Sud de France 3.7: Puimisson Village Life

We were driving from our small village of Puimisson to Saint-Genies, the next one over, and we had turned a corner scaring the birds that were eating in the vineyards with the noise of our car. The birds exploded into the air, rising up in the thousands, darkening the sky and setting it in motion. The sound of flapping wings filled the air. It was nothing I had ever seen in America. I grabbed my camera but by the time I got a shot off they had mostly settled down again. This photo hardly does the moment justice.

Traveling the single lane country roads of France in autumn you wind your way through hectares of grape vines that have burst into the most astonishing reds and oranges, browns and yellows. Who knew that the leaves of different varieties of grapes would turn different colors? 

Different grape varieties, different colors

Who knew how simply beautiful it would be?
 

Later sitting in a bar, still dazzled by the vineyards, I thought about our move to France, life, the universe and everything.

I turned 65 earlier this year and had a late life crisis. I felt that I wanted things to be different. Easier perhaps or just what’s a good word?--gentler? We had been to the South of France before and decided that if we were ever going to have the good life we wanted, we needed to move here.

Life in America had grown increasingly expensive and brutal. For example although we lived in an idyllic setting it the Northwest surrounded by big trees, deer and friendly neighbors. Neighbors who were nice enough but had big dogs and were armed to the teeth—a good friend had a loaded Uzi he enjoy showing around to folks. These were hard people who didn’t laugh much. They had money and instead of feeling secure they were paranoid.

And we had grown tired of the rat race that was all about more money, more stuff and more more. The striving for more reminds me of a scene from the movie “Key Largo.” At one point good guy, sailboat captain Humphrey Bogart asks bad guy gangster Edward G. Robinson what he wants.

Robinson thinks for a minute and says, “More.”

Bogart replies, “More what?”

Johnny Rocco just wants more

Robinson pauses and then in an annoyed voice responds, “I don’t know. Just more.”

That goes right to the heart of America. What do Americans want? More? More of what? Who knows, just more.  More cars, more homes, more money more home theaters.That’s the big difference here in Sud de France. 

Our village has a bar, a bakery, a butcher and a tabac. And it is sufficient. Villagers don’t want more shops in the middle of town. These few shops and the local winery, provide them the basics of daily French life. There’s a supermarket a couple of miles away and the big city of Beziers is twenty minutes away so it’s not that people don’t have access to stuff.

It’s just that they don’t equate how much you have with how well you live.

Our rental village house has a little kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a terrace that overlooks a vineyard filled valley. It is perhaps 700 square feet of living space. It plenty of room for us and our cat and one we use one bedroom mostly for storage. It is a great place to have as a home base and to go out and photograph and write. 

That’s the trick to the French good life for me I think. Getting to that place where you have enough, where you turn off the “more” machine and it’s just okay.

Hanging out Sud De France style

Sud de France 3.4: Something’s Fishy Here in France

Something fishy here in the Herault and I don’t mean the smell form a week’s accumulation of garbage as the refuse collectors join the anti-retirement reform movement. I’m talking about real fish and it’s real fishy.

Just a few of the fish available in a French market

Since college cooking has been my way of relaxing at the end of the day. Over time I’ve accumulated a good sized collection of cookbooks. These cookbooks are by the stars of chef-dom, Pepin, Puck, Child, Hazan and the like. But I’ve come to I realize that these tomes are just fairy tale storybooks. This may be a hard to swallow for Rachel Ray’s viewers but it’s true.

This hit me like a lead sinker when I started trying to buy fish at the local fishmongers. While my cookbooks contained dozens of recipes for salmon and sole, shrimp and crab, here in rural France I’m encountering fish capelan, sar noir, merlu, gobie, dorade, dorade royal, baudroie, lotte, rouget, polpi, raie, anchovies, sardines and cornets.

And these are not exotic fish but the everyday fish that dominate the local fish stands and that home cooks and restaurant chefs seem to buy and cook very well. But I’ve never seen them before and for all my cookbooks I’m at a loss to know what to do.

And I’m not happy about it.

When we lived in in Gig Harbor outside Seattle the town called itself a “maritime city.” Considering it was surrounded by Puget Sound and the Pacific you’d have thought we’d have had tons of fish in our markets. But hell, while we had our fishing fleet we didn’t have a single fish stand. The boats went up to Alaska fish each summer caught tons of fish but not an ounce made it to the Harbor. Adding insult to injury most of the salmon you could buy came from the Atlantic. What was up with that?? Throw in farm raised fish from Southeast Asia or the Mexican catch and the Pacific Northwest looks like a fish wasteland. Talk buying cheap products from overseas.  

Sea urchins and more

What was craziest was that my cookbook never mentioned any the fish I see every day in the markets. I’m sure that a few of the star chefs and food writer’s must have seen these fish and been curious about them. But you wouldn’t know it from the cookbooks. I can’t explain these omissions except to think that offering recipes for fish you can’t buy in America may not be a good marketing strategy. 

But you know America once had abundant supplies and a wider variety of fresh fish. I know because I grew up in the Bronx and in the 1950s my grandmother would buy live carp for making gefilte fish. She’d toss them in her bathtub until she was ready to make them into delicate yummy fish patties. As a kid I remember being fascinated by the carp as I'd watch them swimming in her fifth floor bathtub. 

Today in the States you don’t see live fish or even whole fish, just slabs of white or red meat that taste about as good as cardboard.  

The sign reads "None of the fish at this stand is farm raised."

And making it worse is that not only is diversity gone but the big fish--salmon, cod, halibut, crab and tuna--the ones we eat, are at the top of the food chain eating up the diversity. They consume lots of smaller fish, and they’ll even eat each other. In every bite of salmon you are eating pounds of other fish. The little fish in the French markets are  lower down on the food chain and learning to eat fish like lotte (monkfish) and dorade (John Dory) doesn’t just widen my choices but it’s makes it easier on the marine environment.

So I’m tossing out my old cookbooks and giving up on these tired food writers who can’t see beyond a salmon mouse. All they’ve accomplished has been the  numbing down of our pallets.

This is the uncollected garbage and its smelling pretty bad

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 2.5: When the Google fails where are the cops when you need them?

We had planned to turn ourselves into the police today. 

According to our long stay visas within a week of arriving we are supposed to check in with the local Prefecture of Police.  

Naturally we go online to find it and when we Google “Prefecture” we get the web page for the Sous-Prefecture in Beziers. There’s a little Google map on the page to help find them and I zoom out to look for landmarks in Beziers.

To my surprise as the map takes in more area, I discover that the arrow is stuck in the town of Montblanc some twenty miles from Bezeiers. Okay I think, perhaps it is part of the metro area of Beziers just as parts of Long Island are part of metro NY. 

But I'm unsure of this so I go to Google Earth which finds the address again in Montblanc. Well if you can’t trust the Google and Mama Google Earth who can you trust? 

So Diane puts on her high-profile intimidate-the-locals suit and grabs her corporate lawyer attaché case full of papers and we head out to meet the cops.

The drive is uneventful. We roll through the hills of the Herault and reach  Montblanc a typical southern French town that has grown as a retirement community with loads of small newish townhouses. 

As directed by Google we turn off the D-18 make a right on the Rue de la Paix and a left onto the Avenue Edouard Herriot. But after passing by a block or two of residences it’s clear that the Google has steered us wrong. 

When all else fails in France you go to the nearest Mayor’s Office and beg for help. Every town has a mayor and every mayor has the kind of power that a Boss Tweed or Mayor Daley could have only dreamed about. Want to put a terrace on your home get the mayor’s okay and it’s a done deal. Want a house? Ask the mayor.

But things are not going well today and as we open the door to the Mayor’s office and the doormat gets caught and is dragged along until it jams the door halfway open. We push at it but it won’t budge. 

Sacre bleu! The Americans are destroying City Hall. A secretary sees us and shrugs. She comes out and gives the door a hard rap, freeing it. She passes me with a grim face and I try to be invisible. This is probably a really bad moment to ask where the Prefecture is—but we do it anyway. 

"Where is the office of the Prefecture?" The secretary looks at us as though we are morons from space who have landed on the wrong planet. 

"What Prefecture? “She asks and Diane explains that we have a slip of paper from the Consulate in San Francisco that says we have to see the police when we arrive in France. She hands the secretary the wrinkled 1x5 inch strip of paper that was slipped into our passports by the Consulate. 

It is a sorry looking piece of paper that looks like it was hastily cut out of a larger piece of paper and it hardly looks official.

If anything it resembles an amateur's ransom note. 

And even worse it is written in English. The Consulate sent a note in English and not French. 

The secretary looks at it and puts it down as though it is covered with dog poop. Her expression says “What is wrong with you people?”

Score another point for the morons.

She shakes her head, goes to her computer and prints out a map--a Google map--with a large red arrow pointing to a spot in the middle of the city of Beziers.

“La,” she says, “C’est la.” It is there.

I look at the map and notice that the scale is so big that the arrow covers most of the city of Beziers and the tip of the arrow is pointing to a blank white space.The Google has struck again.

But we smile, we thank her a million times and gently ease ourselves out the door making sure not to get it stuck again.

Back in the car we get on the road and I’m feeling like an outlaw--like Bonnie and Clyde, like enough is enough.

If the cops want us badly enough let them stop hiding from us. Come out in the open "flics" and find us. Otherwise we won’t can't find you. 

Maybe we will go to our very own Mayor and throw ourselves on her mercy.
Ça va?

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 2.4: Market Dazed

Living in France market day is a special part of the week and Wednesday is market day in Clermont l’Herault. It’s an important part of any town’s economy and the markets are scheduled so that the farmers, cheese makers and other sellers can be in a different town on different days of the week, to spread the joy around so to speak

Market day is a medieval tradition and beloved because not only is it an opportunity to get extraordinary food, but it provides townspeople a chance to meet friends and catch up on the latest news and gossip.

So this Market day morning we grab our shopping bags and set out early for our first look at the Clermont market. When we arrived we parked at the municipal lot and walk about three blocks to the “Centre Ville” and the market.

The heart of Clermont l’Herault is the old church and as it has been done for centuries the market spreads itself through the streets surrounding the church. 

Even from blocks away from it you can see the market stalls extending for blocks in all directions. And even though it is early in the morning --some vendors are still setting up--there are dozens of people already shopping.

Walking into the market I am amazed at the variety of the stalls. There’s are three or four olives stand each with at least twenty varieties of olive concoctions, a couple of honey vendors, half a dozen produce stalls, about as many cheese stands and so on and so on. There’s a housecoat and pajama seller and a lingerie booth and a soap seller. A guy with a petite goatee is selling kitchen knives and across from me there is a van selling horse meat. 

Yes, there’s a horse meat vendor and he sells out of the side of his small van. There’s a small wooden riser in front of the van and after a minute or two I realize that it is for the older French people, who are physically very short and are his main clients. Horse meat isn’t all that cheap so I suspect that these older folk simply acquired a taste for it as children during the hard, hungry years just after the Second World War. We forget how devastated Europe was by the war. While America boomed countries like France and Italy were literally, no actually starving.

It’s always a good idea to walk the entire length and breadth of a market before you start to buy anything. It was a good idea here because there was something at the Clermont market I hadn’t seen at other French markets, sellers of fresh mushroom.

Clermont lies in the green, forested hills of the Herault and it seems that a lot of the locals go out and pick wild mushrooms to sell at the market. There were several at the Clermont market with improvised stalls made of old crates. On top of the vertical crates sat horizontal crates filled with huge boletus mushrooms the size of a softball, chanterelles by the ton at $5 lb and lots of wild mushrooms I’d never seen before.

At the produce stands there were lettuces the size of sombreros (1 euro each) and piles or berries and melons.

It was truly overwhelming and humbling. It is what life should be about, friends and good fresh food.

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

Sud de France 2.2: Villeneuvette

In France you don’t have to find things to do, things find you. 

Driving down a local road we saw a sign for a restaurant we had been told about. Turning into the little road the sign pointed to, we came upon the town of Villeneuvette--a walled village from the 15^th century or earlier. And in the middle of the town was a wool weavers fair. 

A serious wool weaving fair with weavers dressed in wool clothing that was rural French couture well before the reign of Louis XIV. There was a wool spinning exhibition and people were selling everything from wool toys to wool pillows. And they had a table for a hands-on kids wool class, complete with background music performed by an accordion player. Or maybe the accordion player was with the wine bar? I wasn’t sure but a good, though weird time was being had by all.

The other interesting thing about Villeneuvette is that it is a better example of community redevelopment than anything I’ve seen in the states. No Main Street Projects or Civic improvement group. The town was falling apart for years and the final blow was the loss of their water due to some changes in the water level due to expanded demand from the bigger towns.

So the folks got together and went back to their roots to pull the town together. First they got the water system repaired by pressuring the regional government and then they turned to their past for their future.

Villeneuvette had been a textile town for centuries. It was known for the quality of their products. So the town used its skill in making fabric to become a ‘crafts village.’ The restaurant anchors the town and draws people to it and then there are several small shops selling fabric and other things and there is a crafts gallery.

Okay it’s a gorgeous setting. The town is surrounded by vineyards and it really looks like a village out of the 16^th century. Well that doesn’t hurt but it’s the pride of the people that got to me. They call it a renaissance and that’s true.

All in all that was a pretty good discovery to make on a lazy Sunday when we weren’t even looking for anything to do.

Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer