7th March 2010. In all this talk of the Pays Basque, I have somehow neglected to mention what is probably the most symbolic feature of all the French Basque country and that is - La Rhune.
La Rhune is the distinctively shaped mountain that seems to crouch at the western end of the Pyrenees and its brooding presence and sharp-edged silhouette dominates the Côte Basque. To me, there is something of a headless Sphinx about its form. To put its size into perspective, at 2969' (905m), it's just shy of the qualifying height for a 'Munro' by the length of a domestic ladder.
Access to its summit is from the Col de St. Ignace (169m), which is midway between Ascain and Sare. The road up to the lower station from Ascain is described on a cyclists web site as "a gentle snaking climb (my italics) up to a very popular funicular railway taking tourists to the top of La Rhune for a view of the ocean". Cyclists clearly have a very different view of the world to the one I see!
Once at the Col de St. Ignace station, there are two methods of reaching the summit of La Rhune - there's the Petit train de la Rhune, a rack & pinion metre gauge railway that slowly grinds its way up to the top or - you can walk up. A popular option is "Train up and walk down.." or, if that smacks of being too easy, try it the other way round - aka the Hero option! If you intend taking the train up on a fine summer's day, be advised that it is an incredibly popular attraction and parking will be an issue, as will the queues for a ticket. The trick is to make an early start, looking to be at the Col de St. Ignace station no later than 9am. If you leave arriving there till later in the day, you'll be treated to a Masterclass in the Noble Art of French Queueing - say no more! A return ticket is ~14€ and dogs are charged at 50%.. ouch! There's a vulture towards the end of this clip! And despair ye not.. the accordionist stops at around 4.25..!
Make sure to check the weather forecast before leaving as the conditions can change quite rapidly up there. There is a small Spanish-run restaurant/snack bar at the summit as well as a number of shops selling tourist gizmos, alcoholic drinks and tobacco at Spanish prices. I'd recommend taking a picnic as the food in the cafe could best be described as average, plus why sit indoors when the views outside are so special?
Take a picnic, sit ouside and drink in the views which are really stunning. From the summit on a clear day, you can see waay up the coast north of Bayonne to the start of Les Landes. Saint-Jean-de-Luz lies before you and inland the Pyrenees march away to the south east in a blue haze.Right! Enough sight-seeing.. think it's time to refresh the inner man. Here's a recipe for Les Pommes de Terre Sarladaises (potatoes sauteed in goose fat, garlic & parsley) - the finest recipe for potatoes known to man: Ingredients:
750g (1½lbs) of waxy potatoes
3 tablespoonsful of goose fat (or, if serving with Confit de Canard, use the duck fat from the tin)
1 tablespoon of chopped parsley
2 finely chopped cloves of garlic
Some coarse sea salt, freshly ground black pepper.
Peel and slice the potatoes fairly thinly and dry them in a clean tea towel. Heat the goose fat in a heavy frying pan with a good-fitting lid, and when it starts to smoke, put in the potatoes to colour over a high heat. Keep turning them so that they don't stick and when they start to colour, cover the pan and moderate the heat. Allow them to cook for 30 minutes, turning them every 10 minutes or so to brown in the fat. Add more goose fat as required. Towards the end of the half hour, stir in the chopped parsley and garlic. Turn out on a dish covered in kitchen paper to soak up any excess fat, sprinkle with the salt and serve... Mmmmmm!.
4th March 2010. The Pays Basque is one of France's best kept secrets (in my opinion). After discovering its delights, I tried hard not to extol its virtues too much with friends and colleagues in the UK as I selfishly wished to keep it to myself! We’d suffered the occasional booming voices and braying laughter of my fellow countrymen in 'our' restaurant in ‘our’ village and we didn't want to increase the risk of any recurrence. For that same reason, I keep my distance from expat forums and blogs on the internet.
I've always had a yen to write and once we'd re-located in the Pays Basque I started to keep a simple daily diary of our new life down here to 'get my hand in' again and start the juices flowing. I also started writing letters to my dear old Mum in England to give her more of a flavour of what we were up to than I ever could over the phone. After a while, this material started to accumulate and I thought about starting a blog to capture all these experiences in a more flexible, readable and joined-up format. In researching blogs, I discovered a whole new world of bloggers, blogs and forums for ex-pats (including many Brits) in France that I'd previously been unaware of. The more I looked, the more I found. There must be thousands of Brits widely dispersed around France whose only contact with each other is via electronic means. However, I've kept well clear of all internet expat forums as they seem to attract aggressive "keyboard warriors" and, for me at least, life's too short to waste time engaging with them.
It occurred to me the other day that this largely invisible expat community only exists here in France. It's all one way traffic. There doesn't appear to be a similar group of French expats living the reciprocal life in the UK. While there is a large group of French working in the UK - estimated to be some 300,000 strong - I would doubt very much if there's an equivalent number of French living in the UK for what might be called lifestyle reasons - retirees and people who've taken early retirement and have set up small businesses to complement their pensions. It's my guess that those 300,000 French are mainly to be found working in and around London where there's easy access to the Eurostar for weekend commuting.
Peter Mayle definitely hit a nerve with his seminal "A Year in Provence" as it tapped into the aspirations of thousands of baby boomers (like me) who'd experienced foreign travel first hand - and liked it - in a way that wasn't possible for their parents' generation. I'm excluding, of course, our fathers' wartime experiences overseas as they all mainly came to a grinding halt in 1945. Our fathers returned home never to travel overseas again for the most part and they spoke about it rarely. It was a period that most of them wanted to forget.
We, the UK baby boomers, were the generation brought up on a diet of dull post-war food (although we didn't realise it at the time) - Camp coffee, Kia-Ora orange squash, sliced white bread, evaporated milk, salad cream, tinned fruit (peaches, pears or pineapple usually covered it), tinned veg, packet soups, Kraft Dairylea cheese, meat that was cooked to death and rice was only seen in rice puddings. Cooking oil - what's that? Spaghetti - as we'll find out in a few paragraphs - came in tins in tomato sauce. As my Mum said years later, "after the war, we were just grateful to be eating anything.." I think it's fair to say that our knowledge and experience of food and drink - as a nation - was pretty minimal in the fifties and well into the sixties, so we were all in the same boat. The problem arose when England met Europe, and more specifically - France.
Madame once asked me if we used to have lobster at Christmas when I was a kid.. (Lobster! I thought.. suppressing hysterical laughter!) No, we didn't! Or oysters. Or broccoli. Or a thousand and one other things we now take for granted. My Dad used to stock up with a case of a dozen bottles of sweet Spanish Sauternes in early November in good time for Christmas. By the end of November, that case had mysteriously evaporated and he'd have to go out for another. Sweet Spanish Sauternes put me off white wine for a loong time.
Here's a little story that will illustrate what a complete numpty I was in food matters when I was young. I lived in London for a couple of years in the mid sixties. My bed-sit was on the first floor of a large semi in trendy Willesden Green(!). My landlady was Italian and the tenants were a cosmopolitan bunch. Among others, there was Ferry, a wealthy young Persian man (they weren't Iranians yet) on my floor and a Polish girl called Marta in the basement flat.
It wasn't too long before my beady eye alighted on Marta. I found out that she had supper with the landlady one day per week so I asked her what Marta liked to eat. It turned out that spaghetti bolognaise was her favourite. I asked Marta if she'd like to come up one evening for a meal and, to my surprise and delight, she said that she would.
I went out that evening to buy all the supplies.. (and don't laugh!): 2 large tins of Heinz Spaghetti Bolognaise, a large white sliced loaf, some butter, a 2oz tin of Nescafe.. two plates and two coffee cups and saucers. Oh yes, and a packet of sausages. I was going to serve Marta tinned spag bol, on buttered toast, with a couple of sausages sticking jauntily out of the top in the manner of an indoor TV aerial.. Followed by real Nescafe.. I can't remember if wine was involved.. probably not. What a feast to set before my date! (ahem..)
Come the evening in question and Marta arrived on time.. The spag was bubbling away nicely in a saucepan on top of my Baby Belling.. the sausages were under the grill.. the toast was ready.. and I was talking to the lovely Marta... Suddenly, blue smoke started pouring out from under as the sausages caught fire.. Without pausing for breath, I quickly slid the grill pan out, blew the flames out and then held it out of the window to let the smoke disperse.. In my mind's eye I can still see this cloud of acrid blue smoke slowly drifting down the neighbouring gardens..
Right - the toast is on the plates, each with a steaming dollop of spag, two burnt sausages stuck in a 'vee' like a bullfighter's bandilleros..et voila! From there on, the evening was only going one way and that was downhill..
I never did see her again. Strange that.. (I've often wondered if she's ever recounted the tale to groups of totally bemused Poles..)
Three or four years later, my French sister-in-law was staying at the family home and she offered to make the evening meal for my mother. She wanted to make a spag bol (the classic sixties dish) so she popped out to the shops to pick up all she needed. When she returned with all her ingredients, I noticed she had a long blue packet (~half a metre long) under her arm. I asked her what that was and she gave me a curious look and said, "It's the spaghetti..!" The penny finally dropped. D'oh!
Coming to France from the UK was a genuine revelation back then.. particularly in food terms. Steaks had red juice (ie, blood) still in them. (Meat was always killed twice in England.. once in the abattoir and then it would be murdered in the kitchen - just to make sure..) If there was any lingering sign of blood in a steak, my father would proclaim "A good vet would have that back on its feet in 5 minutes.." He would have used a blowlamp to cook a steak if he'd been allowed.. (I think he'd been marked by 5-6 years of Army cooking) The big difference was that French food had taste. Salads with vinaigrette dressing (not salad cream). Crusty baguettes (not limp white bread). All the different varieties of cheese (not Kraft Dairylea). Red wine. Real coffee..
All of the above goes some way to explaining why thousands of French retirees aren't buying up abandoned properties the length and breadth of Britain, living the dream and writing best sellers called "A Year in Warrington" with a follow-up called "Toujours Warrington"*. Imagine the rumblings if they colonised such outposts as British West Hartlepools, Workington or Rochdale with settlements of trimly moustachioed French pensioners and their hennaed wives! Getting on to the committee of the local Working Mens Club, walking their whippets, fancying their pigeons and breeding budgies, writing witty columns for French newspapers.. The horror of the Bowling Club committee as the newly arrived Frenchman launches his 'wood' up in the air on the local bowling green in the parabola of a pétanque player..! There's a parody waiting to be written here. The simple truth is that they live to eat. We don't. We eat to live and as Madame found, it's very difficult outside of the major centres in the UK to find the ingredients for cooking à la française.
* Withapologies to the good folk of Warrington naturally!
I doubt if there's a better interpretation of Debussy's Clair de Lune than this one by Presti Lagoya..
28th February 2010. An Alerte Rouge for 60-odd departements in France last night.. Strong winds swept the country overnight - the storm crossed the Bay of Biscay from Spain and coasted in around La Rochelle and devastated some low-lying villages when a high tide, whipped up by the strong south-westerly winds, breached a dyke and flooded villages and farmland. So far around 45 dead have been reported with many being drowned in their homes.
The idea of drowning during the night in one's own house is far from our thoughts when we go to bed and so the unimaginable shock of waking up in the wee small hours with the house flooding and no lighting must have been appalling for those involved, especially the elderly and infirm. Many houses were flooded to a depth of 1m 80.. (almost 6 feet) It doesn't bear thinking about..
I now feel somewhat guilty about my reactions during the storm because I was lying in bed, listening to the noise outside and feeling content that, with the new windows fitted, things were now much quieter.
2nd March 2010. We were on the beach at Anglet this afternoon and I heard some unfamiliar honking sounds coming from above.. Looking up, I spotted several great straggling broadly vee-shaped formations of cranes beating their way back to their northern European summer retreats (from Africa?). There were a good few hundred of them. My next question is what is the difference between a stork and butter oops, a crane..? I’m no ornithologist as you can guess.. This must be a sign that spring is on the way.. The car thermometer registered 22C yesterday at 3pm on the way to the beach.
Our pooch (9 this summer) met another English cocker spaniel, a 10 months old bitch, down there and the two of them started racing about like a coupla eejits.. (“Wow, another dog!”) It was so funny to watch.. Would have been hard pressed to say which one was the 8 year old.. Strange, isn’t it, how dogs never lose their fascination with each other.
20th February 2010. In previous posts I've mentioned a few Basque dishes, notably the Gâteau basque, but I think I should apologise in advance to the Confrérie du gâteau basque for what I'm about to say about their revered cake.. (I should add that this is all tongue-in-cheek!)
At the 2009 Fete du Gâteau basque in Cambo (below), the judges were photographed filling out Next Of Kin forms before trying to speed-eat eight Gâteaux basques* against the clock (although I could be wrong here..) No, they were really suggesting alternative uses for the cake in the middle.. (I heard later that the winning suggestion was "Boat Anchor.." with "Base for garden umbrella" cominga close second)
(Note from Management: 1 Gâteau basque, but 2 Gâteaux basques)
There's even a museum dedicated to the gâteau basque.. Try as I might, I just can't imagine a museum for Dairy Cream Sponges or Custard Slices in the UK - but that's all part of the magic of France. Gâteaux basques come in two main varieties (and an HGV licence is needed for both!) with either a black cherry or a crème pâtissière filling. Madame usually buys the cakes (I'm only allowed to buy them when there's a 'k' in the month) and I've never really been that enamoured with the black cherry variety of Gâteau basque.. finding them a bit heavy going, rather like a flywheel in cake form.
Last Sunday, I was off out to buy a couple of baguettes from the baker in the centre of town when I had a sudden hankering to try a Gâteau basque with a crème pâtissière filling. I found one at a pâtisserie (I've been "hedumacated" not to buy cakes at bakers) and brought that home. It was chalk & cheese compared to the black cherry variety. Of course, Madame wasn't too keen but, as far as I'm concerned, it's the one I prefer.
So, back to Basque specialities. A feature of Basque cooking is that the colours of the Basque flag - red and green - often feature in the dishes (usually red & green peppers). I think my first lip-smacking experience was at La Buvette des Halles, a small café that had just opened in the centre of St Jean de Luz adjacent to the covered market (that sells meat, poultry, fish & all types of sea food, fruit & veg and cheese). After the market had finished for the morning and while all the detritus was being swept up, we saw a chap quickly setting up tables and chairs. His kitchen was inside the market building and his fish-orientated menu featured much that had come straight from the market - so without further ado we sat down at a table in the shade of the platanes.
I still remember what we had that first time - Madame had a tomato* and mozzarella salad and I had 9 oysters, then we both had grilled sardines (we didn't know then that they'd been cooked on a plancha) accompanied by a pichet of cold rosé. Everything was fresh and full of taste. Coffee, a Café Creme cigarillo and the bill followed - 105 francs - which at the time was only ~£11. If we could have pressed the rewind button and had it all again we would have! Delicious - and in such a simple setting - and as a bonus, it was ideal for people watching. It was his first year in business and we've been back every year (bar a couple) since then.
* Tomatoes are a no-go item for me..
His menu is a véritable (as they like to say here) catalogue of Basque cuisine - he serves all of the following staples of the Basque kitchen: Ttoro, Pipérade, Omelette au piment doux, Axoa d'espelette & Poulet basquaiseand probably a few more that I've forgotten. Plus a few standards like sardines, grilled tuna, dressed crab, oysters, moules, entrecôte steak or confit de canard. For freshness of taste (and price) I don't think he can be beaten. It's one of our favourite places when it gets a bit warmer. Recommended: Light lunch? Go for the sardines. Feeling peckish? Tuna with pipérade will slow you down a bit..
I remember after our first holiday down in the Pays Basque we were keen to try sardines on our barbecue when we returned home. After they all fell through the grill and smoked out the neighbourhood we realised that frozen ones just won't do! And you need a plancha..
Here's the late Keith Floyd attempting to make a Pipérade in a Basque lady's kitchen in St Jean de Luz and getting it all so wrong. (Imagine the reaction if a Frenchman was ensconced in a Yorkshire kitchen attempting to demonstrate for the viewers - and the lady of the house - 'owze famoos pudding de York-sheer was made..) I think he escaped very lightly! Don't misunderstand me.. I had a lot of time for Keith Floyd.. it took some nerve to do what he did here. Can't imagine the saintly Delia trying that!)
22nd February 2010. 15C this morning. I went to Dancharia in Spain to fill the car up with diesel.. It's crept up to a tad over 1€/litre (~88p) - presumably in the light of the Total refinery dispute in N France which threatens to disrupt the supply of petrol to the country. While I was there, I picked up a few odds and ends and had an extra virgin cold pressed hot chocolate.. (as you do).
23rd February 2010. A few months ago, we were asked by A - an old friend of J-M in Tours - if we’d like to go for a flight with him one day from the Basque Aero Club at Biarritz airport.. A is a semi-retired fighter pilot (French Air Force) and he's a flying instructor at the Aero Club. Biarritz Airport is not that busy and the main operators who use it are Air France, RyanAir or EasyJet. Occasionally a biz jet flies in. We were there once waiting to board a RyanAir flight to the UK when I sensed that there was something going on. I noticed a posse of gendarmerie motorcyclists discreetly standing by with a few heavy-looking characters talking into their cuffs. An Airbus landed and, as it taxied in, a small tricolourcould be seen fluttering from the flight deck window. It taxied up to the terminal and shut down in quick time while a stairway was hurriedly wheeled into place. There were a few impressive looking 'suits' nervously waiting below.. A minute later the door opened and there was El Presidente Sarkozy himself.. with MAM* two steps behind him.
Anyway, on the day we flew with A, all was blissfully peaceful and quiet. We opened the hangar doors and pushed out the (very) small aircraft (a Robin DR 400 120) that we were going to commit aviation in and, after a few external checks, we strapped ourselves in, quickly ran through a short checklist, called the tower to ask for start clearance and then started up. All very simple and minimalist! Once the engine and oil temperatures were showing the correct values, we called for taxy clearance and then we were off taxying around (above) to the threshold of the active runway. Then, following a quick look around, A released the brakes and opened the throttle and we were off down the runway - all 7,382ft of it.
We climbed out over Biarritz before turning north over the sea to follow the coastline. At around this point, A turned to me and said "You have control.." (at that point I could sense Madame watching me like a hawk from the rear seat!) and we continued flying north along the beaches at Anglet before he told me to turn onto an easterly heading to fly up the northern banks of the Adour. I'm reminded (not by my performance of course!) of the classic comment written on a student pilot's report. It went: "Once Bloggs climbs into an aircraft, he starts a chain of events over which he has no further control.." Ouch!
It was a day when I would normally have been rowing and down below I could see a couple of 'yolettes' (fours) outlined like pond skimmers against the silvery Adour.
The rowing club lies just above the second bridge up on the pic above on the left hand bank. At this point we turned right hand down a bit (technical aviation term) towards the Pyrenees and suddenly my mind map of how the Pays Basque fitted together suddenly took on an extra dimension as the landscape unfolded before us.
Saint-Jean-de-Luz
After St Jean de Luz we landed back at Biarritz, refuelled the aircraft and then taxied around to the hangar and locked it all away again. Great fun.. and I wish I could afford to do it more often. Many thanks to A for his kind gesture.. the Pays Basque looks just as good from the air.
To wind up with, here's the pooch enjoying himself on a blustery day at our local beach a day or two ago. The clip won't win any awards I know - I was really just testing out my new camera.
Right! Enough sight-seeing.. think it's time to refresh the inner man. Here's a recipe for Les Pommes de Terre Sarladaises (potatoes sauteed in goose fat, garlic & parsley) - the finest recipe for potatoes known to man:
Ingredients:
Ingredients:
