone even if it was perhaps meant all along to be covered.  The style of this house is "tout-venant" or "anything goes".  Fancier houses have stones that are roughly cut straight and square and almost even follow courses.  This is called appareillé.  In important structures like churches they use big stones cut into regular courses.   In a place like ours,  lime mortar is a huge part of the structure of the building;  only at the corners and the edges of the windows are the stones fitted neatly.   


I wonder if the time will come when exposing cruddy stone, like sandblasting low-fired brick in Boston, or sanding wide plank floors with huge cracks, very suitable for wall-to-wall,  will get really old.  That time has not arrived for me.  

It was tempting to leave the stone un-filled like Francis' house across the street.  But in the end it seemed wise to fill in a wall that faces the slanting rain and frequent heavy fogs.


Just under the roof, it's convention to run a "genoise", old-fashioned half-cylinder roof tiles set on top of flat tiles and buttered with tons of lime mortar.  We had to patch the genoise where they had chopped it out for the chimney.  On fancy houses, there can be three or four rows high of these semi-circles.  I had always found them rather mysterious looking but I actually cranked out a decent looking repair the first time.  





Robert then came by and did his magic with the zinc gutter.  He spent most of the morning running around to find special ammonia that he needed.  







Next project:  waterproof and tile the terrasse, a floor which also serves as the ceiling of the bathroom below.  






This is a bit urgent since I jumped the gun and already installed styrofoam-backed drywall on the very ceiling....

Friday, April 9, 2010

the video





I can't get the video out of my mind, those infantile code names, Crazyhorse and Bushmaster, like when we used to play flashlight tag in the summer, in the suburbs.  All the euphemisms, engage (kill), individual (human being), a vocabulary of kids trying to sound like adults.  And then after killing so many humans for no real reason at all, someone just says, "Stop shooting" since the bad guys on the ground are all dead and friendlies have suddenly arrived.  Afterward, as a consequence of this orgasm of violence, everyone is calm.  Nobody behaves normally, like, oh maybe screaming hysterically.



To defer these preoccupations,  I sauntered out along the Lot to the dam and the lock just upstream from the confluence with the Vert.  It's uncommon to have such clear skies toward sunset so the light was good for taking pictures.  At the confluence, you pass over this brick bridge of course, but I like to backtrack,  to check underneath the bridge once in a while perhaps to find trolls.  Upstream you can see a dam to the right of a small factory.   



The lock is on the right bank of the Lot but the dam stretches across from bank to bank.  This must have been a rapids before the dam and this lock is part of the system that facilitated floating wine barrels and other stuff toward Bordeaux on the Atlantic and then on to rest of the world. 


It's probably obvious to everyone but me how any lock works.   The part I get:  With the downstream gate closed, the upstream gate opens to admit a boat.  This upstream gate is closed behind the boat and the downstream gate opened.  Like an elevator, the boat is lowered calmly to the downstream level without having to worry about white water, sharp rocks, whirlpools, etc.  


The gates are all new, the gears nice and greasy but if you enlarge the photo below you can see the cobwebs because the boating season has not yet started.

 

What I don't ever quite get is why you have to built the dam across the entire river even though the lock itself is extremely narrow.  What a lot of construction work for one narrow passage way.  With a little luck, couldn't you just build the lock and hope enough water would rush in as you open the upstream gate to float your boat?  But of course this would violate all laws of hydrology, serious laws.  And you wouldn't get to hypnotize yourself watching how the glass-smooth upstream suddenly turns into a standing curl of frothing water and half a km stretch of boiling milk.  Standing on the lock looking down you can't help wanting to jump,  to join the boiling molecules.  



Obliteration!




Plus douce qu'aux enfants la chair des pommes sûres, 
L'eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin 
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures 
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin.
Arthur Rimbaud
(Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples is to children,
Green water penetrates my pine hull
And stains of blue wine and vomit
Wash me, wash away rudder and anchor)












Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Mas maury

I took Robert's suggestion and went out to Mas Maury, a  salvage yard in Pescadoires, to have a hunk of iron at 1,20 meters cut for the lintel of the bathroom window.  It was raining.  It almost always rains when I go to this place.  You cross a very long, very narrow one way bridge.  You have to watch your driving and you can't go too slowly because there is inevitably somebody waiting for you to get past.  But your eyes are bugging out when you look down at the wild, chaotic poverty of the gens de voyage, the Roms who live under the bridge in dilapidated caravans and mobile homes.  There's trash all over the place and a doubtful fire smoking away in the rain.

You wind through ancient Pescadoires to scene of equally impressive commercial incoherence.  The yard is all men.  They don't employ even the token woman and, as for the customers,  neither the foreigners nor the French bring along their women, though Mrs Snoutsworthy likes the place and often goes along.  Today the customers were all hardcore artisans, most in blue coveralls, all over the age of 50.  The place is getting neater and neater.  Back where they keep steel of all profiles--I-beam, angles, rounds, squares, all shelved, like with like, it used to be a welter of crappy wood moldings, toppled piles of ceramic tiles, odd crud.  They've even gotten a new saw, water-cooled bandsaw with automatic feed to replace the deafening old chopsaw.

There were two parties in front of me, but it was for me that the old guy who runs the place took off his glove for a handshake, a favor for a regular customer.  We've talked seriously in the past about our two countries, about what matters and what doesn't.  He came to retrieve Francis' gate a year or two back and patiently pulled off all the snails stuck to it.  He called them "inoffensive."

From the office as I waited to pay up,  the big picture windows look out on the motley scene of inanimate worthless stuff--a couple of huge metal lions next to a pile of 40 x 40 exterior tiles, everything agglomerated together in one insensate mass, waiting for somebody to come along and see each one as separate and adorable.  Willing to breath value into them like a modest version of some creation myth.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

infinitude

It was too pretty out yesterday afternoon, the only question was where to take a bike ride.  Sunday I had had a good hike with Dorian near Mauroux (pronounced moh-roucks).  We passed through the phantom village of Orgueil, a strong outpost along the Lot River at the time of the Hundred Years War but completely effaced in the meantime.  Funny name for a town since the word means arrogant pride.  Our ride took us through Lacapelle-Cabenac where we detoured down a dreamy lane between high stone walls to make the annual pilgrimage to Le Repaire d'Orgueil.  This is an ancient house with the cross-shaped windows that date it back to the 14th century at least.  The sign on the gate has it to the 12th century.  We've been going there for a few years, standing on the pedals of the bike to peer over high boxwood hedges to see the wonderful gardens inside.  Unlike many French gardens, this one is a loose progression of intimate environments rather than a rigid, Cartesian plunking down of specimin trees and shrubs in stiff rows and columns.

The name of the house made me imagine severe, proud owners, forbidding noblemen who could freeze your blood with a single glance.  Mrs Snoutsworthy noticed a woman inside the gate making her way slowly on crutches.  "She gave me a big smile when I said hello:  why don't you go talk to her."  Before I knew it we were inside!  We made it inside!  We were walking around the gardens, hearing the names of all the trees, learning that the gorgeous spring used in the old days to water horses yielded water that was unlike most springs, always lukewarm, ideal for horses.  The woman spoke beautiful French, and at a stately pace.  Later her "companion" joined us and he and I talked ghosts and voices from the beyond while Mrs. S and the woman sauntered off to the herb garden.  He suggested I look at the site of "beyonders" at infinitude.  He said they had had a destructive mole that year but he couldn't bear to kill it.  He found a book on moles and learned that they make vast lengths of tunnels, tens of meters in length and can hear from a great distance the sound of a single worm falling into a tunnel.

They invited us to come back and have tea and see the inside of the house sometime.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

You don't have to shout, young man

A few days ago, I heard Obama exulting over the "landmark-health-care-reform" victory.  His cigarette voice firm, sentences clipped and all terminated with the downward note of a skipper giving a heading to the helmsman.  All of a sudden, an unmicrophoned voice from the audience shouted faintly, "What about the public option?"   The big O didn't miss a beat, blamed it on Congress, "We couldn't get it passed in Congers".  The audience member said something else and O replied, "You don't have to shout, young man."

A small incident admittedly, but gleaming with the shrapnel of exploding irony.  Since polls show that most people want a some sort of socialized medical insurance system, wouldn't it kind of make sense for someone in an audience to shout?  The whole health care performance was as hard to interpret as an Eric Romer movie dubbed into Old Norse.  But if you believe Glenn Greenwald  (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/) Obama and the Dems wanted to ditch de-privatizing the health insurance system all along.

The teabaggers make it all even harder to evaluate as they bark so hysterically.  Don't you ever wonder why dogs go completely bonkers when you just innocently walk past their fenced in yard?  Where's the proportionality? And why do their owners tolerate it?  Or if they like it, why don't they just do their own barking?  Why the intermediary?  But back to insurance, if you believe the insurance gangsters got about what they wanted from their legally bribed politicians, you can admire the craftsmanship at least.  They got about thirty million new customers and, better yet, customers who are legally obliged to buy.  But they negotiated the mountain path of socialization so nicely, the wheels of their cart so close to the edge that dislodged pebbles could have provoked landslides.  The question lingering in the air like an uncredited fart, how come we have to pay monopoly-jacked rates, huge profit margins, obscene compensation packages for something we could get for next to nothing under a system of public insurance?

Not that many people here get it that things are not as they seem.  Obama couldn't turn out to be the typical psycho-killer oligarch-loving American president any more than Charlton Heston could play Goebbels.  If his skin color doesn't prove this, just check out his enemies.      

Friday, March 12, 2010

virgin poplars


The thermometer on the window sill broke through my arbitrary barrier of 10° C (=50° F). with a dull sunlight and a north wind that you would hardly notice if you were headed south on your bike.  So I headed south through dear old Albas up the road with lacets switching up the scrubby hillsides with I’m guessing absolutely zero change in grade for the whole 3 or 4 km of the climb to Sauzet.  The same goes for the gorgeous climb up from Caîx to Crayssac.  Who laid out these roads so perfectly?  Was it a graduate of the famous grandes ecoles is the School of Bridges and Highways founded in 1716?  The roadways are so narrow that I need to really pay attention when being passed since my sense of position has been slightly compromised by Old Betsy, my acoustic neuroma.

Mrs Snoutsworthy, she who delights in maps, pulled out the chart even for this ride we’ve both done a hundred times.  Maps which, I must say, are worthy of the well- laid out roads.  You have to see them to believe the detail.  The scale is 1:25,000 and each one covers  9 miles x 12 miles.  One inch = 320 feet.  Best of all, the map notes many house names, lieux dits, and then the lieu dit is often marked with a small road sign too.  This is a wonderful comfort for someone who gets lost in the bathtub.


 


The north wind was cutting my neck on the D45 while I recited Baudelaire’s poem Elevation to distract myself.  But suddenly just before the Chateau de Cousserans there were the Thousand Virgins as I call this grove of poplar trees that is such a fine sight at this time of year, nude, no leaves, the sun low in the west bringing out the roundness and rosyness of their trunks.  They often look virginal, these groves and you see them a lot, usually planted in what might be flood plains, often in odd triangles of left-over property.  I’ve asked a lot of locals what they are for.  Everyone tells me the lumber is basically only good for pallets, though the guy in Goujounac has samples on display of tongue and groove flooring.   The owner’s son shrugged when I asked him if it really makes good flooring.  “It is in fact popular,”  he said.

Someone told me that it was traditional to plant a grove of poplars like this at the birth of a daughter.  By the time she was ready to get married, a paysan would cut it all and sell it and add the proceeds as part of her dowry.    







Thursday, March 11, 2010

Saint Avit



On my way over to Montcabrier on the 811,  someone kept trying to pass me, swerving in and out in my rear view mirror.   My driving often causes this temporary insanity in French drivers where they forget all that they love about life, their little children perhaps, the well-feathered retirement they have in store in not so many years, all forgotten in their obsession to get around this putain de Kangoo going 65 kph (if I’m lucky) in a 90.  How must they be feeling?  Are they enraged?  Or is it more like the irresistable need to square up a picture that is hanging crooked?   When I got to the usual turn-off for Cazes, I decided to ignore the detour sign and give the poor bastard behind me a break.  Halfway up the mountain, a major tree-trimming project forced me to turn back.  And that’s why I ended up going to Montcabrier through Duravel, the way I used to ride my bike over there to work, before the murder.

I think I am used to Le Moulin de Cavart being empty and for the most part, I enjoy being there, at the foot of towering cliffs with caves that were supposedly all inhabited during the Neolithic.  You can’t see the home of the Dutch neighbors for the thick stand of bamboo.  The shop is much as it was when I worked there:  my last, unfinished project, repairing an armoire is still balanced on a bench where I left it  maybe 4 years ago, like Miss Haversham in her wedding dress.  The carp pond looks like hell, clogged with weeds, the water level low, the carp apparently eaten by herons.  I did an inspection of the house maybe just to make myself feel sad.   The shutters that I made and that made Helene happy.  Alix’s room plastered with awful fashion photos from a phase she has undoubtedly outgrown in LA,  Dorian’s floor strewn with millions of little pieces of toys he’s outgrown in just two years.   Eleonore’s room with her strong drawings, the bed I made for her trashed by a small bird that somehow got in and died, feathers all over the place.





On the way back the sign for the “vestiges” of the 11th century church of Saint Avit caught my eye and I decided to make another pilgrimage.   I don’t trust the Kangoo on dirt roads after getting stuck in Floressas, towed out with a tractor.  It’s a pretty lane into a  gnarly oak forest.  Does anybody remember why they built a church exactly there?  Did some narcissitic nobleman make a vow during a battle?  Don’t the slit windows suggest a fortified church?  Did all the farmers run in and hide out during a raid?  And the masons who cut the stones and laid the lauze roof of the apse, were they forced to do this for free or paid a wage?   And by the way, are chunks of lauze apt to fall while I gaze upward taking photos?  





view into the abside.  note the slit window





lauze, dry stone, corbelled , roof of the abside.  If the center stone fell...



And then beyond the material facts, what did anybody get out of this church?  Was it, like my suburban Methodist church (funded by a narcissitic capitalist benefactor), principally a place to socialize and make music?  The only iconography I would make out was at one side of a voute, two figures that I imagine to be Adam and Eve.  They have that horror-struck expression of many primitive Romanesque carvings, the recognition I suppose that sex is so profoundly evil that if you yield you will be driven into exile from paradise.  This is pretty much the message on other rural Romanesque churches I know, such as the far finer one in Besse. 


carving at the base of the arch. (click for a closeup of the sinners)

I’d love to know what bearing this message had on the life of parishoners a thousand years ago.  Did it cause them horrible anxiety and inner conflict?  Or did they regard it as cynical propaganda,  an analog to international terrorism in our day, a way of scaring the children before they go to sleep, giving them bad dreams?  And why is it always Adam and Eve, the Fall?  Why not, say, Cain and Abel, the horror of breaking the taboo on murder?   

update  Francis kindly sent a link to a brief and tantalizing item on the Duravel tourism office web site (here).  Here's my translation: 

"This rustic church served outlying houses in a parish with a population of 200 souls.  The church was constructed beside a spring with curative powers and was also close to an important crossroads.  From its style, the church dates to the 12th century but the foundations of the choir are more ancient still and in the nave,  hewn stones from the 6th century have been found."

I'm eager to go back and look for the healing spring and the crossroads.   And also to try to visualize the forest of twisted oaks as farm land especially now that Stephanie has stumbled across lots of old postcards from Castelfranc and Albas showing fields now overgrown with brush and small gnarly trees.  




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Monday, March 8, 2010

O tempus, o mores

About 10 years ago, the bike trip we took from Avignon to Albi was almost entirely on country roads so tiny that the occasional center line seemed like a visual joke pulled by the road crew.  I swear most of the cars were a lot smaller 10 years ago.  We carried all our camping and cooking stuff,  food, clothing, all reduced to a bare minimum such that when one of the Thermarest sleeping pads failed, we had to go shopping.  Like Rip Van Winkles we briefly ventured onto a couple major highways looking for camping stores in shopping malls.  New sleeping pad bungeed to the back rack, we slammed the door on that madness and pushed on through a world that was pretty much built up by 1860, the stone farmhouses and barns, the orchards, the vineyards.

An article in Basta (http://www.bastamag.net) made me realize how much difference 10 years has made.  First of all, that there IS a Basta, founded in 2005 as a journal about anti-development fights.  And you can find it anywhere in France,  in almost any newspaper store in almost any town of more than a couple thousand inhabitants.  I'm not sure how this distribution system works, but there's nothing like it in the USA where any equally radical viewpoint is relegated to the internet.   You could never find something like  CounterPunch for example at an American airport newspaper stand.  

And second, that Basta is covering the protest movement against the cancer of shopping centers.  "In Toulouse, soon there will be more supermarkets than there are customers."  The tide seems irresistable as we have been noticing around the outskirts of Cahors.  How on earth in this day and age and in the middle of a world-wide financial crisis could they be cutting ribbons on huge new shopping centers?  But they are.   And the cars are relentlessly getting bigger too.

proposed "Gateway to Gascony" shopping center sprawling out to gobble farmland near Toulouse

The developer, a company with American roots, has a bizarre website http://lesportesdegascogne.com/ with splendid pictures of airy, environmentally correct shopping experience (no cars in view, no parking lots, no pollution).  An elegant tickertape runs beneath this revelling in the triumphant facts:  the French high court affirmed a lower court permit, so now it's build, baby, build.

We've changed a lot in 10 years too.  From timid buyers of a sleeping pad at InterSport, we have degenerated to consumers of major appliances, queen-sized beds, building materials all bought at major chain stores in large shopping centers.  

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Choses vues


You'd never know that this picture is shot from the other side of a high chain link fence where someone grazes them like livestock on the ruins of an old vineyard.  This is not to say they aren't still growing a lot of grapes, but we are seeing more and more abandoned vineyards, sometimes with the vines violently ripped up and taken off, sometimes as though the old vintner just departed this life.  Yesterday, hiking around the dolmens and menhirs above Castelfranc, we dropped down into Niaudon and passed several abandoned vineyards.  A little further on, we came to some land I looked at buying a few years back when we despaired of finding an old place we could afford.  That's exactly where I bumped into the wife of the most active  developer/architect/builder in the area whose outraged clients dot our circle of acquaintance.  She was out scouting around for building lots and found these at Niaudon too expensive.  Now the lots are in the process of being built out like any old American suburb, munching away at the farmland that came down through, in this case, perhaps thousands of generations.  
_________________________________________________________________________________



This grandmotherly hutch is like the newest member of our family if they only sold relatives for 200€ at the chain of used furniture stores called Troc.  We had been searching high and low, especially at the huge salvage yard in Pescadoires known as Mas Maury.  How many frigid afternoons had we debated broken down, wormy armoires and buffets, some with sticker prices still expressed in francs.  This one I loved at first sight and it didn't hurt that the great clerk, Yes-Yes. who insisted on using his servicable English found all the door keys and arranged for delivery from Montauban the following Monday.  Yes-Yes.  

The oak in this piece might cost almost the purchase price in the rough.  And then there is the effusive carving.  I'm thinking this was semi-mass produced in the nineteen-thirties.  What about all the carving?  I'm thinking of the row of pantographic pin routers they used at the carving shop next door to my old shop in the South End of Boston:  the American eagle original in the middle and then 6 replicas being automatically mimicked to the left and to the right.  One slip of the grinder and you had 12 broken feathers.  So somewhere along the line there were boxes full of this floral oakwork ready to be glued on here and there.    



It appears to have its original finish which suggests pride and weekly oil and elbow grease by the imaginary grandmother.   



Such musings naturally lead to wondering about the other people who have lived in this house.  Francis introduced me to a cheerful young guy of North African origins I would say.  He partly grew up in this house and was a bit amazed to see how we have turned it upside down.   He used to sneak out the back window to make a quick getaway from his mother.

Before his time, the house belonged to the Miran family, one with deep roots here to judge by the Castelfranc cemetary and the fact that there's a hamlet off toward Crayssac called Miran.   These Mirans were apparently furniture makers and good ones too, according to the old lady whose family used to own the house next door.  She said she played in his workshop among the Louis XIV reproductions.  The last Miran here committed suicide.   She said the house was originally build by a river captain who just rolled barrels of wine down to the shore for the bateliers to float down to Bordeaux.  








Wednesday, February 24, 2010

marché aux truffes







We had to go to Cahors anyway to get stuff for the house, so we took Philippe up on his urging that we visit the truffle market at Lalbenque.  I had never seen a truffle until Philippe pulled a bunch out of the fridge.  I guess he stores them atop eggs with the idea of grating them into omelettes.  In the event, we made a pitstop at "Le Juge", the home of Kim and Denis in Fontanes.     Kim had left for a marathon day teaching in Toulouse despite her bad cold while Denis was left to juggle Daisy, also sick, with making us one of the omlettes he is famous for.








Lalbenque, the epicenter of the truffle world, is just a few kilometers away from Fontanes so we got there in plenty of time.   This is not a market with stands and awnings as almost every town of any size has once a week.  In this market, truffle vendors line up behind rough counters, planks on sawhorses.  The truffle-mad public is kept a meter or so at bay by a long rope until the market formally opens.  During this pre-market phase, you go up to the rope and look at the tiny baskets of turd-like mushrooms.  Now an then a vendor will actually pull back the handkerchief to reveal the contents or even pass the basket across the divide to be sniffed.



It was a pretty good-sized crowd especially since the hot summer made for a poor crop of truffles.  I heard the price was around 1,000€ per kilo (I think that works out to $33 per ounce vs gold at $28 or so)  The official poster sets out the rules:  no excess dirt to pad the weight, no truffles damaged by frost or rot. Minimum weights for the two grades.  


It seemed like a lot of the crowd was there for the "folklore" as Philippe had put it when encouraging us to go.  In fact, we bumped into Philippe's brother and two sisters-in-law

You had to work to get pictures where most of the crowd wasn't taking pictures of the crowd.  After we came home, I looked up other tourists' blogs and they all looked the same:  straight-faced peasants ranged behind their crude counters waiting for the market to formally open.  

I couldn't work out the commercial end of this at all.  There were no price tags, no observable haggling.  At two-thirty they dropped the rope and there was an explosion of chatter and movement.  My view of the scene was totally blocked by aggressive tourists vying for good pictures.  I didn't even see any money change hands.  Just this one young woman, when she wasn't smooching with her boyfriend, working something out on a calculator.
Before long, her father wandered over to an accurate-looking digital scale for what looked like an official weighing of his tiny basket of mushrooms.  

There were also a couple of vendors up the street selling mainly oak saplings that had been "infected" with the truffle microspores.  One of them told me that when the phylloxera epidemic wiped out the vineyards in the middle and late 1800s, a lot of vintners turned to trufficulture to survive.  An old woman in Fages had told us the same thing last year.  This vendor told us that even the cultivated truffieres required a trained dog for "cavage", searching out the mature truffle underground.  You can use pigs too, but he said pigs will eat the truffles unless you jab them in the mouth with a sharp stick!  This is not a problem with dogs who receive a different reward.  It's striking that the French, like the Americans, are almost universally tender-hearted toward their Fifi's but completely indifferent to their pigs. 

Here, for the record, are the obligatory fine faces from the crowd.  Cue Casting Central!  

               

On the way back through Cahors, we rejoined the normal modern world of shopping for stuff with price tags.  We found door handles and curtain rods at Cahors Decor and paid with an American credit card because the exchange rate has been improving.  









Saturday, February 20, 2010

mique au petit salé

l'ardoise

The lunch menu might be a little hard to make out:   soup,  duck liver paté,  mique,  petit salé,  a chunk of Camembert, and a fruit salad.  If this is not what you are in the mood for,  you can go eat somewhere else.   But all of the 44 seats were reserved in advance which is why "complet" ("sold out") is scrawled across the menu in pink chalk.

I went over at half past seven when I saw from my own kitchen window the lights in the restaurant kitchen.  
le petit salé, soaking

Someone had already put out the petit salé, salted pork ribs, in water at least overnight to reduce the saltiness.   The unheated kitchen was immaculate and even on a chilly morning it was a lot more inviting than any dusty old woodworking shop I could ever remember working in.  On the other hand, there were 44 people who were going to be very hungry at 12 noon;  it didnt bear thinking about,  what they would do if we screwed up or ran late. 

      
Mique for 50

Marcel, who until last July worked in public relations in the next departement over,  was setting out the ingredients for the mique like a well-organized efficient professional who had always cooked for a living:  white flour, eggs, salt, yeast.  The yeast he weighed out precisely on a scale.  

Mique is essentially an egg bread that is cooked by boiling in vegetable broth.   It's a local-regional dish with variants that seem to run almost from town to town.  In the Dordogne, they serve individual little round balls of mique for example while here in this part of the Lot they make a loaf and serve big slices. 

When the yeast was proofed, Marcel spread out enough flour on the stainless steel table for three big loaves of mique and began breaking eggs into a hollow in the pile of flour.  He added the yeast and water.  It wasn't yet 8 am and, looking at the mass of eggy flour he smiled and said, "Now comes  the disagreable part." 


désagréable

Like with challah dough, the stickiness from the eggs diminishes after a while and then you just knead.  It was cold in the kitchen and I welcomed the heavy exercise of kneading. They got the recipe they use from an old woman who they said was very stressed out doing them a demonstration mique for fear it would fail to rise. 


       
empêtré en pétrant

Before too long, Philippe showed up and it would be unkind to mention here that he had overslept, as he said, for only for the third or fourth time in his life,  particulary unkind in light of the fact that he is always insinuating that I am a slacker when really I am just too darn busy most mornings to remember to open the shutters much before 9am.   No, all of this I must pass over in silence.


Philippe brings out the heavenly mousse de canard


The three loaves of mique rise near the radiator at the back of the restaurant, as it is only 50°F or so in the restaurant.  

Meanwhile, Philippe pulls out a crate of carrots and turnips and a burlap sack of potatoes for me to wash and peel.  He cleans and chops cabbage for the soup, boils the petit salé / pork ribs,  tweaks the thermocouple on a reluctant stove burner,  sets two big pots of broth to boil to cook the mique, and answers one phone call after another.  All this time Marcel is helping with the stove and putting together a really well balanced and delicious fruit salad for dessert. 




Before too long, the dough has risen and it's time to toss the mique into the huge pots of boiling broth.  The only way to avoid collapsing the dough is all at once to just give the basket the old heave ho into the boiling water.  There's scalding water all over the place which requires alert backpedaling by the hurler.  There is no graceful alternative.  

Philippe takes the time to describe the truffle market at Lalbenque and to encourage us to go see it next Tuesday, "not to buy, just to absorb the folklore."He brings out the restaurant's own stash of truffles, set atop some eggs in the fridge.   He says that at 1,000€ per kilo, this handful of truffles might be worth around 400€.  What an aroma. 

All of a sudden, it's time for the restaurant staff to have a quick bite before the hungry mobs descend.  Here's the petit salé:

   


And here's the mique: 




and the complete  dish prepared for the client with cabbage soup broth on top and a big carrot, turnip, and potato: