Rural Life

Brive la Gaillarde and Sete

It has been all quiet on the posting front as we have done the unimaginable for us and taken a holiday.  Our excuse was that we needed to buy southern French wine and good quality olive oil - something we achieved, but in reality, having not had a holiday for two years, we needed time out.

We got in the car and headed south and indulged ourselves at our favourite restaurant - at Brive la Gaillarde down in the Correze, and called La Cremaillere.  It is actually a hotel as well, but as we hadn't booked we couldn't get a room, but we could get a table for dinner.  The chef there is a master and our meals were sumptuous but well judged so that we could actually move afterwards and didn't feel at all bloated or uncomfortable.  We asked them to recommend a wine and it went with the meal fabulously without being the most expensive on the menu.  The amuses bouche of pumpkin veloute, toast with tapenade and the most amazing mushroom fondant (or cappuchino as they called it) were perfection and live in the memory.

So if you are in the area - perhaps for a rugby match - this is the place to look for!

 

From there we went over the Millau viaduct and headed for the Med.  There is now a service station by the bridge so you can stop and wonder at this edifice before driving over it and heading on your way.

 

We headed for Sete - a fairly substantial port near Montpellier, with a fishing fleet, a regular ferry service to Morocco and an active port that had the Arianne collector ship and loads of bits of wind turbines in when we were there.  We were lucky to get a fine room at the Grand Hotel overlooking the canal junction.  The canals join the Mediterranean with a lagoon behind Sete and its spit of beach that leads to Agde and Cap d'Agde to the east, so are salt water.  The water is so clear you can admire dog fish drifting in the current and the oysters and sea urchins that have populated the sides of the canals.  Another place we recommend!  Here is the hotel -

 

And here is the excellent view of the canals at dusk from our third floor room balcony.  About a kilometre along the canal straight ahead is the local MacDonalds that was pelted with octopi by Jose Bove and his chums in protest at Americanisation and fast food.

Rural bounty, rural poverty

It is a bizarre balance to life here between bounty and poverty.

On the bounty side of things, there are currently excellent quality chestnuts to be had for free, after the recent rain there may even be some good quality cepes.  Our neighbour has a fishing licence for the year, and frequently brings back large carp, that feed him, his two cats and the chickens for a couple of days.  There are fine quality walnuts going begging, while we are able to take advantage of absent clients' gardens for apples and figs, which would otherwise attract vermin and make a mess.  We get our firewood for free from the One Acre Wood.

Yet life is also precarious for many of our neighbours.  The one with the fishing licence eats well when he can catch a fish, and does have fresh eggs but he lives on the equivalent of £400 per month.  In our village the average household income is 11,500 euros a year.  For fans of my other blog, I will confirm that the average quoted is a median - so half the households have less than that.  There are several houses in the village that are not connected to the mains drains or the mains water supply.

This gives a very different view to comfortable middles class views on things such as mice, blackbirds, pigeons, rats, coypu and muskrats.  If something gets into your stock of apples or nuts or chicken food, they deprive you of a meal or two.  If your roof slates get the acid treatment from bird poo, they have to be replaced at the cost of something else - food, electricity, a pair of shoes without holes in.  If the river floods due to the banks being washed away following coypu and muskrat damage, you live with the mess as best you can, cleaning what can be, but leaving the structural damage, because you don't have the cash.

Another set of neighbours tend a wonderful strawberry bed, hoping to get enough for themselves and also to sell some at market for a bit of cash.  When the mice go through and take a nibble out of each one, any hope of sales is gone.  A good mouser is therefore an important asset, and will be forgiven for the odd indiscretion in a newly turned seed bed, if they can provide the tail and paws of the strawberry thief.  Next door's cat catches rats and gets away with murder on the back of it.

The credit crunch will mean a hard winter for some.  If wise words about the numbers of berries are to be believed, the weather could mean a harder winter for others.  If that is the case, every nut, every stored fruit and vegetable will be needed, and anything that damages those food stores will be dealt with accordingly.  Poisons are indiscriminate and unnatural, and affect a whole food chain - give me a good hunting cat any day.

Making the most of fruit

It is undeniable that Autumn is now with us in the Northern Hemisphere, and it is a race against time to gather in as much of the fruit, vegetables and nuts as we can before the first frosts damage them.  I will add the proud photo of the four best pumpkins lined up in the sun to ripen once it is off the camera, as it is hugely satisfying.  Last year's feral pumpkin was late and never ripened properly so didn't reach the rich and satisfying red colour that we have this year.

The chestnuts are starting to fall and we have had our first outdoor fire with chestnuts roasting, and lovely they are too.  We must also go scrumping and collecting our own so that we have enough for savoury crumbles, chocolate cake and soups.

The walnuts are also starting to fall - it looks like it will be a mixed year this year.  Some trees are loaded, others have virtually nothing.  However the key thing is to get them gathered over the next couple of weeks and then let them dry slowly in nets in the garage, so they can be enjoyed over the coming months.

Grapes are ripening - they have taken advantage of the very sunny September here to add sugars and develop a sweet flavour.  We have picked a good 40 kilos and using the potato masher and a flat bottomed bowl, plus a large piece of kitchen muslin, we have managed to crush them and make a very palatable grape juice - strong, smooth and rich.  It lasts up to about 10 days in the fridge, although by the end it is starting to feel a bit sparkly on the tongue, showing that the first fermentation process has started.  Others are better at making wine than us.

Finally, we were introduced today to the joys of getting your fruit crushed and juiced.  Lydie and Dominique Edin at Clefs have a huge fruit press, pasteurising system and bottling kit.  You can take along 100 kilos of fruit (ideally apples) or more and they will run it through their press, pasteurise it (unless you want to keep some unpasteurised for cider making) and bottle it for you for a very reasonable price per produced litre of juice.  We went along with friends who were old hands at the pressing game, and had ordered a slot on the press, and came home with 50 litres of bottled juice, still hot from the pasteurising process.  The juice keeps for up to 2 years, but if it is as good as it looks, I doubt it will last much beyond May!!

As I eyed up the juice, jams, pumpkins, chutneys and nets, I felt that we might be nearly ready for winter.  If only we could just get the fire wood issue sorted out...