Chez Poirier - be very hungry

Chez Poirier - ah, an experience. My friend Kathy M. is here from Tucson. Kathy is curious, energetic, incredibly good-hearted, she is bold and she loves food. She once made us a meal entirely based on Tequila - it was so good - we still think about her Tequila enchiladas and the Tequila bread pudding - yum! So, this to say that she is a great person to take to a restaurant where you need an appetite and where embracing new experience is an asset.

Monday morning: Chalais market. Chalais (www.chalais.net) is in the Charente (the next door département)  and has a population of less than 2,000, four butchers, a lingerie shop, two grocers, several bar/restaurants, a bookshop/newsstand, five bakers, a large supermarket, DIY store, printer, antiques etc.etc. Market day is Monday, when half the town is closed to traffic, just so that you can buy anything from corsets (not the sexy kind) to foie gras (then you need the corset). We arrived late because we were planning to have lunch out. Chalais is famous for its veal raised outdoors, with the mother cow. Veal here is dark pink and tasty. Calves are never kept in crates. In our village, the small farmers earn their living by raising calves. Chalais also has a huge and rather ugly castle which was bequeathed to the town (a poisoned chalice), a lovely Romanesque church with cloisters and, like many small towns around here, a retirement home with a tremendous view.

The market is very different from that in Ribérac, partly because it takes place in the streets rather than in open spaces. Also it is a much more countrified affair - lots of elderly men wearing tweed caps and speaking patois. And it's in the Charente which is a foreign country. There were snails because the Charente is famous for its snails - I don't eat them myself but they sit stylishly in net bags gleaming in the sun! I met several friends and acquaintances, smelt the rotisserie chicken and we bought greengages for Kathy - the vendor kindly picked out a handful of ripe ones. Kathy has been racking up first tastes: fresh fig, many different phases of duck product, greengage, Roquefort, Pineau, Armagnac, Kir, orange tomatoes warm from the plant, ripe pears off the tree ...

Chez Poirier in Bardenac (population 232) is a traditional restaurant (which means lots of food) and unlike many restaurants around, it is open on Mondays - because of the market. It is often full to bursting, so we got there early. In rural France, working people eat promptly at 12 noon. You sit down and don't ask what's for lunch because you're going to get what's for lunch. And if you're lucky the waitress will tease you - I am very, very lucky. We sat in the warm on the terrace so that we could watch dogs sniffing one another and see who came in and out. Kathy M. took the photos because I still don't have a discreet camera with which to take photos of food and I am a bit reluctant to do it, so I forget. Rules for eating  at Chez Poirier - taste everything and pace yourself.


First Course: soup - carrot & potato with vermicelli and maybe some tomato. Kathy was so excited she forgot to take a picture


Second Course: roasted beetroot salad with couscous salad - looked gorgeous and tasted amazingly good. The beetroot had some raw onion in it and the couscous a light cider vinegar based dressing - so simple, so very moreish. We had to beg the nice lady to come and take it away.
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 Third Course:  charcuterie. Andouille (intestines & tripe made into sausage) - I didn't even bother with this because I know I don't like it but KM ate it like a good sport, also the mortadella-like salami with olives - pallid and revolting and in any case I knew that the star of the show was the terrine. A home made pork terrine - so delicious it was difficult to stop eating it. Topped with ham and lovely yellow fat. The small pats of butter are there to eat with the nasty pale stuff, because one is allowed to have butter with certain kinds of charcuterie. The rules are abstruse.      

Fourth course: the nice lady came up and asked in a  whisper if we liked roast lamb. With lots of garlic. Oh yes. Perfectly cooked - and so much of it. We did not eat it all but we tried. With the lamb came beans. Fresh white beans - it's the season. Maman and the Blacksmith bought 20 kgs of beans in two large sacks - I had to load them into the car. These beans were cooked with savory, we think, and a little tomato and some carrot, possibly a little ham - so tasty and we ate relatively so few of them. But we wanted more, however...

Fifth course: green salad. In the Charente, salad is typically served wilted, i.e. dressed well ahead of serving, with a neutral oil such as sunflower and a white wine vinegar, so that it cooks slightly in the dressing. Then when it comes to table the cook slices a shallot into the salad bowl and mixes that in too.The result is fresh and delightful and you don't taste raw shallot all afternoon, which is surprising. We thought there was way too much salad in the bowl and we were wrong because the tradition in the Charente is to eat your salad with the...

Sixth course: cheese. In the Charente they care about cheese, unlike in the Dordogne. Milk production was something they came to after the dreaded Phylloxera decimated the vines of the Cognac region. The butter from the Charente is a protected trademark and it is very good. So there were many cheeses on offer - some industrial and some local. Amongst the good ones: a good Roquefort (all Roqueforts are not equal), a hard goat's cheese, a soft-rind goat's cheese, brie, local soft goat and a divine Brillat Savarin, so creamy and perfect with the salad that I had thirds and I was not alone, which is why there was almost not enough salad.

At this point there were still a couple of slices of bread left but we petitioned for the cheese to be removed forthwith and Kathy said it was probably the best restaurant meal she had ever had at that point. The lady said as there wasn't far to go now, there was a good chance it would turn out alright. I was frankly pessimistic that the dessert would live up to the rest but...

Seventh course: I was wrong!! I am not a huge fan of desserts but this Tiramisu was exceptional. A chocolate génoise (that's posh for sponge cake), a coffee cream that oozed caffeine and a top layer of cream beaten with egg whites, light and airy and hardly sweet at all. Kathy had to sit on her hands to stop herself snagging further portions as they wafted by the table. I left her some of my cream though. Then I had a coffee which is often disappointing and it was, except that it got Kathy excited again because it is served thus:

All this, my friends, and a bottle of wine, for 12.50 Euros on an ordinary sunny Monday lunchtime in rural France. We were full and we had left food on our plates. It is even better on Sunday lunchtime...

Repas de Vendanges

The meal could almost be the raison d’être of the grape harvest. I have been privileged to be invited to the vendanges for the past four years and in that time the meal has gone from riotous to fairly staid. There used to be a lot of horseplay in the vineyard and at table and there’s still a lot of hilarity, teasing, pushing and shoving, as well as serious eating and drinking. The menu is still gargantuan and doesn’t vary all that much from year to year. This year we were 20 at table in the lean-to garage, some of whom had neither picked grapes nor helped in the kitchen. I arrived (deliberately) late when a lot of imbibing had already taken place – mostly whisky for the men and home made pineau for the women, accompanied by the worst kind of supermarket aperitif snacks you can get – ersatz smoky bacon flavoured crispy things – all additives and colourings. Yum!

Paulette has at least three helpers in the kitchen on the day and a couple for a day or two before. Everything is cooked on a large gas ring in the stable or on the solid fuel stove in the kitchen, using the flimsiest of aluminium pans and the only work surface in the kitchen table. She has an enormous stock of bowls, dishes and platters – all the women take turns to help serve; the men only move to pour wine, light their cigarettes and throw water at one another. There are a lot of smokers in the group, so if you want to be able to taste the food it’s wise to sit at the open end.

Any country meal begins with soup and a meal as culturally important as this one absolutely must include soup. When Serge (the father) was alive the soup was always a potage with tomato and angel hair pasta/vermicelli. Serge believed that every meal, except breakfast which he didn’t eat anyway (a hand-rolled cigarette and a cup of black coffee), began with soup, no matter how hot the weather, lunch and dinner, otherwise he didn’t feel as though he had eaten a proper meal. Soup is very important in French peasant food – it rehydrates and provides minerals for labourers and contains perhaps the only vegetables they will eat that day. This year we ate a squash soup with grated cheese in it, which was delicious and the cheese very stringy and sticky – cause for some hilarity as it got everywhere. In this region, once the men are down to the broth, they add a slug of red wine to the plate, swirl it around and drink it straight from the soup plate. Traditionally only one plate was used throughout the  meal, so this was a good way of cleaning it. Also, bread doesn't usually appear on the table until after the soup. Some of the men at the table take three servings of soup.

Second course – crudités – grated carrot, sliced tomato with raw red onion, hard boiled eggs and cucumber – vinaigrette in a Tupperware container because the French love Tupperware. One of my cousins is a Tupperware Queen – I think she has everything they ever made.  Her fridge is a model of order and cleanliness but I don’t think that owning Tupperware would help me or my fridge…

Third course – charcuterie – Rosette de Lyon, two kinds of Saucisse de Morteaux with and without garlic, home made pâté de campagne – the gherkins are obligatory with pâté. And lots of bread. Once, all the charcuterie would have been home produced but it's a lot to expect now that Paulette is getting on a bit. She does still make all her duck conserves and pâtés. There was also a curious and surprisingly good raw cabbage salad with vinaigrette and croutons – the croutons make all the difference. Agnès spent three hours slicing the crinkly savoy cabbage as fine as lace with an enormous and rather blunt knife.

Fourth course – beans. We eat a lots of these white beans or mongettes  in this region – here they are cooked with ham or pork skin, onion, celery and parsley. Further south they would add  tomato and probably carrot.  Traditionally, vegetables and meat were always served as separate courses but this is less common these days. This allowed manly men to have a cigarette instead of greens.

Fifth course – roast chicken. I am salivating just thinking about it. These are no ordinary chickens – Paulette raises them and cooks them in a covered pot in her solid fuel cooker. The smell is outrageous and the flavour indescribable. These are real chickens – I would pick any amount of grapes just to eat her roast chicken. Of course, by  this time in the meal I am not hungry any more but I eat two pieces anyway – the fat is yellow and the skin crispy. The flavour fills your mouth and all you want to do is sit and eat chicken until it comes out of your ears. It is such luxury and so few people today know what a real chicken can taste like. I’m still dribbling. If you’ve never eaten a chicken bred on scraps and maize and lettuce, which has scratched and eaten grubs and then roasted slowly in its own juices with only salt and pepper as seasoning, then you need to come and visit! 

Sixth course – salad. A green salad with vinaigrette and chopped raw shallot - sliced in by hand at the last minute. This is the way they do it in the the Charente - the département just across the river - i.e. 500 m. away and which is a foreign country. In the Charente they often eat wilted salad too - called "cooked" or "tired" and they always eat their salad with cheese. Paulette is from the Charente, thus a foreigner, where they speak a completely different patois and she imported her foreign ways such as eating tired salad with cheese and making pineau. She has lived in this frontier village for nearly 60 years and isn't about to go home across the river. In the Perigord nobody really cares about cheese  unless it’s goat’s cheese, so we are offered an industrial Camembert, followed by cookies, coffee and something very strong out of an anonymous bottle, which this year turns out to be cherry eau de vie. Coffee is brewed in this fantastic enamelled pot and served in the glasses we’ve been using for wine and water. Altogether a modest meal for the 2009 vendange! And it only took three hours to eat it. 

Figs

Figs, glorious figs

My brother, the blacksmith has a fig tree laden with luscious figs. He only likes them dried and our solar dryer will have to wait till next year, especially since it is now pissing with rain for the first time in months. The tree has so many fruits on it and I can't eat them all! We have given some away but they don't keep and attract fruit flies like nothing else. Hornets also love them and the blacksmith has been killing dozens in his house every evening.

The only one who really likes fig jam is KK, so I may make a couple of jars for him, tho' as he rightly said, the cave is already full of jam that we don't eat. I pointed out that he would almost always prefer to eat cherry jam, of which we made quite a lot this year, while KK was here and we scrumped the trees around about. It's hard to let the fruit go to waste. He re

minds me that fig and walnut jam is good and since we have a shed load (almost literally) of walnuts still to process from 2007 & 2008, I think this is a good idea. And fig jam does go well with foie gras.

I have put a few figs in jars with sugar syrup and a fig wine apéritif that I made in the summer, which wasn't much appreciated as a drink. I think it was too strong (as in alcoholic) but since I invented the recipe after having tasted it at the red village of Collonge, I'm ready to try making it again.

Other ways to enjoy figs - again sadly only enjoyed by me at present, apart from splitting them open fresh from the tree and stuffing them in my mouth - split them gently and put in some goat's cheese, either fresh or more pungent according to your particular palette, and put them under the grill/broiler. Delicious with a green salad. Round here, they make a fig bread with about 50% wholemeal flour and this is really good with any cheese, but particularly goat's cheese. Also, of course, good with honey. The daughter puts goat's cheese and honey on her fig bread. Not bad!

Last year, I remember making an apéritif snack with dried figs and I think it would work with fresh ones. I made it so that an overweight friend would have something other than nuts and crackers on which to snack, to sop up the whisky. You soak the figs in fortified wine (fig wine again!) I think I used pineau - spoon a little honey over the figs and then put them in the oven for a while till slightly caramelised. Good eaten as a snack or as dessert with crème fraîche or vanilla ice cream. And actually delicious with chestnut ice cream.

Yesterday, my mother made a dessert for a dinner I was preparing and to which she wasn't invited, which I think is very nice of her. She split the figs and filled them with a mixture of sugar, butter and ground almonds, then baked them for 10 minutes. 2 out of 3 of us liked the result, tho' I felt it was a little sweet. She had suggested flambéeing the whole dessert but I had got fed up by then. We ate 2 kinds of chorizo brought back by me & KK from Spain, blanquette de veau with locally produced veal, and everything else produced within a 10km radius, except the salt (100 kms), white wine (30 kms) and basmati rice & pepper (India!). The other two eaters refused salad on the grounds that they had eaten too much blanquette, so I ate it for lunch today in a piece of fresh baguette with some delicious tinned tuna also bought in Spain in tiny, one person-serving tins. Tuna is so very important on the Basque coast - in the town we saw shops basically devoted to tinned tuna, sardines and anchovies - the windows glowing from the beautiful label art.