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 11^th 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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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.  

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.  

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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.  

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.  

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:

   

mique au petit salé (la veille)

Tomorrow morning early I will be learning how to make a mique au petit salé across the street at Le Restaurant au Pont.  They serve this at noon time once every week or so and each time the place is packed.  Cars and especially panel trucks aren't really parked outside as much as they are just abandoned by the very hungry.  Not that they also don't get a lot of customers for the regular lunches.  At noon there is only one meal on the menu but it's substantial:  soup, main course, cheese, dessert.   That's the way a lot of restaurants are around here.  Then they have a regular menu with lots of choices at night.  The lunches are very democratic:  as many expensive cars as rusty little camionettes.

I'm still not sure what to expect of this mique thing.   According to Philippe, it's not only a Southwestern France thing, it's got local variants for Quercy, the Bouriane, etc.  Some serve little individual balls of this bread-like mique,  others big round loaves as in this picture, still others coils.  The recipes I've seen on line call for flour, yeast, eggs cooked in broth.  I think.   The petit salé is some kind of pork, salted.  Vegetables surround the whole thing.

I asked Philippe what gives with the big crowds and he said that not that many people take the time to make this ultra-traditional dish at home anymore.  My standard of comparison could only be my mother's chicken dumplings stew which I'm not sure I'd even like any more but which all my siblings are nostalgic about.

I'm very pleased to have been invited.  I've been looking for a pretext for hanging out with  Philippe and Marcel and seeing them in action and would have settled for peeling potatoes.   In order to get answers to my many curiosities:  how can they like their work so much?  what did Marcel do before abruptly changing careers?  How in this country where people study for years in order to learn the fine art of waiting tables can a couple guys suddenly figure out how to run a restaurant?

Chaource

Appearance:  crust white, rich and regular, lightly reddish tint;  interior fine and smooth, white throughout

Texture:  rich creamy, supple but not runny

Aroma:   scent of mushrooms and cream

Taste: mild and fruity flavor, hazelnut accentuated by a hint of acidity.  

(I like the French version better than my English translation)

  

Syndicat de Défense du Chaource

A l'oeil : croûte à fleur blanche, riche et régulière, à légère pigmentation rougeâtre ; pâte fine et lisse d'un blanc homogène.

Au toucher :pâte onctueuse, souple sans mollesse.

Au nez : légère odeur de champignon et de crème.

Au goût : saveur douce et fruitée de noisette relevée par une petite pointe d'acidité.

You can buy this cheese in supermarkets, boutiques, markets, just about anywhere around here.  It's not at all expensive, not the ones I've found.  It's made in only a few places up north.  It comes in rounds three or four inches in diameter, wrapped in a waxy paper.  I think the containers are small because it doesn't keep all that well.  That's more of a theory since we both love it and it disappears quickly.

That's what I can say for sure since this cheese keeps changing as it spends more time out of the refrigerator.  It's modest and simple when cold, firm, Protestant in a way.  It becomes more and more Catholic, if that makes any sense, as it warms up.   Its parts divide into a trio, the wonderfully rubbery crust, the gooey layer just inside and the firmer, cream-cheesey interior.