Early March Quercy Blossom

Early March and spring rushes in to relieve the chill of a long, hard winter. My almond trees are spreading their delicate petals to the seeping warmth and the Rosemaries have suddenly exploded into a riot of pale blues. The sun is hot now, despite the still-cool air, hot enough to eat lunch outside – and on the spreading pavements and boulevards of Cahors that is exactly what they have been doing.
Outside one of my favourite cafes – just beside Gambetta’s statue – a party of English tourists noisily settled into a large table for eight, excitedly rustling their maps and expressing wonder at the glories of the architecture. Dressed in pale creams and beige linen, newly streaked hair perfectly groomed, they pushed their up-to-the-minute shades into their hair and looked expectantly at Florian. He was busy juggling beers for a pair of regulars, stopped en route to the bar to kiss my ears, and shimmied in without seeming to notice his suddenly expanding clientele. Long years of experience.
I settled down in a pale shaft of sunlight with La Depeche and the under-waiter. He’s too young and perhaps too shy for a kiss, but he always shakes my hand and asks tenderly after my health. I ordered my omelette fromage, succumbed to a glass of rosé and sat back to breathe in the exquisite sensations of spring in the south of France.
Back on the table for eight they were reading the menu and discussing the possibility of ordering a bavette.
‘I think it’s some kind of omelette,’ said a man in sandals and a foppish bow-tie, ‘you know, one with bits in it.’
I smiled, sipped my wine and enjoyed the hustle and bustle of early season.
My omelette arrived, fat, moist, oozing with melted cheese and garnished with enough lettuce to feed a family of rabbits for a week. I lost track of progress on the other table for a while. I was hungry, the sun was warm on my back and life was to be enjoyed.
A tramp with four dogs, five dreadlocks and a disarming expression wandered through the tables and stopped at our party begging for enough money for bread – by which he meant tobacco. There was a general rustle of pockets and purses, a few ‘well really’s’ and he wandered on his way, well pleased.
I had finished my lunch and was sipping my coffee by the time they had finished their aperitifs and ordered their repast, it was one o’ clock and I was due to meet my son from the Lycée. At that moment the phone vibrated against my thigh and he hove into view on the other side of the fountain. I ordered another coffee and naughtily consumed my square of chocolate – two more months before bikini weather. Alexander shook hands with Florian and slid into the chair opposite me, just as the lady with the beige silk top waved imperiously for attention. Lucien skated out with the extra coffee, shook hands, and deposited it with a practised flourish and a ‘voila m’sieur,’ then disappeared into the heaving restaurant.
‘Well really’, said the lady in the beige silk top.
The market was packing up as my son and I arrived back at the car. Great crates of early season spinach and a few bunches of the prized globe radish jostled the last of the cabbages and cauliflowers, that’s it for the winter staples; we won’t see them again for another eight months. Soon it will be all thumb-size courgettes, slender young haricots verts and tiny, tender carrots. The asparagus is waiting in the wings and so are the early strawberries, the famous, fragrant Garriguette, queen of the strawberry tribe.
One sweet kiss from her scarlet lips transports you straight to the south.

© Amanda Lawrence 2010

So if it rains in August this year, my mind will take a positive leap forwards to the cold days of late winter and the promise of delectable feasts to come.

Anne-Marie Walters

The inspiring tale of one woman’s war.

Anne-Marie Walters was a mere twenty years old when she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and secretly dropped by parachute into occupied south-west France one freezing, moonlit night in January 1944. Life as a secret agent seemed to suit the indomitable courage of this remarkable young woman. She became a courier on the WHEELRIGHT circuit, carrying messages, arranging escape routes for British airmen and living in daily fear of exposure. Then, just when liberation seemed to be truly on the horizon, she was ordered over the Pyrenees to Spain – on foot. No mean feat even in peacetime. And unlike so many of her SOE colleagues – for so long the unsung heroines of WWII, captured, appallingly tortured and eventually shot by the Nazis – Walters survived to tell the tale. She wrote this vivid, ebullient account of her life as ‘Paulette’, living clandestinely among the gallant French Resistance, immediately after the war. Through these pages she takes you with her on her breath-taking adventure, sharing her joys and her sorrows, and appreciating the nail-biting drama all the more because you know that when the last page has been turned she at least made it safely back over the white cliffs.

First published in 1946, this new edition includes notes by David Hewson, who identifies many of the characters behind the pseudonyms. It also includes a great many photographs. A beautiful book and a thoroughly absorbing read.

Published by Moho Books RRP £13.99

© Amanda Lawrence 2010

Order now from Amazon

A Frosty Walk In The Woods

Welcome to the freezing Quercy in deep mid-winter. Today marks Epiphany and the end of the festive season. It’s the end of puddings and pies and Buche de Noel, the end of Bing for another year, and the start of a new life for our Norwegian spruce in the little copse behind the old orchard. Much as I look forward to the hustle and bustle of Christmas every year, I look forward even more to this.
Outside the temperatures are dropping, a scattering of snow ices the view from my window and more is forecast. The deserted vines are no more than marching ranks of tangled wire. The oaks have finally shed their leaves and a six-inch carpet swathes the forest floor. Morning walks have taken on an eerie quality, apart from the odd creaking bough, the woods are absolutely silent. Scarlet rosehips dangle like forgotten Christmas baubles right in my path and the acid-green of an early hellebore catches the eye. Deer pick their way cautiously through this newly exposed landscape, a sudden scuffle and a hare shoots out from under my heels and bounds off into the distance. He’s a big one, standing his ears would reach my thigh. There have been rumours of other rather less benign animals too. Late one evening driving along the narrow, serpentine road that winds up from lovely Albas, a huge, shaggy, grey creature streaked across the road in front of the headlights, its distinctive tail disappearing into the trees on the far side. Too big for a dog, what else could it be? There are wolves in the mountains of the Auvergne, a hundred and fifty kilometres away, but not in the Quercy. Or are there? One hundred and fifty kilometres isn’t really very far, I mused nervously to myself, and that’s the road route. It may only be a hundred by wolf-track. Hmmm. I resolved to carry a stout stick on my solitary walks.
Back in the relative tameness of my garden, beneath their protective covering of oak leaves and snow, spring bulbs are already beginning to appear. I deliberately scuffed the ground under a large copse of oaks, to find a mass of tete-a-tete narcissus poking hopefully through and the fat juicy tips of a scented spread of blue hyacinths. Hope in its most delicious form.
Meanwhile something else in its most delicious form is steaming on the back of my wood-burning stove. Onions. I bought five kilos for little over a euro in the market and bore them home in triumph. A vast iron casserole sits heavily beside the blackened stove pipe containing a kilo of onions, a few cloves of garlic caramelised and melted in olive oil and butter, a slosh of white wine and a sprinkling of herbs - rosemary and bay today – followed by a few litres of stock. On the slab sits a large rustic loaf, like a collapsed football. It’s a Croustilot, pride of the Lotois boulangers – this is as local as it gets. The wheat is grown in the Lot, ground in the Lot and the bread is baked with a sourdough by the artisan boulangers of the region. It’s good, beautiful, flavourful and as tough and chewy as your grandmother’s handbag. But saw it into sizeable chunks and crisp it on the hob beside the casserole – I hesitate to use the word crouton, it’s too poncey for this dish – float the crispy pieces on top of the liquid, top with grated gruyere and allow to simmer for just a few minutes whilst you warm some good, deep bowls, and you will find the uncrackably hard bread has swollen and mellowed into into an exquisite, comforting concoction.
French onion soup, the only thing to have on a cold day.

Toulouse Christmas Market

It’s official, I have become a bumpkin!  Five years of rural French living have squeezed the sophistication out of me, like toothpaste from the tube, almost without my noticing.  It was brought to my attention with blinding clarity one wet chilly Tuesday in late December.

It all began with a request to Santa for an LBD for Christmas.  The old boy deputed one his elves – heavily disguised as the beloved – to escort me to the metropolis, wine me, dine me and buy me something wildly gorgeous.  The metropolis in our case is Toulouse.  Sophisticated, rose-pink and undeniably youthful – it was a bit of a shock.  The city centre was heaving, people were moving en masse like a nest of chic ants.  Every sleek, soignée girl had knee-high shiny boots.  Mine were ankle-length and a tad dusty.  Every man was cool to the point of boredom and well under twenty-five.  Mine was harassed, fifty and a tad dusty.  Hmmm. I mused, slightly appalled at the yawning gulf between the two, time for a change of lifestyle.

We stopped for a coffee-break in a well-packed café, bursting at the seams with students on holiday and the young of the Midi preparing for Christmas.  I took serious stock of the situation.  Sleek and soignée.  Well I could do that, a haircut and six months in a beauty salon might produce soignée.  Sleek could be a bit tricky.   I’d have to take up jogging…  And carry on with those sit-ups and all that jazz.  But I could then get myself some long, elegant boots – or perhaps not because it would be summer by this time – et voila!  The man-thing would be harder.  Harassment could be cured easily enough, and I could perhaps give him a bit of a brush down, buy a new t-shirt – which he won’t wear.  But fifty?  Well I could either trade him in for a newer, sportier model or spruce him up a bit – go-faster stripes, that sort of thing.  I looked across the two feet of shiny chrome, where the object of the exercise was communing with his mobile – now that was pretty cool – and stole a quick appraising glance.  Perhaps I should get him waxed for Christmas?

Frosted Juniper

Strong northerly winds have swept the vines bare, the temperatures are dropping fast and outside my warm kitchen snow is falling. The prickly junipers and rosemaries on our rocky hillside, that in summer hang so grimly on to their precious water resources in searing tropical heat, are now half frozen and veiled with white. The Mediterranean pines are beginning to look like the marches of the Arctic Circle.

Winter has arrived in the Quercy.

In the fields sheep huddle in their winter woolly jumpers. A lone donkey watched me nonchalantly as I walked swiftly past – snowflakes gathering on his eyelashes – he stood there patiently waiting for the storm to pass, he’s a wise old beast and he’s seen it all before. I could spy a familiar figure toiling in the distance. Monsieur the elder was pruning his vines. Why now? I wondered for the hundredth time, why do they wait until the weather is cold enough to freeze a bowl of soup in thirty seconds? I really must enquire one day. As I neared his vineyard it rather looked as if I was going to get the chance, he spotted me, and came wading, waist-deep through the immaculate ranks.

‘Beh, ma belle!’ He greeted me affectionately, removing his beret and preparing to scratch my cheeks. As I gingerly pushed back my swathes of wrappings to receive his enthusiastic embrace I noticed his worn shirt and waistcoat, reinforced with just a light jacket. He wasn’t even wearing gloves. He is well into his nineties and as fit as any man around. They breed them tough in these parts.

Jamie Oliver in Cahors Market

Salut! And welcome to the beautiful Quercy in ankle-deep autumn.
It may officially be winter elsewhere, but here in this incredibly mild year, autumn clings on. The oaks, reluctant as always to surrender their leaves, are a splendid rusty brown and after every wind, a fresh layer of leaves means the forest floor disappears completely. It’s mushroom time, and my kitchen table is permanently coated with learned tomes on the edible – and otherwise – fungi of Europe. Fortunately I also have a couple of mushroom-guru friends who help separate the delicious from the deadly. Pharmacies will help too, but they’re cautious to the point of condemning everything but those you knew anyway. My gurus are better, and I now have a satisfying string of Clitocybe Geotropa drying gently above the wood burning stove in my kitchen, not to mention a good crop of Tricholoma Terreums and Shaggy Ink Caps growing in the garden. Of course a few mushrooms are great for a risotto and the bee’s knees for an omelette or to add to a casserole, but they don’t exactly keep body and soul together. To that end I hared into Cahors market this morning, early for once to the immense surprise of my favourite stall holder.

‘Mon dieu!’ He exclaimed, grabbing the stalk of curly kale that naturally I would require. ‘What’s happened?’ I explained that my daughter was doing her ‘stage’ – work experience – and I had to get back to Castelfranc in time to pick her up for lunch. He nodded, losing interest in the issue, and said mysteriously, ‘There is a man here, filming. I think he is English, maybe you know him? Look, he’s up there!’ Good grief, I thought, but managed not to say, that’s like saying, ‘Oh, you live in London, do you know John Smith?’ So I nodded vaguely, bought some wonderfully crisp radis noir and a vast bag of spinach and prepared to wander off in search of some fruit. ‘Look, look,’ encouraged my excitable friend, ‘they’re filming with television cameras!’ They were. As I burrowed around in a copious tub of apples I spotted the unmistakable oversized furry caterpillar that signals a sound man. It has happened before of course. Cahors is a beautiful place, an ancient place and who wouldn’t want to come to the market? My thought-train was interrupted by the arrival of the resident muscle, armed with a large basket. Now I could buy some parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, not to mention a top-up of beautifully fat chestnuts. We piled the basket to dangerously overflowing as usual, and the beloved went off to stash it in the car while I hunted down the glossiest chestnuts. I chose a stall right on the edge of the market, opposite the chic sausage man. I haggled a bit, and hummed and hawed a bit, then bought a couple of kilos and waffled on about the dry summer, until a cough behind me made me turn.
‘Come and meet my wife,’ the beloved was saying, as I handed over a handful of coins. I thanked the garrulous stall-holder, resisted his holly-and-mistletoe sales pitch, and looked up into the familiar blue eyes of Jamie Oliver.
Five years of formal French greetings have made me a trifle conservative. ‘Ooh-errr, good morning,’ I mumbled with typical eloquence, holding out my hand.
‘Hello darlin’,’ replied the high priest of British cuisine.
We chatted, well Jamie chatted, I uttered a stream of gibberish. He asked about our life here, I thought it prudent not to ask about his life there… and of course he is as natural and friendly as he’s always portrayed. So after an exchange of business cards, he and his furry caterpillar film crew went their way and we went ours. Then I pottered over to satisfy the curiosity of my curly-kale-and-spinach friend.
‘Ah yes, do you know heeem then?’
‘Well, yes. He’s a famous chef in England, Jamie Oliver.’
‘Jammy Liver?’
‘Well, not quite, but close enough. They’re making a cookery series for British television.’
‘Ah! ‘He nodded wisely, ‘This I knew of course. You are good cook no? Maybe he do a little with you?’
‘Well no,’ I laughed at the idea of the great Jamie cooking on Cruella. ‘I don’t think so. When I say famous, I mean VERY famous, like Michel Roux or Paul Bocuse – but a bit younger. He’s made several television series, written several books and has a string of restaurants.’
‘Non!’ His eyes drifted in the direction of the departing camera crew.
‘Jammy Liver eh?’
So, if you’re reading this, Jammy, sorry – Jamie. Have a great time in this fabulous little corner of France – and it was lovely to meet you, darlin’.

Autumn Vines

Welcome to deep, deep autumn in the rain-washed Quercy.
In years to come people will talk about the long hot summer of 2009 and remind one another that it truly lasted from April to October. But it’s November now and the bitter Northern winds have swept across the landscape, turning the shivering vines scarlet and bringing driving rain in their wake. For the first time in my life I really don’t mind. The countryside is parched and gasping, wells and waterholes have been dry for months and the gardens are in desperate need of a good drink. Meanwhile the autumn pruning has been done, winter wood has been cut and stacked and all the leftovers piled high on the bonfire. The last of the wild harvests have been gathered too. Pinecones for the fire – pinecones make superb fire lighters – are piled in six capacious boxes on the lower terrace. Walnuts, still wet and unctuous, wait to be moved inside to dry out for the year, quinces await the preserving pans and bags of fat, glossy chestnuts will be roasted, peeled – what a fiddly job that is – and frozen for Christmas.
In my steamy kitchen, the wood-fired stove (Cruella, for those of you who’ve read White Stone Black Wine) is puffing gently to herself in the corner; a small cauldron of caramelised onion soup simmers slowly on her accommodating hob, filling the immediate vicinity with tummy-gnawing aromas. Rain slaps against the window panes and fogs drift across the hills masking the shimmering vineyards. But in my little corner of the house it is a steady twenty-five degrees; there’s nothing like a good wood-burning stove.
Down in the markets the winds have caused hibernation to set in. Only the hard-core stall-holders remain, well wrapped against the elements and displaying the stalwarts that will see us all through the short, cold winter months. Baby turnips, leaves still on, a vast pile of cardoons, stacks of leeks and endives and boxes of muddy, knobbly Jerusalem artichokes, just nudging the winter pears. And of course there are onions – sacks and sacks of onions. One euro-fifty for five kilos and enough onion soup for a month.
‘Would you like some celery leaves?’ asked the girl at the stall where I bought a slice of pumpkin and a good-looking bunch of turnips, ‘just to help with the stock.’ This is very common. They are selling not only their produce, but their advice, years – centuries – of experience. And if you buy turnips you will of course be making a casserole of some sort, so celery leaves would add just another layer of flavour to the whole. I smiled and thanked her as she snapped some sturdy stalks off the globes of celeriac and stuffed them in my basket. Her hands were roughened and swollen with work, earth driven deep under the fingernails, but her cheerful, rosy-cheeked face and kind eyes showed an inner contentment that few can achieve in these frantic, corporate dog-eat-dog days. Perhaps she was selling not only her wonderfully fresh produce and her culinary advice – but a whole different lifestyle?

Orleans Reinette

That’s what I’ve been doing this week, a new word for an old pastime.  There is nothing quite as satisfying as planting a fruit orchard and no pleasure quite as dreamlike (alright so maybe there are one or two exceptions but not that I’m going to discuss here) as looking forward to that far-flung day when you are picking more fruit than will feed the village in a year, it’s a good five or six years away, but I really look forward to that.
One of the problems with planting an orchard in southern France is that it’s not really apple country.  They do grow here, of course they do, but the old English varieties, and especially the sharp culinary apples are just not available to buy.  Fortunately I found a saviour in Deacons Nurseries on the Isle of Wight.  Not only do they grow absolutely every apple I’ve ever heard of and many more into the bargain, they are willing to ship them to rural France.  And so I chose six-of-the-best.  Bramley and Lane’s Prince Albert for the culinaries.  The delicious Lord Lambourne for a fairly early dessert.  Wonderfully aromatic Ashmead’s Kernel and crisp William Crump for the mids and the indispensible Orleans Reinette for my late keeper. I had them all grafted onto a semi-dwarfing rootstock and received an exciting, damp parcel last week.  Honestly – the things that get me excited these days.
Meanwhile down on the orchard terrace six enormous holes have been dug, with a certain amount of grumbling, a pickaxe and a pneumatic drill, by the beloved.  The white stone of the Quercy has been blasted with good muscle and sinew, then sifted and enriched with compost and topsoil; it looks like we’re in business.

Chestnuts

Happy Birthday to You, Squashed Tomatoes and Stew!
Autumn has seeped inexorably into the south in the last few days.  I prowled around Prayssac market this morning admiring box after box of fat, glossy chestnuts and tempting over-sized quinces.  Cardoons are beginning to appear and knobbly, pink Jerusalem artichokes.  All the vegetable stalls have an abundance of late-season tomatoes, and they don’t seem to be diminishing… seasonal tastes are changing and the tomato glut is beginning to tell, prices have dropped to rock bottom and still they can’t sell them all.  The café and restaurant menus are undergoing a subtle change too.  Earthy soups, spiked with Quercy saffron.  Guinea fowl, deliciously pot roasted and served with lardons and chestnuts.  Desserts of apple and pear, quince and walnut replace the soft fruits and frothy, frivolous confections of high summer.  It’s food to go walking on.

Home Made Bread

In my steamy kitchen crumbles are all the rage.  Dark purple plums with a ground almond topping, apples paired with the last of the blackberries, pears with walnuts.  Homely food, but oh so comforting, besides I have several hungry and appreciative palates to feed.  The beloved consumes crumble as if his life depends on it!  On the wooden table, beside a pile of damp apples awaiting their culinary home, lies my current obsession, three well kneaded, well risen, homemade loaves just about to go into the oven.  It may seem odd in this land of artisan bakers to even try to compete, but I don’t really.  A good baguette is not something I could manage even if I wanted to.  You need to have something of the hot blood of the south to fabulously fling the dough around the way they do.  Passion, that’s the word, passion with a capital P.  I’ve never actually peered into the hallowed halls of a boulangerie at the dead of night, but I strongly suspect that the further south you go, the hotter the blood and the higher the fling!   However, a nice malted grain, multi seeded organic loaf? Now that is my kind of thing.  A gentle kneading motion, billowing curves and finally a beautifully rounded shape.  Sound familiar?
Meanwhile on the other side of the table the apples are flanked by something much naughtier.  A large, sticky chocolate fudge cake liberally covered in candles, because today is my youngest daughter’s birthday.  She is fifteen and there will be a gaggle of giggling almond-eyed girls to help consume it.  They can afford to of course, because French girls are born with hips like haricots verts, and no matter how much they eat, they never lose them. Unlike me.  Tant pis eh?

© Amanda Lawrence