Tag Archives: Normandy

A Celebration of the Stinging Nettle

15 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Food, France, Normandy, Things to do

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

In La Haye-de-Routot, in Upper Normandy, is a collection of heritage museums exploring aspects of Norman and French culture: traditional bread making (which I have written about here), the history of clogs, the linen house, and La Chaumière aux orties, a celebration of all things nettle. That’s right: l’ortie piquante, the common and much hated stinging nettle.

I

I am a city girl, and nettles, like cow dung, are annoyances, to be got past quickly, ideally gotten rid of. I only remember one sort of nettle celebration in my childhood.  At the boys’ boarding school my brother attended in the South Downs in the late 1970s, there was a field of nettles, thigh-high. The small boys would run through the nettles, their bare, white legs sticking out under grey flannel shorts. It was a badge of honour, to show no pain.

In fact, the nettle has long been celebrated for its many good qualities: as a medicinal herb, a nutritious food, and as fibrous material used in canvas and rope. The nettle is rich in vitamins, iron and protein. It is known for its re-vitalizing qualities and is used both as a tea plant and as a vegetable.

On some Sundays at La Chaumière aux orties there are cooking demonstrations. We were lucky enough to visit on a damp August afternoon. Shivering in our thin summer clothes, we were delighted to find a huge open hearth, a pot bubbling away, and a delicious smelling spread of food on a table: beignets, crumbles, cups of warm soup, a pie.

A chef was giving a demonstration of open hearth cooking and handing out recipes. She invited us to taste. Of course we accepted. It was only as the food was going into our mouths – including the mouths of our young daughters – that I noticed the basket of nettles on the hearth, and the pictures of nettles on the wall. I asked my husband what an ortie was. Too late.

And just as well, because the recipes were delicious. The soup, the beignets, the crumble and the pie: all wonderful, and not a hint of sting. Even our daughters went back for more.

I took copies of the recipes with the best intentions. But I’m having a hard time reconciling the hated nettle with that delicious food. Maybe soon I’ll get over it, put on my gloves, and go nettle collecting. There’s a forest of nettles along the side of the path at the end of our garden, just waiting for me.

Our Daily Bread

08 Saturday Oct 2011

Posted by in Culture, Food, France, Normandy, Things to do

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Bread is given three definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

  1. a usually baked and leavened food made of a mixture whose basic constituent is flour or meal
  2. livelihood <earns his bread as a laborer>
  3. food, sustenance <our daily bread>

It is in search of bread under its first definition, a baked food made from flour, that we go as soon as we set foot on French soil. A truism, still true: bread never tastes quite like it does in France. For baguettes and croissants, an early morning run up the hill to our local artisanal bakery, Le Fournil de la Roselière in Sainte Opportune La Mare,  does the trick. Although it stands alone in a quiet village, I’ve never seen it empty. Cars and trucks are constantly pulling in and owners whisking out with their daily bread in hand.

In a nearby village, La-Haye-de-Routot, is Normandy’s Bread Oven Museum. Every Sunday afternoon during the year, and every day in the summer, there are bread-making demonstrations.

The bread oven cottage is small and dark, and the bread oven is enormous, filling half of the cottage. It’s the kind of oven Grimm’s witch might have tried to push Hansel and Gretel into. Our children are sceptical, and they keep their distance. The boulanger is large and muscular and has a booming kind of voice. He starts us from the beginning, showing how he heats the oven and removes the coal and ash. It’s hard and hot work, requiring patience.

While he works Monsieur le Boulanger keeps up a comic patter with the audience, telling jokes about the clueless Parisians who take his bread-making courses. He only bakes in the traditional way, he tells us. Baking and keeping alive the art of traditional bread making is quite literally his livelihood.

He shows us how he shapes and decorates the bread, using a special tool for the detail. A pinch here, a prod there, a few seconds of extra work and people will pay three times more for a loaf, he chuckles.

While the bread is baking we go for a walk and return to the smell the baking bread. Now the children are keen, gathering close to the boulanger. Each has a go at helping to remove the bread. The paddle is carefully inserted under a few loaves and then the bread is pulled out with a fast, powerful tug.

Afterwards the fresh bread is sold. We leave with the warm loaves nestled in their white bags, ready for the evening meal.

With most meals in France we eat bread, freshly made and often hot: daily sustenance. One Saturday evening there is a mass in the village chapel, to honour the feast day of the village’s patron saint, St Fiacre. He probably started off as Fiachra, an Irishman, who travelled to France and built a hospice for travelers. Legend has it that St Fiacre furrowed a great garden with his staff. He is the patron saint of gardeners and taxi drivers. This seems fitting for our village with its beautiful cottage gardens, and I like the anomalous conflagration of rural and urban. It’s the story of our lives.

We arrive at the chapel just as mass is starting and are invited to sit in the only free seats, uncomfortable and ancient wooden pews at the front. Next to us is an unexplained heap of warm brioches. Brioche is made in a similar way to bread, but is enriched with egg and butter. It was often used as blessed bread in French churches, and was sold at market in the butter centres of northern France.

The mass is long and the chapel is full. We are hungry and the brioches smell so good. Finally as mass is ending, the priest and the mayor come forwards. The priest blesses the special St Fiacre brioches, sprinkling them with holy water: bread of life. The mayor invites the congregation for a glass of sparkling wine in the mairie, and the brioches are distributed. In the morning for breakfast, is the glistening golden brioche all the more delicious for having been blessed?

Five Great Books About Normandy

10 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in Culture, Normandy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

Here are five books about Normandy I’ve read and loved. Some are reference books which were helpful to us as we initially explored the region. Others are fiction and memoir. These too have served as reference of course: what, after all, is fiction if not a guide to the possible ways of being?

When we started thinking about buying a house in France, I read everything I could get my hands on: the chic lit novels, the earnest guides to property purchases, A Year in Provence. This last didn’t help much. We are a two-career family, without Mayle’s luxury of time, nor his means.

A couple of caveats. There are significant gaps in this list. First and most glaringly there are not enough books in French. There is also a lack of historical writing, both recent and ancient. I am working to fill these gaps. Please let me know your favourite books about Normandy and France. I’d like to read them, and maybe add them in over time. Finally, there is no particular order to this list.

Madame Bovarytakes place in and around Rouen where Gustave Flaubert was born and raised. Charles and Emma Bovary’s first home is in Tôtes, and they later move to Yonville which is based on Ry. Emma famously meets her lover in Rouen Cathedral I have an edition of Madame Bovary designed by Manolo Blahnik, and it has always seemed a perfect partnership between the cobbler  to the Sex in the City girls and Emma, the original desperate housewife.

We have poured over this gorgeous coffee table picture bookby photographer Hugh Palmer, considering the merits of one village over another. Palmer beautifully captures the diversity of Normandy, from the cliffs of Étretat to the lush Pays de Caux farmland dotted with grazing cattle and cider orchards.

There is nothing that comes close to the Michelin Green Guide for its authority and knowledge of the region. You know that if the men at Michelin give an attraction three stars, it will be worth the trip. The alphabetical organization by place name, rather than by region, can be annoying. Normandy is large, and it would be convenient to see what’s near you now. But maybe it’s just reflective of life in France: deal with the weird structure to get to the good stuff.

My mother cooked from Julia Child when I was growing up: not for the children, but when there were dinner parties. Oh the dinner parties. Silver and crystal and cigars and port. Fricadelles de Veau a la Creme. La Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin. I’ve never hosted such a dinner party and it makes me wonder: have I grown up?  In My Life in France Julia Child tells how she arrived as a diplomatic wife in her late thirties. The boat docked in Le Havre, and she motored with her husband to Rouen, where she tasted sole meuniere and fine wine and described it as “an opening up of the soul and spirit for me.”

Tell me that Posy Simmond’s graphic novel Gemma Bovery isn’t a great book at your own risk. Great about the English and the English in France, how we talk to each other, how we dress, and how (we imagine) the French observe us. Haircuts, handbags, home decor: Simmonds doesn’t miss a beat in this sharp comic parody of Flaubert’s novel.

I want to give a shout out to three writers whose words about Normandy and France today have resonated with me. It’s not about Normandy specifically, but New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s essays in Paris to the Moon opened my eyes to the pleasures of living with children in France, indeed the pleasures of living with children at all. Humourist David Sedaris dissects the reality of life as a gay American writer in rural Normandy (take that, Emma Bovary!) in Me Talk Pretty One Day. And Judith Warner, who I find perpetually wise, has written beautifully in the New York Times about rural Normandy as antidote to our wired lives.

…in the early evening there is a misty kind of light – a particularly French, grayish, bluish, blackish kind of light – that fills you with a joy so profound that it’s painful. It reminds me of why I live most of my life running around in a snit and obsessing about noisome details, petty insults and minutiae: because to experience happiness – of the most powerful and soul-intimate kind – is also to know that some day it all will end.

–Judith Warner, We’ll Always Have Normandy

A Visit to Jumièges

09 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in Normandy, Things to do, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , ,

I had never heard of Jumieges Abbey before reading about it in the Michelin green guide, which gives it a rare three stars. Three stars from Michelin means you can’t miss it, particularly when it’s only 25 minutes from your house – maybe 35, if you have to wait 10 minutes for the ferry. The ferry is not much more than a sturdy kind of raft that takes about 8 cars and pops you across the Seine in under 5 minutes, to the delight of our children. While waiting, you can stock up on courgettes and lettuces from the lady who grows and sells vegetables from her house next to the road by the ferry.

Originally built in the seventh century, the abbey was pillaged (how, exactly do you pillage? Can you give me a visual image?) by the Vikings. It was rebuilt and consecrated in 1067. William the Conqueror attended the consecration. An early Benedictine abbot, Robert Champart, became Archbishop of Canterbury. It was an important centre of learning and power for hundreds of years. The abbey fell into ruin after the Revolution, when it was sold and became a stone quarry. The imposing twin towers and skeleton of the abbey remain, open to the sky, and towering over the landscape of the Seine Valley.

The ruins are hyper-Romantic (insert your favourite Byron verse here). It’s extremely photogenic, and serves as a backdrop to performing arts events in the summer. We didn’t expect our children to love Jumièges Abbey, but they did. The wide open spaces, ruins you can clamber about on, and 15 acres of parkland to explore.

This is a haunting, ancient image of a Carolingian man, one of few remaining traces of the monastery that the Vikings destroyed. The best known artwork from the Carolingian period (780-900 AD) are the illuminated manuscripts.

What I have been mulling over is why I had never heard of Jumièges. I’ve been visiting Normandy for years (more on that later). Did it really not get covered in school? Its history is as much the history of England as of France. By some estimates, 50% of our English vocabulary today derives from Anglo-Normand, the language of William the Conquerer’s court. Beef, mutton, lentils, pears, laundry, pocket, petition, endorsement: so much of the food we commonly eat, as well as our names for things of the earth and the intellect, come from this historical exchange between Normandy and England.

Les Iris

03 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in Les Iris, Normandy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

Here are some pictures of Les Iris, our chaumiere in Normandy.

A chaumiere is a thatched cottage, built from a skeleton of wood beams, infill of clay or lime and sometimes reinforced with horse or cow hair, and a roof of reeds.

Les Iris is on the Thatched Cottage Road, a 53-km route that runs through the Boucles de la Seine national park connecting Notre-Dame-de-Bliquietuit to Vatteville, Azier and Vieux-Port and winding along the Seine to the Vernier marshlands.

“The thatched roofs of our buildings, from whose tops grow irises with their sabre like leaves, appear to steam as though the humidity of the stable or the barn rises up through the straw”

—Guy de Maupassant

The Seine flows at the end of the garden, between limestone cliffs and occasional villages. At certain times of day, large boats glide silently past, heavy on their way to Rouen, or, lighter, back out to Le Havre and the sea beyond.

This being Normandy, there is the requisite apple tree in the garden. Ours is large and old and the unripe apples taste sour and floury. The garden is full of herbs, and along the footpaths from the village up into the ancient forest there are plentiful mushrooms. The abundance this season has been a general topic of village conversation, and we ate the wild mushrooms cooked with butter and herbs by a neighbour. You can take the mushrooms you have picked to the pharmacy in the next village, and they will tell you which ones you can eat. We haven’t tried this yet.

The small village church from our window. There are said to be graves in the cemetery from the hundred years’ war. During the day the bell tolls every half hour and with particular vigour at 7 am and 7 pm.

Meals are outside in the sunshine overlooking the Seine, or in the salle a manger at the petrin (dough-making table). The top lifts to reveal a trough, which provided a warm, draft-free place to knead dough and leave it to rise.

No space for bathtubs under the thatched roof, but there are two lovely bathrooms, one on the ground floor, with strong showers. The country kitchen has windows overlooking the garden and a Belfast sink.

A typical Norman fireplace, for wintry evenings.

The floors downstairs are traditional Pont Audemer tiles, and upstairs, hardwood throughout.

v