Food – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

Gones to the city: Episode 21 Mrs Harris’ Grandson Goes to Paris

Having failed miserably to get tickets for ‘Les Nuits de Fourvierres’, for the second year running, I had more success getting tickets for Anohni and the Johnsons at the Paris Philharmonic Hall. Off we went for a couple of hot and sweaty days amongst the Emily fans and families on their ‘Europe in 5 days’ itineraries. As is our custom, we managed 3 days in Paris without a single visit to a museum or gallery. We walked all over the 10th and the 11th, ventured fleetingly into the 20th on the hill up to Ménilmontant and got the metro up to the Philharmonie de Paris, which is a glorious building in a music themed park, tucked hard against the Périphérique in the 19th.

The campus includes the Cite de Musique, a collection of music spaces including large performing halls, practice space and children’s resources. The Philharmonie itself is modern and shiny and only relatively recently completed, it is covered in aluminium bird shapes straight out of one of Escher’s notebooks. We arrived for our show in the Grand Salle Pierre Boulez at 8.15 and thought it eerily quiet, maybe she had been too optimistic playing two nights at such a large space? We opened the second of the acoustic isolating entrance doors into the auditorium to be met by an usher and a full house and then the lights dimmed, and the show started before we had even begun to follow him to the seats. Having narrowly avoided falling over the low rail in the dark and into the crowd below, we found ourselves in the center of the balcony front row and settled into the performance. A French audience is a joy to behold, attentive, enthusiastic and cheery, and they watch the fucking show, not a phone to be seen. Seriously, I looked over at the packed stall seats and not a single phone, no one filming, no one taking selfies, no one checking Insta, no one doing a quick work email. When the show finally finished, a couple of hours later and the band took its bows, then the phones came out, and they took a respectful shot of the performers. So a word for the wise, if it says 8.00 PM it’s not doors 8.00, show 9.00, it will start no later than 8.15 and do not even think about getting your phone out until the show is done.

The summer is finally here, and a city is not necessarily the best place to enjoy the heat and humidity. Few cafés and bars have air-conditioning, some restaurants do and our hotel, like most now, did have pretty good AC, but it was a sticky couple of days. We had a couple of great meals, an insanely good one and one that could generously be described as ‘average’ but that’s what you get when you eat at the unthinkable hour, at least for a Parisian, of 6.30 PM. Breakfast at the hotel was good, but it was spoiled by a tech bro who thought it would be cool to share his thoughts on coding protocols to the wider world. You get used to the laptops at breakfast, but it seems that the crass self worship that seems to come with working in tech in the US is hard-wired, you can take the asshole out of Silicon Valley, but you cannot take the Silicon Valley out of the asshole, even in Paris.

Tuesday was the feast day of Saint Eleanor or Éléonore, as she appears locally. Originally from Provence, she arrived at the ripe old age of 12 years old at Canterbury Cathedral to marry King Henry III, who was 28 at the time of her wedding, the first time she had laid eyes upon him. She was not completely unprepared for this life, coming from an overachieving family with her three sisters all marrying kings – Margaret was the Queen of France, Sanchia Queen of Germany and Beatrice Queen of Sicily. Eleanor was a loving and dutiful wife, attractive and a bit of a fashion icon, certainly compared to the barely civilized Brits. She had her clothes shipped over from France and was responsible for the introduction of a new and daring whimple, not an item of clothing with many followers nowadays but at the time was quite the thing. Unsurprisingly, as a well-educated and erudite woman who provided advice and counsel to her husband the king, his Barons got their noses out of joint. This was particularly the case when Henry went off to Gascony in 1253, and she was made Regent in his stead. She held the post of Lord Chancellor, the only woman to do so until the great Liz Truss was appointed in 2016. She had a major beef with London, she hated the Londoners, who seemed to have returned her disdain. She took her revenge by taxing her cockney citizens, and they didn’t take it well. Eleanor demanded from the city all the back payments due on the monetary tribute known as queen-gold, by which she received a tenth of all fines which came to the Crown. On a barge sailing up the Thames on the 13 July 1263 she was attacked and was pelted with stones, loose pieces of paving, dried mud, rotten eggs and vegetables, Eleanor was rescued by the then Mayor of London and had to hide out at the nearby bishop of London’s home.

She had 5 children who survived and another 4 who we are not sure about as they are not recorded officially. The first son became Edward I of England. Margaret who became Queen of Scotland, Beatrice who married John II, Duke of Brittany. The younger son Edmund Crouchback, (that’s a catchy name, not sure if it was used to his face though), who became an important ally of Edward later as Duke of Lancaster, ended up establishing the House of Lancaster that was one side of the War of the Roses a hundred and fifty years later. The youngest daughter Katherine died at the age of 3 and both parents were shattered. She survived her husband and both her daughters and spent her later years as a typical royal grandma of the age, finally living at the Amesbury Priory, where she died and was buried. Her heart was taken to London where it was buried at the Franciscan priory of Greyfriars. Henry VIII dissolved the Greyfriars and the remaining buildings were destroyed in the Great Fire of London. Quite depressingly, the building on its site is now the Merrill Lynch’s London office. The physical site of Eleanor’s grave is unknown, making her the only English queen without a marked grave. She has been beatified but not technically canonized, but her feast day is June 26th, the day she died in 1291.

On our last day before catching the train home from Gare De Lyon, we went to a small, modest restaurant called Magma near the hotel. It is the home of Ryuya Ono (no relation to the sack-dwelling keening contributor to “Sometime In New York City”). He and his Japanese team create precise Japanese influenced versions of French classic cuisine. We had a fun amuse bouche of leek soup with a Japanese custard, followed by a white tuna sashimi with a salad of aubergine and cucumber. It had fresh coriander seeds as a seasoning and the whole dish was exquisite. The main course was the collar of Guernard, which I have never eaten before and will now happily seek out at the fish market. The fish was grilled so it had a smoky flavor, but the flesh was sweet and easily fell off the decorative bones. I swilled this down with a couple of glasses of a sublime Chenin Blanc, a ‘Chenin De Ligne – 2023’ from Pinot Bar, the negotiants and garage winery of Chris Laurent and Fanny Caignard, sold as a Vin De France as it’s made in Brittany from Anjou grapes. Desert was equally divine with chocolate, ice-cream and a galette crumb. The skill on display here is already acknowledged by Michelin and worth every penny of the €39 set lunch.

Gones for good: Episode 12 – Dear Dairy

For those who may have noticed, I have a passion for cheese, a ‘Cleese in the Cheeseshop’ sketch long-list fascination with all matters to do with the fermented curd. I read somewhere that in fact they mention 43 cheeses in that sketch, and to this day I can probably recite all of them. I will assume, dear reader, that you are familiar with this staple of the Monty Python cannon, but for those who have been locked in a time vault since the 1940’s and are only now catching up, here is the original TV show version. The origin of the sketch is worth retelling. John Cleese was seasick while filming on the south coast, on the drive back to London Graham Chapman suggested he eat something to feel better; Cleese replied that he fancied a piece of cheese. Upon seeing a chemist’s (a pharmacy for those on the left bank of the Atlantic), Cleese wondered aloud whether the shop would sell cheese, to which Graham responded that if they did, it would be medicinal cheese and that he would need a prescription to buy some. Based on this insight, they decided to write a sketch based on this conceit. However, once they started writing it, they concluded asking for cheese in a chemist’s shop was too unrealistic without requiring an elaborate set up. So instead of someone attempting to buy cheese somewhere other than a cheese shop, Cleese thought that they should write a sketch about someone attempting to buy cheese in a cheese shop that had no cheese whatsoever, so they did. John did not initially find it funny. When Chapman insisted that it was funny, they presented it at a reading for the other Python members, who also thought it didn’t work, except for Michael Palin, who collapsed with laughter. So they persevered, the bouzouki players and dancing bankers were added, and the rest is history.

What has kept me from consuming too much cheese was the whole health impact around dairy produce in general. I drink skimmed milk and have for years to the point where even semi-skimmed, demi écremé or 2% milk in my tea tastes like I have added a dollop of cream. I switched to oat milk for cereal and coffee. The health concerns about dairy and specifically dairy fats became such a common understanding that they have been accepted without question and have brought forward a whole industry of vegetable alternatives and margarine catering to the avoidance of the dangers of dairy products. My first job out of college was working for the kings of trans fatty acids, Unilever. My parents under the same misguided instructions from the media and medical establishment switched from butter to some chemically enabled stabilization of mixed vegetable oils, branded and marketed as healthful, weight management enabling and smart choices: “Flora”, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” and Olivio. It now seems that the actual evidence behind the health advice that we have all been blindly following was not as robust as originally trumpeted, in fact “….sparse and few data for the effects of dairy consumption on health are available”. Au contraire, of late, there has been extensive and serious research on the long term impacts of choices in the diet, in terms of following large groups of people over long periods of time. The result of these studies have shown that not only is dairy produce not bad for the long term health outcomes but in fact the converse, consumption of dairy is actually beneficial.

In a study published in the Lancet for example, called Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology or PURE, the researchers followed 136,000 adults from 21 countries for nine years. They found that, during the study period, those who consumed two or more servings of dairy per day were 22 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease and 17 percent less likely to die than those who consumed no dairy at all. Notably, those who consumed higher levels of saturated fat from dairy were not more likely to develop heart disease or die. Another one, from 16 studies involving more than 63,000 adults, found that, across an average of nine years, those who had higher levels of dairy fats in their blood were 29 percent less likely than those with lower levels to develop Type 2 diabetes. So in fact there seems to be a benefit to consuming dairy fat rather than avoiding it. As soon as I read that, I was relieved, happy that my cheese obsessions were now part of a healthy lifestyle, but I was saddened that so many people have been confused and misinformed. That they have been actively encouraged to avoid foods that now they believe are beneficial. Milk fat, it transpires, is naturally packaged in a unique structure called the milk fat globule membrane, which they now think can help bind cholesterol in the digestive tract, as well as the fermented dairy choices like yogurt and cheese containing microbes which are good for gut heath and vitamin K, which is good for the heart. The crap we were told to replace it with made a lot of people money, but trans-fats and all the other binders and fillers needed to make vegetable oil look like butter or fat-free cheese actually does and will kill you.

Anyway, now that is behind us, we can concentrate, as the French have always done, on good butter, yogurt, milk and cheese, together with the myriad other products that you will find in the dairy aisle here but are unknown in the US or UK: faisselles, fromage blanc, fromage frais, calin, petits Suisses. I immediately went out to our local cheese shop in Lyon, Pierre et Marcellin on Felix Faure to indulge my new-found healthy life choices, luckily it was free of bouzouki and other manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse. Some Mont Vully, Epoisse and St Timothé in hand, mission accomplished. It’s not difficult as Lyon is well served with specialist cheese shops plus most supermarkets and grocers have a reasonable selection, cut to choice, not just pre-packaged and trapped in plastic.

For my weekly saintly exploration the obvious choice was Tuesday with St George however that is a reasonably well known story, no spoilers, but he is neither English not originally had anything to do with dragon slaying. Thursday the 25th was St Marc’s day, but that is complicated as Mark the Evangelist, as he is known in the protestant lands, is firstly a major hitter, which hardly fits my desire to shine a light on some of the odd saints who are feted each day in our local bakers. Most people will have heard of him, he is the Chelsea of saints, popular with the wrong type, a bit gauche and like the mess that is the boys from Walham Green, he has some dirty laundry in his meteoric rise to the big leagues. No Russian oligarch or bumbling American hedge fund yokels, rather that is it commonly acknowledged that he didn’t actually write his eponymous gospel. Not only that, but it seems that the majority of his popular life story details are actually filched from another Mark, the interestingly dubbed “Cousin of Barabas” or John Mark. Maybe this is the origin story of the expression “to be wide of the mark”?

We braved the torrential rains that have engulfed most of Northern Europe to go to the farmer’s market at Place St Louis in the 7th arrondissement of Lyon. It is the typical market with a majority of stalls selling fruit and vegetables, some are actual farmers, some are more classic green-grocers who buy their produce at the wholesale market. Some are specialists, there is for example one guy who sells predominantly Italian citrus; Sicilian lemons, blood oranges (which are confusingly sold in France by their varietal name more often than not, so you will see Moro, Maltaise or Sanguinello) and occasionally in season bergamots. The fish stall is excellent and the two brothers who run it always have a smile, even in today’s monsoon, often they check with me what the English word for the variety of fish that I am buying. We had an odd exchange due to the confusion over Monkfish, which they misheard as Monkeyfish so I was desperately explaining that is what was not a poisson de singe, but indeed a poisson des moines. There is an awesome poultry butcher, they farm about 50 minutes outside of Lyon and draw the crowds by having a rotisserie with glistening, golden, fat-dripping chickens rotating and scenting the air. The other end of the stall is the greatest variety of poultry cuts, roasts, legs, thighs, sausages, patés imaginable, and of course eggs. The delight that is a paupiette, is one of their specialities. A small parcel of joy encased in a boned, flattened leg of chicken, guinea fowl or turkey; the middle will be chopped meat and flavoring – mushrooms, peppers, herbs and the French chile of choice, piment d’espelette. There is a cake and bread stall who also sell great pies and tarts, all baked in their wood burning oven so that their crust has that flaky crispness that is tough to get from a traditional electric or gas oven. There is a good cheese stall with an excellent separate section just to contain their selection of goat cheeses and a butcher’s van with more traditional sausages, offal and cold cuts. In summer there are seasonal vendors with honey, baked goods, re-caning of wicker furniture and that staple of French markets, the guys selling mattresses. Luckily, as it is mainly locals rather than tourists we miss the rip-offs like the Pyrenees cheese guys, proffering free tastes and selling their large wheels of Brebis at the very reasonable price of €45 a kilo, which you can get from the supermarket for half the price. If someone is giving food away there is usually a compensatory mechanism, beware men bearing sun dried tomato hummus samples!

Gones for good: Episode 10 – Fishheads and tales

Salmon is great to eat, but less impressive as a color for pants. You can farm salmon in large lakes, lochs and open sea-pens, so from the perspective of sustainability you would think it would get a hefty thumbs up. Especially as we are supposed to eat oily fish, reduce meat consumption and support a sustainable protein source with no methane emissions. In the US, partly thanks to the ubiquity of farmed salmon in sushi, the annual consumption per head is over 3 pounds of salmon. That sounds a tiny amount from a European perspective, but you have to remember vast swathes of the US eat zero fish, ever. European per capita consumption of just farmed fish production was 6.7 kilos in 2021, the last year data was available. Farmed salmon divides opinion sharply, in fact in some quarters it is demonized. When I lived in California I could choose to only eat wild salmon and its depth of flavor and color is like night and day, but in France we get one choice of Salmon, farmed. There are by contrast a plethora of options of other fish even in supermarkets and my fish guy on the market (a long-suffering PSG fan), has 2-3 whole different types of fish, 6-8 filleted fish plus shellfish of various hue, seafood preparations like quenelles, fish moussaka and preserved fish like herrings, smoked salmon and kippers. But salmon he does not sell, as he cannot compete with supermarkets and their farmed Norwegian salmon. The concern with the farmed salmon, particularly that emanating from Norway, Scotland and Chile, is that it’s raised in poor conditions of health and hygiene for the fish. The fish meal used to feed them together with insufficient water filtration means that the farms cause real destruction around them and have effectively killed off the wild varieties of salmon that gave the original reputation to those fish origins. There are efforts to identify those sources that do play by the rules, but it’s not always that easy on markets or where wet fish is sold to identify whether you are buying good or evil salmon. Being marked as Organic is also a false friend, as that can refer to the food on which they are raised rather than the overall farming regime.

I once went wild salmon fishing off Morro Bay on the Central Coast of California. A friend won a prize at a private school fund-raiser that his kid went to. Another parent was a salmon fisherman, so he, and a plus one, got to go out on his commercial fishing boat. I was roped into being the plus one and at 6.00 am one Saturday morning was picked up to go and fish. My friend forced down me some disgusting anti-seasickness med with coffee, despite my protestations that as a semi-experienced sailor, it didn’t bother me. Off we sailed on a small fishing boat on a pretty flat, sunny morning sea while the Dramamine fucked with me. I felt like death for the first 45 minutes as we headed out to sea, finally the mate cooked us a fried breakfast – part of the prize thank god – and finally the nausea disappeared. We were using sonar to find the shoal of King Salmon the captain was in search of. This was definitely not Ahab and the beast, this was technology provided mastery of our domain. The visual clues were dolphins and seabirds, the dolphins smash into the shoal, which for safety swim in giant spherical shapes. The dolphin impact stuns and breaks off the salmon swimming on the perimeter of the ball, and they float up, stunned, to be gobbled up by the dolphins or the diving seabirds. The ball shape shows up clearly on the sonar, and we let out the fishing lines. Again, no romance here, just large hooks with shiny reflective aluminum lures on lines 800 yards long get trailed off the back of the boat as we slowly drift over the battered ball below us. We haul the lines back in and every 6-8 feet there is a large king salmon flailing on a hook, some of these are immense, the size of small sheep, 30-40 pounds in weight. Friend and I help with the hauling-in of the lines but the Mate and the skipper do the execution work, the gift to the school ensures we don’t have to bludgeon our way to our prize. An hour or so later we putt-putted back into Morro Bay, the catch nicely snuggled in the chiller hold covered in ice. We were each given one cleaned King Salmon as our bounty-come souvenir of our morning’s adventure on the high sea.

I am, as the regular reader will have spotted, quite fascinated by the daily saint’s days that the baker’s shop writes on the chalk board each day. So last Tuesday the 9th of April was in honor of St Gaultier. He should be the patron saint of reluctant labors, like my salmon fishing, and is in fact I was delighted to discover invoked in case of work related stress. He is also patron saint of Vintners, which is a good cause. St Gaultier was a professor of philosophy and rhetoric which was so exciting he became a Benedictine monk near Meaux, of mustard fame. He was appointed by the king, Philip 1st, abbot of a new foundation at Pontoise. The discipline at this new Abbey was lax, and he ran away several times to avoid the responsibility of making it less lax. He gave up completely and went to Cluny, which is actually not far from us at Charolles and was at the time the biggest and richest abbey in Eastern France. They sent him back to Pontoise. He tried to escape to Tourraine and hid himself on an island in the Loire, before yet again being led back to the abbey. He also escaped to an oratory near Tours before being recognized by a fellow pilgrim, who grassed him up.

After being forced to return yet again to Pontoise, this time he decided to go to Rome to appeal directly to Pope Gregory and gave him his written resignation. Gregory instead ordered him to resume his responsibilities as abbot and never leave again. Accepting his fate, he campaigned against the abuses and corruptions of his fellow Benedictines, and was beaten and imprisoned for his troubles, which may have been why he was not so keen on the job in the first place. He resumed his work after being released and died in 1099.

St Gaultier or St Walter as he is known in English, was buried in the abbey at Pontoise, the place he had strived so hard to avoid. He was canonized by Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen in 1153, and was the last saint in Western Europe to have been canonized by an authority other than the pope. He did finally escape Pontoise, as they managed to lose his body during the Revolution.

I have escaped the city life of Lyon this week by taking a late break to ski with Dan in the Val D’Iseres, staying with a friend in Tignes 1800. It’s typical spring skiing so today we had sun, sleet, snow and rain. It is by coincidence the last week of the Easter school break for Paris so the resorts, although not full as it is late, are awash in Parisians. Some are gloriously old school in terms of spring skiing means one thing and one thing only, working on your tan. There are great examples of people at each bar and restaurant with pine yellow tans, working hard to get them to the full dark oak tan that some of the older French ski-instructors sport. It was a sunny day yesterday and there were folks laying out in deck chairs at 10.30 in the morning at 2500 meters above sea level. If I hadn’t watched him play badly against Villa later that day, I would not have been surprised to spot Ben White of Arsenal fame laying out there too. He is a young man who seems to have taken upon himself the curation of a serious tan all winter and with his odd goatee, looks more and more like a pantomime Captain Hook, grease paint and all.

We are this week in the former land of Savoy, Italy is just over the mountain to our East, and so much cheese, ham and pasta is consumed. They have basically exhausted any way of cooking cheese, ham and potatoes and all combinations are sold for lunch and dinner. Tartiflette, raclette, baked whole Mont D’or and Rebluchon. Pasta with cheese, pasta with ham and cheese, pasta with cheese, ham and potatoes dominate the menus. The good news is that the local wines from Savoie are good accompaniments and great value, we had a Chignin Bergeron last night which was a bright pretty white without being floral. If you are spring skiing, you oscillate between being cold, wind swept and needing staunch hearty food and being hot and sun burned and wanting salads and bottles of rosé at lunch. Happily, the quality of food at French ski resorts puts to shame the rarefied efforts, at what is basically fast food, that masquerades as $45 lunches at any US ski resort. We are surrounded by valleys that in summer provide pasture for cows that deliver the milk for the Beaufort, the Abondance, the Raclette and the various Tomme de Savoies that enrich the local dishes. The other local drink owes much to St Gaultier’s fellow Benedictines, Chartreuse. In both Green and Yellow forms, the bottles are behind every bar, in every restaurant, in every shop. Here in the Alps they also have local Jenepé liqueurs which compete taste wise with Chartreuse and both the original and the local versions turn up in ice-cream and deserts. Lyon celebrates its affinity to Chartreuse like San Francisco does to Fernet, but for some reason our local wine shop on Felix Faure cannot seem to secure regular supplies. I am going to have a Chartreuse with a coffee one morning this week, just because it seems to be the done thing, and maybe I bring a bottle home.

Gones for Good – Episode 8 Nelson’s bells

When does the constant climactic chaos convince the conservative pols that this shit is real? I was reading an interesting post by the Ruffian Ian Leslie where he made the following point using an old quote from G.K Chesterton: “…the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The divide I think that is most apparent now is those who accept that the climate is fucked, and we need to do something about it, and those who don’t think we need to change anything. Either you think it’s an ongoing catastrophe, and we must do something, everything, to stop it getting worse, or you think it’s just more liberal, woke, green garbage, and you are not going to do a thing to change your gas guzzling, methane spewing lifestyle. That we continue to pump oil, burn coal and let methane vent into the atmosphere without limit is a mistake. There is no debate on the science of the climate crisis, outside of certain tin-hat wearing conspiracy groups. There have been and continue to be massive misinformation campaigns on behalf of the fossil fuel-committed, but you would think at some point even the hard core petrol heads have to accept that the consequences of extreme weather are getting in the way of them having fun.

The French endured their worst nightmares this week with the return of Nelson. Not happy with the mass destruction of Bonaparte’s navy over 200 years ago this week, Tempête Nelson ravaged the French coast. Record wind speeds of 187 kmh hit the Finisterre peninsula, followed by flooding and rain across most of the rest of France other than the very south. To the east of Lyon in the Alps 150kmh winds kept resorts closed for two days and on the peak of Chamrousse near Grenoble 200kmh gusts were recorded. This is not normal. Lyon was an odd twilight world on Friday night, t-shirt warm with crazy cold intermittent gusts and lit up by pre-thunderstorm yellow tones. The streets around the apartment are more Kiev-chic than France suburban as they are torn up, piles of concrete, pipes and barriers everywhere. The sewers and electrical conduits are all being replaced around Rue Garibaldi. This is a superb piece of joined up thinking that the French excel at; the reason they are doing this upgrade all at once is that they are taking half of the roadways on Garibaldi, Felix Faure and other major routes and planting trees. Lyon is planting 56,000 trees this winter, part of the national ‘Canopy Plan’ which targets 30% of urban surface areas to be tree covered by planting 3 million trees. They will create major gardens and tree lined pedestrian and bike paths completely separated from the cars. Having done all that work, they want to avoid then disturbing the roots and digging them up to upgrade someone’s fiber, so first steps, get the pipework done. The city has its own incredible Tree Charter which covers every aspect of the incorporation of trees as a critical element of the city’s landscape from choosing the right trees, diversity of trees for various uses, pollen issues, creating tree surgeon and maintenance skilled jobs, it’s here in French but just skim it to get a sense of how thoroughly thought through this approach is. The key benefit is that the trees reduce the temperature by 4-5 degrees C and have been shown in some situations in Lyon to drop it by 10C in mid-summer. So instead of causing more carbon by allowing A/C systems to proliferate, the window-mounted A/C typical of a New York apartment block are banned and Lyon is instead going to use trees, and lots of terraces and cold beer.

Today is Easter Sunday, so I thought I would give you a break from yet another pious rich woman getting a sainthood and would share some French Easter traditions. Every pâtisserie and chocolatier is chockablock with chocolate Easter baskets and chocolate animals full of treats and little eggs. Unlike in the UK or the US, the animal of choice is not the rabbit. The French quite correctly from a physiological perspective prefer the Chicken as the animal to bear the chocolate eggs. So chocolate chickens, chocolate frogs, chocolate shrimp, chocolate hippos, even lots of chocolate fish but not many bunnykins in sight. So if the Easter Rabbit is not delivering the Easter eggs, who is? Well of course here in France the Bells are. Bells? This is a deeply Catholic tradition. From Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday, the church bells are stilled. To explain the absence of the bells ringing, they decided to tell the children the bells were going to Rome and the Pope would bless them before their return. Then Easter Saturday night and Sunday morning the bells ring again, bringing treats back from Rome and hey presto chocolate fish, eggs, chickens, hippos are strewn around. In eastern France, to replace the bells “gone to Rome” during Holy Week, children rang rattles in the streets to announce services. The altar boys got a starring role in those 3 days too, as they would announce the services several times during the day. The first time they shouted: ‘Réveillez-vous’ “Wake up”. The second time: ‘Préparez vous!’ “Get ready.” The third: “Hurry up”, ‘Dépêchez-vous’. We woke up, got ourselves ready, and then hurried over to La Garibaldine to line up in the rain and secure a chocolate chicken.

We also celebrated Easter on Friday night over on the banks of the Saone in the old town at Grive. The narrow streets gave us some protection from the gusts, and the chalk board menu of small dishes never disappoints. We had not been for a while, so every dish was new to us. Small plates work great for a couple or as we were 3, but for 4 they can be a pain as no dish comes with more than 3 items and if you order 2 plates it’s still odd with 6 items for 4 people. The veggie dishes were superb, white asparagus is just in season, and you cannot go wrong with roast celeriac. The pulled pork on a bed of roast mashed parsnip was a winner too. There were 3 fish dishes, monk fish wrapped in cabbage and confit of cod on a squid ink sauce as well as bulots with miso mayo. Bulots are sea snails, they are rarely seen on a menu in England and never in the US but the French rightly love them, as do I. Less chewy than clams but more substantial than mussels they are often served as part of a large seafood platter, the ‘Sélection de Fruits De Mer’ served up on a stand at coastal sea-food places in Province and the Cote L’Atlantique. For the squeamish, pulling them from the shell can be off-putting, but they were served here already shelled. Monday is Poisson d’Avril but that is a fish tale for another day.

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Gones for good: Episode 7 – Bread Heads

There was a recent article in the storied business journal, the Harvard Business Review, on the tactical genius of the French Boulanger. Through a study of the bakers in Lyon, the three learned professors “analyzed the location strategies of 177 bakeries within the city of Lyon, from the beginning of 1998 to the end of 2017”. They were surprised that Traditionalist bakeries (in the food capital of France) had survived. Bread making in France is a relatively simple business and is regulated in part. The ‘baguette traditionnelle’ specifically by law, can contain only flour, water, salt, and yeast. By their name, the Traditionalists don’t use a variety of “time- and cost-saving practices (such as the use of mixes and frozen dough), which are more or less invisible to consumers”. My emphasis in bold. What does not appear once in the research paper is the word or even the concept of taste. I could be snarky and make the case that as 2 of the three researchers are Dutch and the third Swiss that we should not be surprised. But really? The authors of the article were shocked, that despite these disadvantages, the Traditionalists have maintained a strong majority share of the French bread market despite modernist competitors using the cheaper efficient production tricks. They came to the mystifying conclusion that there was a logic defying trick by the Traditionalists, who instead of shunning being next to or nearby a modernist bakery, actually more often than not, set up right under their modernist competitors noses. So you make something you love making, in a time honored traditional way using natural ingredients and as sure as shit, tastes better than the bland cheaper option, and you are in business in a country that loves bread, in a city that worships at the altar of nourriture every day. Unsurprisingly, you are successful. In other news, wine is wet.

Other bread loving nations include the English and the Irish. Ireland has one of the highest natural incidences of celiac disease, yet you will not find a lot of gluten-free options. It seems the Irish have made a conscious decision that if they are to suffer, it will not be for a lack of bread. Nor for a lack of Guinness, although I was surprised to see the UK drinks more of the foamy browny-black stuff than its country of origin, closely behind Ireland is Nigeria. In a hot, sticky, equatorial humid climate the last thing I would be craving is Guinness, but that’s why I am not running a global drinks business like Diageo. Where you will not find cans of Guinness for sale publicly is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is dry and has been since 1952 when King Abdulaziz banned it after one of his sons got drunk at a diplomatic function and killed the British Consul with his sword.

This Thursday, continuing our own swordless tradition, we celebrated the saint’s day of Sainte Clemence. Yet another German widow of nobility who when her hubbie, Menginard I, Count of Sponhiem (a minor kingdom yet again in the Holy Roman Empire) went toes up, goes into a convent, does some good work and then mysteriously ends up beatified. If you are born on this day, the French refer to you as a Clementine, which could be confusing if you became so ridiculously successful in business to the point you are dubbed a mandarin.

Wednesday through this weekend was the “Le Temps Est Bon” (Good Weather) food festival which, although it’s the third week of March, was prophetic in its timing. It was 22 yesterday, and everyone is behaving like it’s spring. We went to one of the events, a dinner with the Mich 1 starred chef Vivien Durand from Lormont, near Bordeaux was invited to take over the kitchen by Florian Remont of the Bistrot du Potager, which is in the 7th, the Gerland area. Remont’s place is known for his South Western Pays-Basque style cuisine, so it was obviously a meeting of the minds. In a small world coincidence, we drove so many times across the Pont d’Aquitaine to and from Bordeaux airport to the cottage in Duras. On the headland to the south of the bridge’s entrance was a ruined château that in its day, i.e. before they built a 6 lane suspension bridge at the bottom of the garden, it must have had great views over the Garronne estuary. For all those years it was a graffitied husk of its former greatness, but in the latter few years of our journeys it was being refurbished, and it just so happens that Durand’s Black Prince restaurant is situated in the château’s former stable block.

The menu was a 5 course tour de force. Brussels, young and fried whole like a flower with a syrupy dressing of shitaki mushrooms kicked it off. Followed by sea-bass carpaccio, then a glorious sous-vide prepared monkfish dish. I think sous-vide is generally preposterous, but this was ‘melt in the mouth’ so I get it was worth the faff.

The main event was kid goat from the Basque Country, spit roasted and served in an unctuous sauce with girolles and perfect roast potato. It was then followed with a selection of spring veggies – roast baby leeks and roast white asparagus on a bed of fried kale and spinach with pea-shoots garnish. It would have pleased Popeye and my Olive Oyl thought it the best dish of the night. Dessert was a bit of a mess with some crispy chocolatey sticks that were nearly inedible, on top of hazelnut cream and a bread flavored sorbet that just didn’t work together. Otherwise, pretty great food in quite a cool space.

The other oddity of the night was the total fail on the music. As well as the French do food, they do music as badly sometimes. We dined with a soundtrack of electronic disco at a volume that was just annoying enough that you noticed it, yet too low so all you really heard was the tinny repetitive beat. The music that if played loud while the young bucks were doing prep in the open kitchen would have been fine, but not dining music, never, ever. In the loos downstairs they seemed to have replaced the ceiling speakers with former earpiece speakers from old telephones so the tinny beat was something otherworldly, laughable even. It’s a shame as the French can do dance music – Justice, Daft Punk, Cassius, Laurent Garnier but this was just crap. This is what good French dance music sounds like.

In Search of Sisi and the Croissant

Rachel and I went to Vienna. Inspired partly by the German TV Show “Sisi” which has been a reasonable hit across Europe on Netflix and which Vienna is milking for all its worth, the Sisi Museum, the Sisi Tour, the Sisi Ticket, which we did buy. We also agreed to meet old friends for a shared 3 days waltzing around the city. Rachel wanted palaces, interiors and palaces, furniture in palaces and if time permitted some palaces and then a little bit of vintage shopping. Our friends wanted to see Freud’s home but as you can guess as much as our friend had a professional interest in where Siggy hung out we were still too focused on where Sisi hung out.

Vienna is a capital city but it was the capital of an Empire so there are lots of very large imperial buildings as well as the numerous palaces. To make sure the empire was celebrated with the correct degree of awe and reverence, there are statues everywhere. Unlike your common or garden statue as are found in Paris or London, Vienna does statues in an 18th century version of Godzilla-scale. Immense and towering and just for good measure lots of gratuitous gold, not just sprinkled on top but gilded to within an inch of their lives on porticoes 300 feet up on the roof. They fall into two distinct camps, Greco-Roman allegorical, some guy wrestling a lion with his bare hands in 6 times life-size scale, or one of the Emperors or Empresses. As the peak of wealth and large building occurred in the last 18th century, early 19th, they are mostly Franz or Franz Joseph. The history of Austria is complicated and mainly unknown to the Brits, we were too busy fighting the French and the Spanish or each other. Meanwhile, in Austria, one family, the Habsburgs, ruled in one form or another from 1270 until 1922. They ruled at times, what was known at the time as the Duchy of Austria, through to basically most of Eastern Central Europe: Austria and Slovenia, with adjoining bits of Bavaria and Italy thrown in, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia: most of today’s Czechia and southwest Poland, Hungary: but not just today’s Hungary, but also Slovakia, Romania, and northern parts of ex-Yugoslavia. They even controlled through marriage what is Belgium and Holland during the time of Rubens, Van Dyck and Brueghel. One of the younger Hapsburg brothers who was there, acting as Prince-Protector of Austrian Netherlands took a shine to this art and returned with 2000 pictures which explains why they have the largest collection of Flemish masters in the world in the Art History Museum in Vienna.

We have a view in the West, especially the US, that there was a Fall of Rome and that was the end. In fact the Roman Empire moved its base to Constantinople, as in Istanbul, and continued with the whole Empire business, changing its name thanks to its recent conversion to Christianity and monotheism, to the Holy Roman Empire. Fast-forward 600 years and the Habsburgs, running Austria and most fertile lands to the East, become Holy Roman Emperors with Frederick III in 1452. So even though their lands are just a part of the Empire, the Habsburgs remain Emperors until Napoleon abolishes the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and Franz the 2nd of the HRE becomes Franz the 1st, Emperor of Austria. So that is why they have all the imperial stuff and unlike the British or Spanish empire, this was not built on colonial conquest and slavery, rather the removal of money from good old-fashioned subjects and land held by fealty to one of the numerous titles. Franz Joseph had a few of those: by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia and Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and of Bukovina; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Oświęcim, Zator and Ćeszyn, Friuli, Dubrovnik and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro , and over the Windic march; Grand Voivode of the Voivodship of Serbia. Fun fact the German word for Emperor is Kaiser, which, like Tsar, is a localization of the Latin term Caesar. So, lots of people to give to Caesar what is due him and that what paid for the palaces, museums and Ferris Wheel.

Austria having bolted on Hungary in the 1860’s is now the Austro-Hungarian Empire but by the time the First World War rolls around it’s referred to as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Which was tough on Franz Joseph as he was hanging in there as an old man and his nephew, Franz Ferdinand and heir apparent, was shot in Sarajevo to kick the whole thing off. He dies finally in 1916 after 70 years on the throne, the great Sisi was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in 1898. He had some other struggles in his long life. The Mexicans executed his brother, Maximilian, in 1867. He lost his only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889. At his death the Empire is handed over to his other Nephew Karl but two years later after the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, Karl oversees the official end of the Austrian Empire and creation of the Republic of Austria. He refuses to abdicate, so goes into exile in Madeira and dies in exile in 1922. His wife, Empress Zita, lives until 1989 and is buried in Vienna in the Habsburg crypt with full honours as the last Empress of Austria.

So the city we visit is the capital of Austria yet sits hard in the eastern corner less than 50 miles to Slovakia, but its heritage is the 1000 years of being the center of the Empire, the location is central to its former territories and its mix of languages, peoples and customs reflects that melting pot of Central Europe, yet sits slightly off its historical axis now that Austria is a much more modest place.

The key component to life in Vienna, apart from the miles and miles of grandiose museums and art galleries, are the cafés. At any time of day from morning until night, there are Austrians eating and drinking in cafés. The food is generally good if a little heavy, suited to long cold winters rather than sweaty summers, but it gets washed down with refreshing white wines which are cheap and excellent value. The Gruner Veltliner, even by the carafe is quaffably dry and fruity, their Sauvignon Blancs are good, certainly better than most South American versions and the Chardonnay, which is sold under the local grape name of Morillon, was also surprisingly good value. They do a really excellent version of Pinot Blanc called Weissburgunder, which is odd as ‘white burgundy’ should be Chardonnay. Anyway, post the whole glycol fiasco of the 80’s Austrian wine is high quality and great value. They suffer from the same lack of fish that German cuisine does, you have farmed trout, salmon or pikeperch, the ubiquitous ‘Zander’ but it’s a landlocked state that developed it culinary traditions before refrigeration and a river does run through it so unsurprisingly all they eat is river fish. Cafe food is remarkable, particularly in the quality and volumes of cake on offer. There is much standard high-turnover mass-catering fare for the lunches but breakfast and afternoon tea is based around hand prepared and baked cakes of many delicious varieties; bunt cakes, strudels, Sachertorte, cream cakes, layer cakes. Coffee is a big deal too, we didn’t explore the many complicated variations and just stuck with cappuccinos.

We had some good if not great food, including the best Weiner schnitzel ever. I had both turkey escalope version and the real veal deal, and they do something with the batter that I have never had before, even in Germany, a lighter fluffier coating would not be imaginable, definite yummy score. We had one Michelin guide Bib-gourmand meal that was the tasting-style over several courses, but they managed to keep our interest, partly because this place was known for its wine, and we did the pairings as recommended and even though they were the regulation 12ml they kept it flowing. Beer is good in Vienna and they have still stuck to the traditional measures of 25cl, 33 cl or 50cl, avoiding the French recent fascination with les pintes. It’s dominated by Viennese style lager but there are darker beers and the ubiquitous IPA is available, just as every bar has many gins for sale and the most common drink on a sunlit evening is an Aperol Spritz. It is indeed an Instagram world.

Rachel and I took a side jaunt to Graz in the south, very near the Slovenian border in Steiermark. Back in Franz Joseph’s day Styria, the region, encompassed much of what is now Slovenia and on the streets of Graz you heard a lot of Slovenian spoken. You don’t hear many American or British accents, but you do hear English spoken a lot, but with both parties having differing accents, it was very much the lingua franca for many people. Apart from the obvious gaff of thanking waiters with ‘Merci’ and wishing people in shops ‘Bonjour’ you can comfortably get by without any German, which of course is good news as none of us possess more than Danke! We did get into the habit of the spirited ‘Hallo’ when entering a place. Graz was smaller than the capital and in its own way more picturesque, spread under a fortress rock, spread around a river and parks. The Austrians of Graz withstood Napoleon’s efforts to take the fortress over several weeks and are very proud of this era of their history. More so than the goings on of the mid 20th century. As you walk along the riverbank there is a newly built synagogue, with some of the stones from the original synagogue which had been the religious center for 2000 Jews who lived in Graz. It was destroyed on Kristallnacht in November 1938. The old ground was left abandoned and only 150 Jews survived the war, some of the bricks were used to build a garage in the town center. When a suggestion in the mid 80s was made to clear the ground and rebuild, it was rejected due to fears that it would provoke an antisemitic reaction from city officials. Finally in 1998, probably when most of the old Nazis had died or retired, the city approved the construction of a new synagogue on the original site. Young local people from a couple of trade schools nearby helped clean nearly 10,000 bricks which were integrated into the new design. As I walked by each day, I could not help noticing how it still has armed police guards, quietly guarding the entrance on the leafy road by the banks of the river.

We got the train back to Vienna ahead of a morning flight home to Lyon the next day and stayed in town in the Neubau for our last night. It was a cute but trendy art deco hotel with a roof top bar, make it yourself cocktails in the room and condoms as part of the guest supplies next to the bed. We could not too excited about another Austrian meal, so we found a good Greek place and had food better suited to a hot summer’s eve and listened to an impromptu concert of guitar and bouzouki picking while the birthday party group on the next table sang along to the Greek songs. Whether they were the equivalent to Greek pop bangers from the 90’s or folk songs I have no idea, everyone seemed happy and occasionally one of the men, no longer able to contain his inner Zorba, would get up and do the dance, arms stretched out and little complicated tippy toe taps of his feet.

The hotel was so trendy they could not get breakfast served on a Saturday before 8 and we had to be out the door before then, so once we got through security we found ourselves with loads of time to have a bite. In another Presque-vu moment we had a rather nice breakfast in a Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie’s Italian’ surrounded by copies in German of his numerous cookbooks and bottles of his special Olive Oil. British fried breakfast in an Italian restaurant in Vienna airport, so much for Brexit. My one disappointment is that I did not try a local croissant, a kipfel, on the trip, Vienna is the creator of the little crescent of buttery pastry and they are known generically in France as Vienoisseries. The crescent is mocking the flag of Turkey as a celebration of the famous and critical victory over the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna in 1683 that allowed Austria to blossom into its middle age before its later fall into senescence.

Settling into a Saturday

There is a glorious luxury to settling in to a lazy Saturday. Not a Saturday full of tasks around the house, no chores, no pressing need to battle the great unwashed in the shopping center. Saturdays waking slowly, slightly hung over from the relief of Friday evening, drinking in the sounds of the birds, soft light of Spring through the silk of the curtains. Saturdays rituals, reading Blind Date in the Grauniad app, debating whether to get up and get croissants from the bakery down the road, pondering the culinary choices for the weekend. Looking forward to the Fulham game, this year has been odd, not just because we have to get used to the expectation of winning but because success brings the attention of Sky and games moved to Friday nights, Sunday lunchtimes and 1.30Pm kick offs. Today is a treat, a normal British Saturday 3.00pm kick off which fills the end of my French afternoon nicely.

Dressed for an unhalfbricked Saturday morning

I dont want to go all Nigel Slater and confessional but one of the other treats is wandering through the cookery tomes to find inspiration. I have flétan, Atlantic Halibut, from the football loving fish guy at the weekly market. I also have the last remaining cabbage that survived the winter, or survived me harvesting them too early assuming they were struggling, sweet potatoes and a large cauli to do something with. Coffee and one of the French biscuits that they call “Petit Dejeuner”, which are whole grain and have chocolate nibs and nuts, accompany a catch up with Private Eye. I know my biases are just being confirmed but the journalism of the Eye is the one consistent investigative effort holding the despicable and corrupt ruling Conservative party to account as they undermine or destroy what is left of the England I had the good fortune to grow up in. It’s ironic that at this very moment, across the plagued island there are many of my peers reading through their Saturday’s Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph feeling the same disgust and distaste but about whoever their target of their privileged ire is today, likely some part of the woke, liberal elites that are in their eyes undermining their world.

Tomorrow France goes to the polls to elect the President for the next 5 years and by the time you read this we hope that we are not reliving that sense of bewilderment that we felt when the desperate and angry elected Donald Trump and voted to leave the EU. There are many desperate and angry French people who Marine Le Pen has spoke to with resonance about their cost of living, their frustrations when they fill up their battered old Peugeot 208’s with diesel to drive the 40 minutes to their poorly paid job. They blame Macron. They blame the establishment. They blame them for their lack of the piece of the western liberal pie they feel they deserve, they blame the dark skinned people for taking their jobs, for causing crime, for not being French and Mme Le Pen nods along with them and smiles in agreement when they vent their spleen. She promises France Unicorns like all populists, “tous et n’importe quoi’, no taxes for the under 30’s, reduced VAT on diesel, no hijabs, no benefits for foreigners, standard stuff. The divisions across Europe and the Western World that are exploited by the Populists are thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr Putin aided and abetted by the uncontrolled greed which powers social media to be such a sustained force for evil. However, globalisation and capitalism has failed all but a moderately sized slice of French society and that is reflected in the polls where over 60% has voted for either far left or far right candidates. If there were such options in the USA we would probably see that kind of reflection too.

Saturday is also a day to reflect on what music have I been listening to or newly discovered this week, new vinyl arrivals have been slower of late as I am trying to be less compulsive. I got the quite lovely Wet Leg album this week and its no surprise they are the darlings of the rock media currently, as well as the new Jack White which is a nice and quite surprisingly good return to form. It’s also a day to dig through the back catalog and revisit old favorites. I consume vast amounts of music but quite a lot of it blends into itself. I definitely have different preferences for different moods and contexts.

As my Saturday moves sleepily at first it gathers pace and then late morning the coffee kicks in and energy levels go up so this playlist brings its game from folky to funky to just fun, enjoy!

Listen here to:

Who Knows Where the Time Goes – Fairport Convention
Cigarettes out the window – TV Girl
VCR – Antlers
Furry Sings The Blues – Joni Mitchell
The Melting of the Sun – St Vincent
Debris – The Faces
White Rabbit (remix by Marcel Dettman) – Jefferson Airplane
Superman Lover – Johny Guitar Watson
Cosmik Debris – Frank Zappa
Who The Cap Fit – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Slipping Into Darkness – War
Could Heaven Ever By Like THis – Idris Muhammad
Bicameral – The Range
Magic Mountain – Eric Burden
Ooh la la! – Goldfrapp
Into the Twilight – Jack White
Ohh la la (Mexican Institute of Sound remix) – Run the Jewels
The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore – PJ Harvey
The Turning of Our Bones – Arab Strap
Fluorescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys
Feel Like A Girl – Coach Party
Ur Mum – Wet Leg