Coming in two days: MaY MEMOIR: 31 days, 31 chapters!

MaY MEMOIR: 31 days, 31 chapters!

Ca va?  Stories from Rural Life in Southern France

It’s coming – this Sunday, May 1st!  The beginning of MaY MEMOIR: 31 days, 31 chapters!

I’ll be posting part of each 31 chapters, one each day, from my memoir Ca va?  Stories from Rural Life in Southern France.

I’ll be non-stop blogging about the eccentricity of life in a 600 year old house, the challenges of ‘Frenchgiving’, or Thanksgiving French style, and the dangers of collecting wood for our fastidious wood heater: ‘Chantal’.  Not to mention the jovial fun of the annual vendanges or wine harvest, how to avoid a herd of stampeding sheep, and what to do when cornered in the house by curious and hungry hunting dogs.

Join me as I wander through this adventure of learning a new language and adapting to a new life far from my upbringing in Chicago.

À bientôt!

Pleasures of the Season: Spring Radishes with Sea Salt and Butter

Also known as radis à la croque-au-sel, this typical spring dish is as simple as it sounds.  Its young raw radishes, served with creamy butter and a side of sea salt.  

I know radishes are not necessarily a vegetable that a lot of people like, but the beauty in this dish lies in its simplicity; it really is something worth trying.  Spring radishes have a very short season, so don’t wait until the middle of the summer.  This is a taste of the moment; a pleasure of the season, so to say. The radishes are crisp, have a mild, almost sweet bite, and a fresh, light fragrance.  It is when radishes mature that they develop the harshness they are more commonly known for.

It wasn’t until I had eaten a fresh radish from our garden that I was converted into believing that radishes were actually something that don’t need to be covered in ranch sauce or simply used as a garnish.  The ones in our garden now will be ready in just a few days, so we’re getting the salt and butter lined up.  Since the radishes will be dipped in salt, an unsalted, cultured butter is recommended.  It’s sweeter than the typical store bought butter and is more complex in flavor.

As Christophe has shown me, the best way to eat this is to cut a deep X into the radish and fill it with as much butter as you can.  Then, dip it in the sea salt.  The creamy butter plays off the radishes crispness and the crunchy salt subtly heightens the heat in the radish.  It really is that good.

The Culture of Bread

Our oven broke.  This is annoying because not only did the piece break that we just replaced, but because I went from making bread that looked like this:

To this:

Christophe gasps when I pulled the bread machine out.  It’s gotten us out of jams in the past, but it just doesn’t cut it when you can make a bread that comes out of the oven looking like it just came from a bakery.  Unlike any other bread I’ve made before, this bread comes out with a crust made to impress, and you can hear it crackle on the cooling rack. Christophe is known to break a piece off it right out of the oven; he calls it an emotion.  When anyone comes to visit, one loaf disappears at lunch and I always need to have a backup ready.  I’ve won his family over with it – and they’re French!  I’ve made it for his Provençal grandmother when we visit, and she proclaims it to be the best homemade bread she’s ever eaten.

This might not seem like a big deal, but this is a huge feather in my cap.  France is the culture of bread.  People do stroll down the street with a baguette under their arm, and it wasn’t long ago when every French person ate 1 kilogram of bread each day.  That’s over 2 pounds – everyday!

Bread is more than just a stereotype in France.  It’s a symbol, a right, a history, and at one point, a big part of everyday life.  It used to influence how houses and villages were built.  Many villages still have an enormous communal bread oven that turns night and day and acts as a local gathering place.  Our house, like many in the region, has a wood burning bread oven.  It might not work anymore, but bread continues to be made in the same kitchen where it has been made for over 600 years.

I can’t take credit for the bread; it’s a Cook’s Illustrated recipe.  It could be called just a bread, but I see it as something more than a thing we eat; I see it as something that nourishes a culture and brings me closer to a rich gastronomy steeped in history.

From Bunnies to Bells

Growing up, we waited for the Easter bunny to bring us our baskets and hide eggs around the house.  Sadly, sometimes the bunny placed the chocolate filled baskets on the heater and could not recall where all the eggs were hidden, but my Easter mornings were always filled with good memories.  In France, it’s not the bunny that makes the memories, it’s the bell.

The bell?  No, no, not the one selling tacos: the church bell.

Traditionally, children are told the church bells go silent on the Thursday before Easter because they have left for Rome to gather the chocolate eggs and carry away all the sadness and misery of those in the village.  Then, to celebrate their joyous return on Easter, the bells scatter the eggs for the children to find as they fly overhead.

At first, I thought the image of flying bells was silly, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the tradition and history that are embedded in this story.  All we have are bunnies, and while the bunny has always been good to me, I’ve never gotten a clear explanation as to why.  I’m not going to doubt him, he always snuck a kite in my basket, but it seems to lack a story with a reason.

After the flying bells, or cloches volent have passed, the family sits down to a large lunch: lamb.  Again, this choice is symbolic and it still commonly practiced, at least in the south where lambs are raised.  France is a modern country, but its choices and customs are rooted in its religion and culture, and I think that’s pretty cool.

Spring

I don’t know what spring is like where you are, but here, in the south of France, it’s awesome, particularly this year.  This is the only time of the year when things are green.  Right now, the sun is shining, its 65 degrees (F), and the sky is an amazing blue.  The flowers are blooming, the trees are budding, and nature is a spectacle to see with its daily changes.  It is the type of weather that calls you to go outside.

I liked springtime in Chicago too, but here it seems more special because it could pass so quickly.  Summer can arrive in a flash and it brings with it its sweltering Mediterranean heat, which makes all that spring greenness fleeting.  This has made me appreciate spring more and look for things that make it significant.  I particularly like this flower; it’s a cyste.  It only grows in the Mediterranean climate and only lasts a short time.  Every spring, someone points one out to me as if it’s a marker for the season and why spring should be enjoyed.  It’s delicate, temporary, and will wilt away when the temperatures start to climb.  Like the cyste, spring could last a little longer, but if you expect it to be there later, you could be wrong, and then you would have missed out on its moment and will have to wait another year to enjoy it.

The French language

It goes without saying that France is nothing like United States.  Yes, we get along and play nicely together, but at the end of the day, there are quite a few differences that set us apart.  Let me start with the obvious: language. The French language is poetic, flowery, and melodic.  It’s fantastic and things love stories are built around, but it’s also hard to master.  I studies Spanish and Italian and have forgotten most of what I have learned, but if you give me a noun from either of those languages, I can tell you if it’s masculine or feminine, thanks to that handy ‘o’ or ‘a’ at the end of the word.  French doesn’t have that.  It’s the article before the noun that tells is what gender it is: ‘un’ for masculine and ‘une’ for feminine.  So, we need to memorize the gender of all the nouns.  Got that?  I don’t even have a clue as to how many nouns there are in the French language, but I’m going to say more than a few thousands.  A few thousands!  Anytime I have messed up the article, and I’m talking a lot here, I get some pretty blank stares; people have no idea what I’m talking about.  I haven’t even been able to find a mnemonic to help me remember what is what, and it’s not like similar objects are clumped together.  Take this example:

Un tabouret – a stepstool

Un siege – a seat

Un fauteuil – an armchair

Un canapé – a couch

All of these are masculine.

So, why une chaise (a chair)?

Why is a chair feminine?

Wouldn’t it be simpler if all just used to same article?  Why not designate all kitchen things feminine and all garden things masculine?  And then, the noun gender also determines how the adjective is constructed, and that is a whole other ball game.  Basically, that simple article is completely crucial in being understood.  It’s the foundation of all that poetic and flowery stuff, and without it, the language would not be the beautiful thing that it is.

This has gotten my head spinning so much that I think I’m going to need to lie down.

Now, if I only knew how to ask for my bed.

No time like the present

Here I go; I’m going to start, there.  Done.

Does that count as a good first blog entry?

No, I didn’t think so either, so I’ll start again.  I guess an introduction is in order.

If you haven’t noticed from the blog, my name is Lynn Deasy.  I live in southern France and I’m a transplant from Chicago. I’m from a large Irish family and grew up in the suburbs.  There was noise, chaos, laughter, arguments, and all around ruckus in our house - and I wouldn’t change a second of it if I could.  After college, I moved to the city and could not have happier.  One day, I decided to get serious and buy a condo since the list of apartments I had rented was getting pretty long, but fate stepped in and decided differently.    

Now, I live in a village in the Pyrenees Mountains, population 15.  Compared to where I lived, it’s missing something like 6 digits, so life is considerable different.  And that’s what I plan to write about: the differences, the likes, the challenges, and the novelty of it all.  I’ll be here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to share, so I hope to see you visit. 

Coming Soon!

Got an itch to learn more about the oddities of French provincial living?
Coming soon!  Stories from the south of France about food, gardening, and life in general, which ends of being far from the ordinary.
See you soon.