108. Espadrilles

18th January 2011. At the end of yesterday afternoon, it was still bright and sunny so we went down to the beach at Anglet. Walking from the car park we could hear the sound of a heavier than usual surf breaking on the shore. Mountainous waves from somewhere out in the Atlantic were rearing up to crash into the breakwater with a massive whumphhh that could be felt through the feet.. The sea was dazzlingly white with foam and there was a crispness in the air that tasted clean and salty.

The late afternoon sun slanted through the golden haze that hung over the beach.. Spent waves - so high and threatening a hundred yards away - faded away to nothing on the sloping beach. Chibby, our golden English cocker spaniel, yelped with pleasure as he chased himself in lazy circles in the sand. Happy days!

If you're visiting the Pays Basque for the first time, it won't be too long before you notice that rope-soled shoes - espadrilles - are extremely popular. Classic summer wear down here, they are available in styles to suit all tastes, and they are very practical, fairly cheap, comfortable, lightweight, easy to pack and easily dried if they get wet.

Old-time smugglers reportedly preferred them (for their silent qualities) as they crossed the Pyrénées and certainly Florentino Goicoechea, the legendary Basque guide for the WWII Comet Line, (mentioned elsewhere here) used to make sure that all his escapees wore them.

They can be bought online in every style, colour and price imaginable from a number of suppliers in Mauléon, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Bayonne and many other outlets in the Pays Basque.   

Lomo is another speciality of the Pays Basque and is served widely.. I believe it was originally a Spanish dish but it's been well and truly adopted on this side of the border. Lomo is pork fillet that's been rolled in <George Clooney voice> what else! - powdered piment d'Espelette - then sliced thinly before being either fried in a pan, or preferably cooked on a plancha, with what looks like red peppers here:

I came across this video (below) the other day - it reminds me of the 5 months we spent in the gîte when I only had the one book to read. Fortunately, it was Karen Blixen's beautifully written "Out of Africa", which I read 2-3 times while there. The quality of the writing would be a remarkable achievement for anyone whose mother tongue was English - that the author was Danish makes it all the more impressive. As a description of a land and its peoples it has few equals. Highly recommended if you haven't read it. The one thing that spoils the dreamlike flying sequence is when Streep's character asks, "When did you learn to fly?" to which Redford responds, "Yesterday."..!        Right..

This really is one to watch in full screen:

The scale of this part of Africa is something that appeals to me - the vastness of the plains stretching into the immeasurable distance with the distant blue of the Ngong hills in the background. One day perhaps.

Postscript to my visit to the dentist the other day: we talked about San Sebastian and he said he thought it was the most beautiful city in the world. I'd not thought of that before but it's certainly right up there. I asked myself - which city/town is more beautiful..? Paris has to come into it somewhere. Where else? Don't be shy.. use the comment facility at the foot of this post. I'd be interested to hear other points of view. Here's a reminder - sit back and enjoy this swooping helicopter ride over the city - it starts at 1:19..

Meanwhile, à propos of nothing, I read today that Starbucks in the US is launching its new 31oz serving size for coffee and iced tea.. to be known as the Trenta.. That's just shy of a litre..! And where the Trenta goes, surely a Quaranta can't be far behind! A bargain bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a gorilla-sized portion of fries and a Trenta. What more do you want? Apart from a Hershey bar.. (and an oxygen tent!)

107. If you're serious about chocolate, then you've come to the right place..

16th January 2011. More on chocolate and how it's made in Bayonne. First though, there was an article in the New York Times that, somewhat ambitiously, set out to discover which were the World's Best Candy Bars - American or British. Without wishing to raise a sceptical eyebrow at the narrowness of the scope of the column, from the get-go this has all the hallmarks of two bald men fighting over a comb. As the old Irishman in the joke explained when asked for directions to Dublin, "If oi was wantin' to be goin' to Dublin, oi wouldn't be startin' from here.." 


Cazenave chocolate

Daranatz chocolate

If there was a Chocolate World Cup (or World Series for US readers) and if I were to be judging it, then a bar from either of these ranges (left and right) would have a 'bye' straight through to the final. The other finalist would probably be Belgian. End of. I remember that during my first visit to the US I was curious to finally sample a Hershey bar first hand, having been brought up on the notion, via books and the cinema, that nothing else comes close. I bought one and was mightily disappointed. Although I have a sweet tooth, I found it sickly sweet and tasting of many things - except chocolate. I know the Hershey bar is, in many ways, an American cultural icon but the sad truth is that the taste simply doesn't live up to its reputation. To be fair, I'd probably disagree violently if I'd been raised on them! I also have to say that the UK's Cadbury Dairy Milk bar is second only to the Hershey bar when it comes to overpowering sweetness. A bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk contains just 20% chocolate and over a quarter of its weight is fat.

Here, chocolat is an entirely different beast. In the narrow streets of Bayonne, there is an old arcaded street - the rue du Port Neuf (left) - that is home to four master chocolatiers. They make their own chocolate from scratch - and this is serious stuff (code for expensive!). You owe it to yourself to try a piece of real chocolate once (at least) in your life. The rich smell of chocolate wafts gently and seductively from the chocolate shops as you stroll by (if you are able!). L'Atelier du Chocolat, Cazenave and Daranatz are to be found within a few metres of each other tucked under the old stone arched colonnades on one side of the street - with Pariès on the opposite side nearer the river. A couple of streets away will be found Puyodebat. There's also Chocolat Pascal (32 Quai Galuperie), Leonidas (28 Rue Lormand) and Jeff de Bruges (19 Rue de la Salie) but I'm not familiar with these. Warning! You're going to hate me for telling you this but you can buy chocolate online from Cazenave, Pariès, L'Atelier du Chocolat and Puyodebat..

Dark chocolate appears to outsell the milk variety and I often see little old ladies in supermarkets reading the list of ingredients on the label to see the percentage of chocolate. Many readers in the UK will be familiar with Cadbury's Bournville - a popular dark chocolate. However, it contains only 36% of cocoa solids.. I would say that the minimum standard here for dark chocolate starts at 70%. There is even a Lindt 99% bar. We invited our neighbour in for tea and cakes one afternoon and she arrived with a couple of bars of Casenave chocolate for us.. one milk, one plain. The plain chocolate was stunning - I'd guess an 8.1 on the Richter scale of chocolate taste.

You can actually buy chocolate flavoured with Piment d'Espelette. It's made by Espelette's very own chocolaterie: Antton. You don't chew this - you simply hold it in your mouth and let it melt. Bliss! Antton offers a guided tour of their small factory (or atelier de fabrication as they call it - it sounds better) followed by tastings.. highly recommended. And they do mail order...

Espelette (with La Rhune in the distance)

I mentioned Piment d'Espelette in the previous post and I realise that not mentioning it before now has been a massive oversight on my behalf. Piment d'Espelette literally means “hot pepper of Espelette” in French. It's produced around the village of Espelette in the Pays Basque. This pepper is so famous that it has been given a protected designation by the European Union, ensuring that only peppers grown in the Espelette region may be labeled as “Piment d'Espelette.” This is designed to protect the heritage and integrity of this unique pepper, which is a commonly-used ingredient in Basque food.

Peppers were one of the earliest imports from the New World, and they attracted immediate attention in southern Europe. Cooks realized that peppers could be easily cultivated in kitchen gardens, and that they made a convenient replacement for the much more costly black pepper. The earliest documented instances of pepper cultivation near Espelette date to the 16th century, and by the 18th century, the region was famous for its peppers. On the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, scroll down this link and you'll gain an idea as to the many and varied uses of Piment d'Espelette.. 

The piment d'Espelette is red when mature, and relatively small and mild. Heat-wise, it is usually compared to paprika, another European pepper product. Piments d'Espelette also have a dark, slightly smoky flavour which can be intensified with roasting or pan-searing, and a robust peppery flavour which can be useful in a wide variety of dishes. These peppers are traditionally used to rub jambon de Bayonne (Bayonne ham), a famous export of the region, and they also appear in many other Basque dishes.

Red and Green - there's no escaping these two colours in the Pays Basque - they are everywhere!

Fresh peppers are sometimes available at markets and grocers, and strings of dried peppers are usually readily available in south western France as well as being exported abroad. Piments d'Espelette are also sold in dried and powdered form, and in the form of pastes, which may be in jars, cans, or tubes. They are also sometimes blended into spice mixes which are meant to evoke the cooking of south western France. I'm guessing but I'm willing to bet that piment d'Espelette is a key ingredient in Sauce Basque (Forte) made by Sakari - it's highly addictive and available online.

Espelette takes its famous export so seriously that it has an annual Celebration of Peppers every October, at which the piment d'Espelette takes centre stage. Peppers bedeck the streets while citizens compete with their favourite recipes and restaurants feature pepper dishes on their specials menus. Other regional foods are also feted during the annual Celebration, and for visitors to the region, it can be a great way to get a taste of Basque cooking. This clip shows Espelette during this time.. (Health Warning: If you're allergic to marching band music, now would be a good time to fit your Factor 30 max strength ear plugs!)

17th January 2011. Scooters are a constant and often intrusive part of the daily scene down here - buzzing (illegally) down bus lanes sounding like angry wasps in a coffee can, looking "cool" (in their dreams) being ridden one-handed by their riders, carrying a surf board (it's true!) or with helmet unstrapped, using a mobile, or squeezing unannounced between lanes of traffic at a speed that makes no allowances for other people and overtaking on whichever side happens to suit (I know, I'm starting to sound like Mr Grumpy!). The one thing they do that really gets my knuckles gleaming is when I'm at the head of a queue at traffic lights, it can be guaranteed that some eejit on a scooter will ride up the outside and then stop at an angle across the front of my car so as to be ready to be first away from the traffic light Grand Prix.. With these last, I'm often tempted to let my darker side take over..! 

If I asked a group of readers of a certain age to name as many scooter manufacturers as possible, I think it would be a pretty safe bet that the first and only names they would come up with would be either Vespa (left) or Lambretta (right). Nowadays, scooters are being churned out in their thousands by a huge number of manufacturers and they come in all shapes and sizes - from short stubby ones with buzzy little 50cc 2 stroke engines to much larger ones - with longer wheelbases that encourage a relaxed feet-forward riding style. Engine sizes? 50cc up to - yes - 850cc!

Gilera used to make wonderful 4 cylinder Grand Prix racing motorcycles in the '50s that made this spine-tingling sound (it scarred me for life when I was a kid) - but today, Gilera is busy with their interpretation of what a modern fast scooter should be - the Gilera GP800. The Gilera GP800 has a stonking great 8-valve, fuel injected, 90-degree, 840cc V-twin engine that will whisk you up to an astonishing 125mph (200kph). I don't care what you say but that is serious oomph to put in a scooter. Harley Davidson - eat your heart out!

Three wheeled scooters have made an appearance too.. and the civilised Piaggio MP3 is very popular with office workers here for beating the traffic and having that little bit extra stability and security on greasy road surfaces. Mind you, you should be careful what you get up to on one of these.. ahem!

The Japanese have a major presence in this market as you might have expected.. Here's Yamaha's class-leading offering - the TMax 500: 

106. A tale from the dentist

13th January 2011. We decided on a quick shopping trip to Dancharia in Spain yesterday to look for some lighter luggage suitable for our upcoming trip to Spain..

On the return journey, as we were driving down the snaking mountain road back towards Espelette (a village noted for le Piment d'Espelette and this great hotel/restaurant, and there are seven others - not bad for a village of only 2,000 inhabitants!) an oncoming car gave a discreet single flash of his headlights to the car in front of us - and the same again to us. In the Pays Basque, if agents of the State (gendarmes, CRS, police, Douanes) are out and about, operating a speed trap or a document check or, as was the case here, customs officers looking for people bringing commercial quantities of cheap cigarettes into France from Spain, then it is not unusual to be warned in this way. The strong streak of antipathy towards agents of the French State here is balanced by an equal measure of solidarity among the Basques. It's clear why this region was so successful in combatting the best efforts of the German Abwehr during WWII. There is such a solidarity that penetrating it must have been an almost impossible task.  

Now, to change the subject, if you have a 'thing' for chocolate, here's another Bayonne institution - Chocolaterie Daranatz.. I went there the other day to buy a small box of marrons glacés as a little treat for Madame. (If I give her a marron glacé I can do no wrong for minutes weeks afterwards..) If you're not a chocaholique, have a browse on their site - it will spoil you for ordinary chocolate. Chocolate from Daranatz and their close neighbours Cazenave is to High Street chocolate as a 1930s 'Blower' Bentley is to an Austin Allegro.. A word of caution: they do mail order!

14th January 2011. I went to my dentist in town this morning. His practice is in the Avenue Thiers - Bayonne's most elegant avenue - with its pale stone buildings and lined with trees that are heavily manicured (square cut) in the French fashion.

Avenue Thiers

While he was attempting to get both hands and what felt like half of his tool-kit in my mouth(!), he started asking me the usual questions.. as they do! "Where are you going for your holidays..?" Response: "Aaaarr- aaarrgghhh.." He then told me that there used to be a Monsieur Armstrong, an old Englishman, who lived next door to his surgery. He said Mr Armstrong was a widower who had been married to a lady from Bayonne - a beauty apparently. He'd been a pilot in the RAF during WWII and had lived in Bayonne for many years. Ten years ago, when Mr Armstrong was 85, he hadn't been seen by his neighbours for a while so finally the police were called to break his door down. He was found stone cold, slumped in an armchair with a bottle of whisky in front of him.. A sad end, but I suppose there are worse ways to go. I must admit that I did wonder on the way home if that would be my destiny too..? I'd better get some (more) practice in! 

15th January 2011. I'm glad I crawled out of a warm bed early this morning to go down to the club - it was low tide and the river was still. There was a cloudless blue sky but it wasn't warm in the shadows. There was a good turnout this morning and we managed to put an VIII out on the water plus four IVs, several double scullers and singles. We took a coxless quad sculler out (2 nanas & 2 mecs) and it was unanimously agreed (by all apart from me!) that I should stroke it. At this point I should add I've not stroked a coxless four before. For any non-oarsmen reading this, steering is controlled by 'stroke' (me), with the rudder cable attached to the toe of my right shoe, which can pivot about the ball of the foot, moving the cable left or right. There was a total range of movement of about 3" (7.5cm) with the null position - ie, a dead straight rudder - in the centre. With the rudder centralised, the position of my right shoe was North/South - ie, straight up and down.  Unfortunately, when I'm rowing, my feet tend to settle at a "5 to 1" position (think clock) with the net result that the boat had a permanent tendency to turn to the left. I found it difficult to turn my right foot in to a "5 to" position and row at the same time.  We zigzagged our way up-river - with me zigging when I should have been zagging -  through a low steamy mist which lay on the river - every now and again we'd burst out of the shadows into a sunlit cloud of golden mist.. very photogenic. In fact, I spotted a photographer on the bank taking pictures of us. Great morning to be out on the river. We did 14km this morning - most of which was in a straight line! (Running total: 372km). 

As it was a bright blue afternoon, Madame and I set off for Biarritz once I'd found my sunglasses. We parked on the cliffs near the lighthouse that overlooks the Grande Plage. As we looked south towards Biarritz, the sea was a dazzling silver as it reflected the bright sunlight:

There were some major rollers sweeping in and surfers could be seen getting entangled with them. The coast road in to the centre is the Avenue de l'Impératrice (Empress Avenue in yer Anglo-Saxon - think it sounds better in French!) and it is lined with over-sized houses built during Biarritz's heyday about 100 years ago when it was the go-to destination for the rich and famous. The style could be described as exotic eclecticism. That's to say, they are a unique merging of a number of styles - heavily gabled Basque, Art Deco, fantasy castle, Norman, Spanish hacienda & French Empire - that's only to be found at Biarritz. Many appear to have been sub-divided into apartments but there are still several that remain under single occupancy. These have no price. At the bottom of the hill lies the truly magnificent 5 star Hôtel du Palais - one of the world's great hotels. I can just see myself shuffling into their elegant bar in my cardigan and slippers for a pre-dinner sundowner.. 

Turning right at the Palais, we headed down to the beach and the promenade. The sea was a sight to behold - surging waves were rolling in and breaking in confused explosions of foam. There appeared to be a strong undertow as incoming waves were colliding spectacularly with the outgoing remains of previous ones. And as each new wave crested just prior to breaking, steam-like spray would blow backwards off the top and a silvery mist hung over the beach. It was hot work sitting on the low wall watching the sea and there were even a few sun worshippers stripped down for bronzing action on the beach - some in bikinis (yes, in mid January!). After 15 minutes or so we decided we'd move before we were cooked through. (The temperature in the sun must have been upwards of 20°C)     

We walked up from the beach to the restored Art Deco Hotel Plaza where we sat outside for a coffee. It was so warm there we both took our jackets off.. So, Biarritz in January - what's it like I hear you ask..? Where to start..?

While I'm pondering that, enjoy the deceptive simplicity of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, the Second Movement (Allegretto)..

A couple of high quality flash mobs to finish with.. 

And this one filmed at the celebrated Café Iruña, Pamplona (another favourite resting place of a certain Mr E Hemingway).. 

And now back to our regular programming..!