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.

Pilgrimage between the seas

Where traditional pilgrims on the ancient Compestella routes visit cathedrals in order to be stunned by their hugeness or by tiny relics, pieces of saints or of their crosses, we visit a certain prison in Agen. Here are no relics that I know of, probably no saints either, only Helene who lives there as though in suspended animation while the wheels of French justice slowly grind out a decision about her ultimate sentence.  It was also rainy last year when we visited;  the walls themselves weep as we pass our own brief sentence waiting before an anonymous doorway with its buzzer button and small fisheye camera.  Visitors must spend a half-hour or so there for no apparent reason watching ordinary deliveries or else the odd prisoner with hands cuffed behind his back, joking with his captors, one of the cops firmly holding the chain between the handcuffs and then all three them disappearing into the court building just across the street.  Getting into the visitors' room meant going through about the same amount of security as at the airport.  This time I wasn't made to check my shoes and wear disgusting prison slippers.   Between the drive to Agen and back and the pre-visit waiting period,  about three hours are consumed.  The visit itself is a mere half hour and it goes very fast.  The guards are smiling and affable, like friends and I think they may have spotted us five or ten minutes extra.

Afterward, we decided to detour through Golfech and Moissac along the complex waterways of the Garonne and Tarn rivers, tracked by the Canal du Midi and a lateral canal all of which somehow connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea and are thus known as the Canal des deux mers.   We had seen the plumes of the cooling towers for years from miles around but never driven past.

At last, the end of our pilgrimage, once again we beheld the ancient abbey of Moissac.  (All the Abbey photos courtesy of Adrian Fletcher, http://www.paradoxplace.com)  

This tympanum is the best!  The god guy is such a psycho power monger that the row of little you's and me's underneath appear like from a dream of Laurel and Hardie, with their slightly-too-big heads, craning and the loving detail of the legs and laps, all different.

Here's the story of Lazerus, sick and starving, dying, a dog licking his sores as the rich neighbors refuse his pleas and continue pigging out.  Sound familiar?

 

Probably the most famous and incandescent of all the figures, the prophet Jeremiah:

1, rue St Roch

Hand made hemp cord lying on a sketch of the Castelfranc bastide (10), the Lot river (3), and the promontories, Pech des Fourches (4) and Pech du Vert (8(

It was a bad moment getting on the cattle car of a small jet on the first leg of the trip to Castelfranc, Burlington to Washington, DC. Ceilings so low many of us had to bend our necks. This added to my sense of unsteadyness brought on by Betsy, as I have named the non-malignant tumor on my ear nerve. To keep claustrophobic panic at bay, I immediately withdrew into an alternative ipod world. I was just getting into La-bas si j'y suis, my favorite French radio program, when the unsmiling flight attendant made me shut it off. I didn't think of objecting or even asking for a reason why. Or even bleating like a sheep.

It was still hard to get the incident at security: a young man standing in the designated footprints drawn on the floor with his arms outstretched like a Jesus in Abu Graib while he answered polite questions. All I could catch was, "Do you want to bring a witness?" He answered "No, that's ok" like he didn't want to cause them any further fuss. He was taken to the side and a hospital type screen was whipped around him. The rest of us all pretended it wasn't happening.

In any case, it seem uncivilized to ignore the woman sitting next to me even though she was occupied weaving a basket. She was an ethnobotanist working in Vermont for a California organization of some kind and on her way to see her bosses at the mother ship. She had a thick photo album of objects made with vegetation, gourds, and especially baskets many of which were in museums. She showed me how to braid cordage by taking the rightmost of three strands, twisting the hemp fibers to the right, then winding that same twisted piece to the left. I think. The result is that when you let go of the braid, it doesnt tend to unwind. She uses basket weaving to teach prisoners in South Burlington about geometry and arithmetic. She says it requires three P's: perseverence, patience, practice. Soon the landing was announced and the woman noted that I had probably had the most pleasant 2 hours of the trip in spite of my looming claustraphobia. She was right.

terrasse, delayed by scattered showers

It rained off and on all day long, sunshine, then hard rain, a cycle every half hour or so.  You can watch them pour in from downstream, from Fumel, the storm clouds.  So when Robert showed up,  he decided to set up a welding shop indoors.  But first Robert had to drive to Fumel to report in to his parole officer.  I took the opportunity to bone up in Wikipedia about concrete, rebar and welding.  I watched hilarious UTube welding episodes where a guy with a big gut and probably a big heart sincerely described welding, using terms like puddle and spatter and scratching that meant little to a virgin like me.  Then he pulled down his welding helmet, the screen exploded with the supernova of an arc welder, and the teacher mumbled incomprehensibly from behind his helmet, drowned out by the zapping of the arc welder. 

First we used another of Robert's incredibly specialized machines to bend hooks at either end of the short rebar sections.

 

 These will serve to hold the rebar even with the middle of the thickness of the concrete.  Wikipedia told me that rebar is wonderful when planted deeply inside concrete:  it expands and contracts with temperature just like concrete does and better yet, the lime in concrete reacts with the steel to form a corrosion resistant film.  At least that's what I remember. 

Then it was time to weld the shorter hooked pieces at 8" intervals to the longer pieces to form a grille.  Robert sought the advice of  Christien, a mechanical engineer who works at the junkyard, Mas Moury.  He recommended two layers of welded mesh, perfectly spaced within the thickness of a 4" slab of concrete.  Neither Robert nor I could think of a decent way to keep the two layers perfectly spaced while pouring cement on them and probably walking on them as well.  I imagined yanking them up constantly and relying really on dumb luck.  This rebar is 10mm (3/8") and much stiffer than mesh.  

I had actually checked that this whole grill would make it out of the door, even if at a diagonal.

 

 Here's about how it looks at the moment under the tarp.  It's raining like crazy and the tarp is getting little wholes in it from being pulled on and off so many times.   Lots of water is dripping into the bathroom below.   Now all I need to do is finish the forming in front.  And pray for clear weather. 

 

terrasse, continued

The breaking of the glass

Next step is pulling out the old wire-reinforced glass.  Surprise, surprise:  it was double-glazed all along.  It came out without much effort.  Then I used the big grinder with a metal cutting blade to cut the frame down into managable pieces which I hauled off to Mas Moury in nearby Pescadoires.  All the guys over there have odd little ironic smiles.  The old man, André, owns the place and quite a lot of Pescadoires to boot.  The guy in the office is a civil engineer who used to do big steelworking contracts in foreign countries.  He gave me a whole euro for the metal and I bought another sheet of plywood and some more rebar:  Mrs Snoutsworthy decided the terrasse needed to be widened by the width of one window frame.  

The cutting of the groove

Next step is chopping a channel into the the far (railway embankment) wall to support the other end of the slab.  I ventured out with the gas powered grinder machine at 10 am on a Sunday and fired through the layout groove.  

A bit dusty...

I started on the channelling with a small jackhammer but soon found myself on the way to Robert's house to get the next bigger one.

Next step:  cleaning out the groove,  dropping the window, forming the end.

Starting the terrasse

Now with the time running low, I am finally in a position to begin the dreaded terrasse project.  

Overview

1, Chemin St Roch, 46140 Castelfranc used to look out on the river from both ground and second floors until they built a railroad on this side of the river to bring coal from Decazeville in the eastern Lot Department to the steel mills in Fumel, west of Castelfranc.  To prevent steep inclines which locomotives cannot climb, they evened out the grade by building up an embankment at the back of our house which blocked the entire first floor.  They left, however, a space 

of about 2 meters between the exterior wall of the house and the wall of the embankment.  

The long-time former owners of the house, the Miran family, headed by a fine furniture maker, covered over the space between the exterior wall of the house and the embankment wall, installed slanted wire-reinforced glass, like in a factory,  to bring in light and keep out rain, and built a bathroom in the newly-created living space.  My project is to remove this glass for half the width of the house and replace it with a concrete slab for a terrasse.

Step one, cut a channel in the house wall

Cut a channel in the stone wall of the house to receive and support one side of the concrete slab.  The channel is about 6" thick by about 6" deep. 

Robert was worried that the channel would compromise the floor joists in the main bedroom cut into and supported by the other side of the wall.   We used his infinitely groovy 2-piece, radar-based tool 

to see through the wall and tell us where the bottom of beams were in relation to the channel.  It also read out the thickness of the wall:  56 to 59 cm = about 2 feet thick!  The top of the channel on the bathroom side of this wall was exactly at the level of the bottom of the joists on the bedroom side.  We therefore put in an oak beam supported by two steel columns to support the floor joists and thus prevent the tile floor upstairs from cracking.   

(The oak beam used to be a floor joist in the spare bedroom where you now walk on click-clack flooring on a concrete slab.)

The channel

To cut a channel in a stone wall, you make two straight sawcuts marking the top and bottom of the channel and then jackhammer out the material between.  I anchored a wood band the proper distance below a chalk line marking the bottom cut

and used Robert's brand new gasoline powered grinder 

with a diamond blade, running its rollers along the wood band.  It was a lot like using a very large chainsaw that shoots a blast of lime mortar, calcaire stone, and brick dust into your face.  Every foot or so the dust in the air became so thick I couldn't see my line and had to retreat to the street to watch out for Chat Charmant wait for the dust to settle.  

The jackhammering took most of the day. 

The composition of these stone walls is called "tout va" (anything that comes).  There are solid calcaire stones at the corners as well as a few salted in in the middle.  Otherwise, the stones are small with lots of soft limestone mortar filling in the gaps.  As you progress toward the middle of the wall, you run into brick, gravel, crud, lunchbags from the 1700s (not really).   The real stones went deep, some of them, so I was glad we had supported the other side of the wall by shoring up the joists.

Next, I set a cleat on the outside wall position the form plywood accurately and then cut this plywood to serve as the bottom of the form.  Cutting in anything large, like plywood, in this house requires checking diagonals and a little forelock pulling because no two walls are parallel or perpendicular to one another.  I would give a lot to know why.  It just didn't seem to matter to anyone.  Well, stone walls aren't built with plywood so when you build an interior wall, I guess you just sneak up to each side with relatively small stones and the wonders of mortar, bricks, and lunchbags for filler.        

When we demolish the glass windows tomorrow,  I will slather hydrofuge on the plywood in hopes that it won't be impregnated with concrete and rendered unusable for anything else.  

Finally the oak floor joists support and level the plywood form.  I like these French jacks very much-- practical and so ingenious their inventor deserves an article in wikipedia.   

Stay tuned for Step Two:  demolish the glass;  form and pour the concrete.