Last of the summer wine...

    Each Friday night during July and August, our village holds a marché gourmand. The best way to think of it is as a large street party. What started out as a small local event several years ago now takes up a major section of the main rue and attracts crowds, sometimes of literally hundreds, from several kilometres around.
    Midway through Friday afternoon, barriers are set up to divert the traffic and long trestle tables and benches are put in place. No plates or cutlery or glasses. You either bring your own or rely on the food truck you're buying from to supply them. Lately, we've been eating Asian food made by a lady who lives in nearby Regat but is originally from Vientiane in Laos. She and her family work incredibly hard. I'd already seen her in Lavelanet market that morning selling her noodle stir fry, spring rolls, shrimp beignets and samosas. (The French for chopsticks, by the way, is "baguettes" and, while I'm at it, baguette is also a word for what the conductor conducts the orchestra with.)
    Riiiight, back on to the main topic. You can buy pork chops, merguez, chorizo and regular saucisse, steaks of various kinds, slabs of ribs...from the butcher and have them grilled over charcoal.

    To the right of the butcher's truck, cut off by my inept photography, is a mother lode of spitting, hissing, finger-burning frites with ample dispensers of mayonnaise and ketchup to squirt over them. Elsewhere you can take away escargots, paella, magrets-frites-and-persillade and more Asian food. All of which says something about modern French tastes, at least in our part of the country.

    You sit down where you can with old friends, and with people you've just met. There's bread from the boulangerie. Bottles of wine. A lot of sharing goes on. Here's what the street looks like when the night market's at its peak. This one was less crowded than usual. Because it's September, most visitors had gone home so the night had a friendly local feel to it.

    Dessert was locally-made ewe's milk ice cream. The sharp-eyed amongst you will be able to make out some of the flavours on the list, which includes violet and rose-petal. Peter had chocolate. I licked away at a boule of  caramel flecked with sel de Gruissan. 

     The weather the previous Friday had been so abysmal that the planned fireworks display was rained out. Not this week. So, just before the scheduled starting time of 10:30 p.m., we all trooped through the streets to the rugby pitch on the outskirts of Léran.

Bonne nuit.

This Year's Final Night Market

As always, the village's weekly night market closed the main street every Friday night during July and August. The first year, maybe 40 people attended. Now, upwards of a couple of hundred sit down at the long rows of tables. All ages. French, English, Spanish...all the nationalities that make up this region.

    Also as always, the final event, like the faint shock of cold air in the mornings, is an intimation that autumn is on its way. 

    So, a look back...

   Our choir has performed twice, singing itself hoarse on both occasions. Many renditions of Champs Elysées and La Mer and, this past Friday, a song in Occitan. 

  I won't try to guess the number of wine bottles but I do know that thousands of plates have been emptied. 

  Steaks, chops and sausages bought from the butcher's van to go on Christian's grill, paella, escargots, crèpes, nems (spring rolls) and noodles: the food choice roams hither and yon. We usually don't. Invariably Peter goes for the magret, frites and persillade while I gravitate to the van that serves Mexican dishes. I've become such a regular that the man who folds the chopped pork mixture into the tortilla knows to add extra chopped cilantro (coriander) and a sprinkle of cayenne (on one occasion, recognizing my addiction, he gave me a plastic bag of cilantro to take home).

   Local, communal, seasonal, all those buzzwords that float through food magazines, the night markets are all those things--the kind of events that are only one advantage to living in rural France. Wherever you're reading this, I want you to imagine for a moment your main street being closed off and traffic being re-routed simply so people can have a good time. 

   Imagine that everyone can come along and become part of the fun. Couples, families, kids, seniors, sitting elbow to elbow, nobody feeling excluded. 

    Imagine that there's live music--guys playing guitars, dancing in the street (meet Marek and Shirley who run the village café).

    Last Friday may have been the official end of the village's summer but, hang on a minute, let me check the forecast. Mid-twenties doesn't sound too hard to live with.

Return of the Night Market

Sorry, sorry. Grovel, grovel. I've really been remiss about posting this week. My excuse: with guests due later this month and from then on through October, we're working very hard on the house,  continuing to paint walls and stain floors, discovering that drilling into stone walls to install curtain rods takes time and unpacking boxes that we packed over a year ago. That last job is genuinely fun. It's like Christmas. You feel the package, make a few guesses-- "the small table that used to be behind the sofa?"--then unwrap it. So far, everything has survived its trans-Atlantic journey although we have yet to find where the moving men hid the pendulum for the wall clock. 

    Meanwhile, excavations are underway on the terrace but I'll save that till I have shots to go with it. For those who can't wait: The apricot tree is no more because, as it is rumoured to do each year, it produced four apricots which plummeted to the ground and were eaten by snails before we could get to them. The small formal hedges are no more, although their component parts are in a sort of way-station on the eastern border (which makes them sound like Soviet era refugees). 

    So.... flashback to last Friday. The first Friday of July, ergo the village's first night market of the season. Flags and shields had gone up on the plane trees a few days before. By Friday evening, the main street was blocked off, tables and benches set up. By 8 p.m., it was packed. Stalls sold food. Mexican food. Asian food. Magret of duck, frites and that lethal mixture of equal parts garlic and parsley called persillade. There were moules. There were snails. There were little Camemberts to cook whole over the charcoal barbecue which is also where you take the steak or fat chops or sturdy saucisses you buy from the butcher's van (which also sold chocolate mousse). 

    The owner of the boulangerie was there, so we could buy baguettes for general plate-wiping and food-accompanying and to dip in the unctuous melted Camembert.  Sylvie from the post office was there too making the most of a captive and well-fuelled (at four euros a bottle) audience to sell bundles of pre-stamped envelopes with pictures of Léran and last year's night market on them. And this little citrus-yellow Citroen was there looking particularly photogenic. 

Snails + Fire = Cargolade

Friday, on the way back from Lavelanet market, we noticed a sign. Painted in white on the black plastic wrapping a bale of hay, the sign advertised a Saturday night cargolade in Lagarde. 

I've wanted to be at a real cargolade from the first time I heard about it. The nearest I came to it was a dish served in a restaurant in Perpignan several years ago. 

We had the date right and assumed things would get underway around seven. But it was eight before we found where it was. Not in the village square where we parked the car. Not in the chateau grounds, several minutes away, but down a track through the woods in a large barn with bales of straw stacked at one side. 

The butcher's truck was there selling steaks, chops and sausages as well as tinned pâté cut in quarters and various little cakes and tartes. 

Cargolade is snails cooked over charcoal. A wheelbarrow full of escargots in net bags stood near the grill. Before long, the grillmasters (including Christian, the man in the middle in the photo, who cooks every Friday night at the marché nocturne in Léran) had tipped the snails onto large rectangular grills and were cooking them directly over the coals. If you're squeamish,  stop right here. 

The snails waved their horned heads around and juices bubbled out but there was no escape. When we went back and lined up about 15 minutes later, they were all deceased, or at least very still. Thoughts of Cathar martyrs came to mind. At this point, Christian took a lardoir--imagine a funnel with a long handle--packed a piece of very fatty pork skin into it and held it over the flames until the fat started to run. He dripped this over the snails while his colleague sprinkled them liberally with salt. 

Nutritionists had better not read any further either. The rest of our meal comprised frites, beers, and a baguette. 

Cooking escargots in bulk isn't easy. Then again, ask me if I'd rather eat an overdone snail than a semi-raw one and no prizes for guessing the answer. The trouble is that overcooked snails stick. Peter compared it to pulling weeds in the garden. In both cases, you have to go very gently or they snap in half. Occasionally, we experienced a small triumph when one of us coerced a complete snail out of its shell. A whole curl of snail, I should add, isn't remotely like the small dark rubbery things that come out of tins. 

Great minds... I said: next time, we should bring nut crackers. Peter decided to use his teeth instead. Snail shells are thin so there's no danger to dental work, and it definitely let us get every last little morsel out. The taste of wild snails is dark and gamy, a bit fungal, and--at a cargolade--charcoal-y. The aioli that came with them was store-bought mayonnaise stiff with garlic chips. Meanwhile, the woman beside ate a huge steak. Raw.