Mirepoix market yesterday

   Now that tourism season has died down, we've added a Monday visit to Mirepoix market back into our weekly routine. July and August, it's crammed and--unless you get there by 8:30 a.m. (and leave by 9:30 a.m.) it's no fun at all.
   But this week's was. Sun blazing, everyone enjoying café crème under the arcades, and cheerful orange things everywhere--pumpkins, carrots, Indian bedspreads...

   Another uplifting piece of news is that, thanks to public protest, Mirepoix will not be getting another supermarket anytime soon.

How to make cassoulet.

  About a year ago, the members of Léran's culture et patrimoine society went on a bus trip to Castelnaudary. Do a search for "Castelnaudary" and you can read the whole post. Briefly, we cruised on the Canal du Midi and, after a massive cassoulet lunch, went to the factory where the cassoles--the slope-sided brown dishes intended for cassoulet--are made.

Each cassole is made by hand.

  I already owned one that holds cassoulet for six, and another that feeds four. What I wanted was an even larger dish, and I left with one large enough for ten servings. There it's stayed in the cupboard above the stove until a couple of weeks ago when I promised to inaugurate it at a lunch for four friends visiting from the US.

That's a standard size colander which gives you some idea of the size of the cassole.

   Dozens of cassoulet recipes exist. I ended up combining the one from Saveur Cooks Authentic French and Paula Wolfert's version from The Cooking of South-West France. I also took a look at Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Technique and main ingredients were fairly similar but I did notice massive discrepancies in the quantities of beans. Wolfert said two pounds (about 900 grams) would feed 10 to 12 and Saveur was fairly similar but Bourdain allowed 1100 grams for four people. All authors agreed that this was not a dish you make on the spur of the moment.
   We set the date and time. Saturday at 1 p.m. Lunch because cassoulet is a very heavy dish to eat at night.
   Thursday, I took the 500 gram hunk of couenne out of the fridge. Pork skin with a thick layer of fat. Feeling like Hannibal Lecter, I cut this into strips, rolled and tied them neatly, and simmered them until they were pliable. I simmered a fresh pork hock in another pot until I could stick a fork in it, then skinned and boned it.

Le bouquet garni et le head of garlic.

    Friday was an afternoon of work. I browned chopped onion and carrot, added cubed pork shoulder, added a kilo of beans (rinsed but unsoaked) an entire unpeeled head of garlic and a bouquet garni and lots of chicken stock. Everything burbled away for a couple of hours in a big cast iron pot on the top of the stove.

Pork and vegetables.

    Saturday, I was up early. The first job was to cut the pork skin into tidy squares and use them to line the bottom of the cassole, fat side down. On top went the bean and vegetable mixture, sans the garlic head and the bouquet garni, and everything went into the oven. Two hours later, I browned about 800 g of saucisses de Toulouse, a large chunk of pork shoulder, cubed, and the pork hock meat, shredded, and buried everything in the bean mixture. Next came the confited duck legs. I drained as much fat off them as I could and arranged them artistically on top of the cassoulet. And no, I didn't do the traditional breadcrumbs-on-top thingy because I wanted the skin on the duck legs to brown and crisp.


     A couple more hours in the oven. By now it was 2 p.m. and we were just getting into our first course, a light salad of greens, chopped green onion, cubed apple and hazelnuts.

Bubbling away in the oven. The cassole and contents were almost too heavy for the wire rack which fell off its moorings seconds after I'd taken the cassoulet out of the oven.

Tah-dah!!!!

    
     The cassoulet was spendiferous if I do say so myself (and everyone else said so too). The best one I've made so far. Next time, I wouldn't change a thing, except to invite a couple more people over and add in two more duck legs. As it is, there's a cassoulet "base" of beautifully seasoned beans waiting in the freezer to use as the foundation for a winter soup--or another batch of cassoulet.
     You want to know what else we had? Cheeses, grapes and figs, and then a small attack on a box of Ladurée macarons that someone had brought us from Paris. And a great deal of big red wines.

Lovely Ladurée macarons. Two dozen, each one different and a little sheet of paper to tell you which was which. We ticked them off as we ate them.

    
    

Quite early one summer morning.

 It was one of those July days that you just knew was going to be in the high thirties by lunchtime. But at about 7:30 a.m. as I walked down to the boulangerie for croissants, the sun was up and the air was cool. Here's one side of the school...

And here, where you can see that clump of trees, is the schoolyard side...

And this is how the same scene looked about 100 years ago.

Where Did Summer Go?

 All of this seems so long now that we're lighting fires most evenings and the sycamore tree in the garden has turned yellow. July and August seemed to race by. Here's a little collage so you can pretend you're here for summer in our part of France (with captions now that I've learned how to do them).

Memo to self: plant lots of nicotiana next year. It loves this climate.

Home-grown tomatoes. Even in October, the vines are still loaded.

The weekly marché gourmand. Early on in the evening.

Definitely the most popular entertainment at the Marché Gourmand--a troupe of "Brazilian" dancers.

The Tour de France passed through Léran on a blazing hot July day.

Outdoor silent movies in Chalabre.

And silent movies by the lake with jazz accompaniment.

A mini-break in Moissac. Definitely in the top five of best cloisters in France.

Sunflowers everywhere, including our garden.

The nightly wheel of pigeons over our garden, underside of their wings catching the light.

This year, you could buy salads of various kinds at this weekly enormous outdoor dinner--but sadly the Mexican food truck didn't show up.

More Reading Material and Other Flea Market Finds.

     Before I get into the stack of books I brought home from the vide grenier at Fanjeaux last Sunday (including this 1950s movie mag), a word or two about why we returned not once, but twice, to a certain barn. To be blunt, we couldn't resist the prices--which dropped steadily as the hours went by. First find--and my favourite--is the enamel coffee-pot that now stands on the bistro table on the terrace. An art director moment or what?

    Next up, but too boring to photograph, an ornate wooden knob to go on the knob-less post at the bottom of the stairs. Also not worthy of visuals, but undeniably nice, were two vintage linen pillowcases, square in shape, which means I must now buy two typically French square pillows.
  
  

But the best bargains were the books. Someone had thrown out a large stack of English gardening books. By the time I found them, the price was down to three for a euro. I walked away with Home-Grown Vegetables (published 1927) -- best page heading: "A Table of Manures." Varieties described in Rare Vegetables (1960) include tree onions--"the curious tree onion is a useful novelty"--Hamburg parsley, and Good King Henry--"sometimes known as Lincolnshire asparagus."  I do intend to research all these. Whether I'll grow them is another matter. The smallest gardening book but promising endless hours of amusement is simply titled Liquid Manure Gardening and features ads both at the front and the back of the book for a product called Liquinure. Slogan: "Your crops and flowers are liquid feeders." A regular diet of that plus a bottle of Corry's Slug Death --"one taste and they are dead"--must have guaranteed bumper crops.

I  picked up these two little  books because I couldn't bear to think that they might end up on a scrap heap somewhere. Untold hours have work have gone into these pages, all covered in spidery brown hand-writing. 

A close-up so you can see how densely the writer has filled the pages.

 Fanjeaux was definitely en fête right down to this troupe of "medieval" performers. I imagine the sombre colours and general air of griminess are far more authentic than the usual romanticized costumes you see.

    It's a charming hill-top village with steep streets, an impressive 13th century church and a sweet little tea-room. Pictures coming up...

The Greengage Summer.

     It's time I reread The Greengage Summer, a novel that, for me, captures the feeling of summer in France more than any other: its small-town life, its hotels, its modest restaurants with their strings of coloured lights in the trees, its heat and lassitude. Written in 1958 by English author, Rumer Godden, this poignant coming-of-age story was made into a movie sometime in the 60s. Anyone see it?

    Of the fruit--here known as "reines claudes"-- Godden wrote: "The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet."
     This afternoon, down at the café, it's 38 degrees in the shade. In the sun, it's so hot that windfall greengages have turned purple-black and literally cooked in their skins. They taste of compote, almost jammy. Some have already fermented, creating a pleasant boozy smell under the trees. I wonder if the birds and wasps that are feasting on them are getting a little tipsy?
    Friends had invited me to go and pick what I wanted from the branches that are almost bow to the ground with the weight of the fruit. Here's what I brought back. Some we'll eat fresh with our morning yogurt. Most will be frozen until the days get cooler. No jam-making when it's as hot as this.

     Our terrace faces north, so most of it is in the shade much of the day. You feel an abrupt temperature change when you step from the boiling hot garden into the shade. Lovely. The house is even cooler. As soon as the sun starts to sink, you feel the mercury falling. Mornings are cool, dew on the grass, and a great scented blast of honeysuckle greets me when I open the back door.
 

Sunflower Season

     One field among many--and the sight still makes me glow. Sunflowers line a stretch of the road to Laroque d'Olmes, lining the route as you drive towards them. Now I know how the queen feels!
     Beyond the field in this shot are bales of hay, neatly and tightly rolled, golden, looking as though they've been shaken out of a packet of giant breakfast cereal.