I just finished my first feature-length book in French. Cloé’s already told her whole family about it, so I figured I ought to tell you all. The point in reading these books is for me to note the (depressingly numerous) phrases and words that I don’t know, look them up and learn them. It’s my fourth actual French book — still only the one had needed to count them — but the first was Le Petit Prince which is, I’m pretty sure, a child’s bedtime story that everyone reads. The second was on Troy, but I read that with Monsieur Taty; the man responsible for my erstwhile Congolese-French accent. The third, L’Étranger, sounds impressive because it’s written by Camus. But, it’s short and I read it because it was French, not because I enjoyed it.
Book numéro 4 is called Au revoir là-haut (See you up there) and it was so good that I kept trying to skim paragraphs so I could shift back off the edge of my seat. However, not only is that not the point of reading these books, in no way do I have the level required to skim paragraphs or pages. So, after blinking in confusion at a character I’d never heard of, I’d have to wind my way back up to the top of the page, underline all the shit I didn’t understand and progress as the author intended. Nonetheless, such was the quality of the book that I repeatedly chose it over English-language books. Though that is probably as much to Pierre Lemaitre’s credit as it is an indictment of Malcom Gladwell, who also accompanied me on holiday. All that to say, in case you’re interested, the translated version is called The Great Swindle. Give it a read. Though, bear in mind that this all may be the equivalent of second-language English speaker bigging up The Da Vinci code as God’s gift to English literature.
I say ‘holiday’. I’m obviously on an extended one of those, but I accompanied Cloé on her holiday to the South-West of France. Now, this is very much an unprompted opinion, but I’m not convinced by the ‘west’ bit in the name. I’d have sort of classified Biarritz - Toulouse as South-West, Toulouse-Montpellier as South and the whole Montpellier-Marseille-Nice corridor as South-East. But the latter already grabbed ‘South’ and made a bit of a name for itself. So, while actually fairly central, Toulouse is West of 'the South of France’. They seem pretty happy with it, though, and as I say, literally no one asked me. Anyway, the holiday was great, regardless of where it was. There’s lots I could write about, but I’ll keep it to 2 things and probably just write a lot about those 2 things instead.
The first: Ariège is a terribly underrated region of France. Or, département, rather. It’s about as far away as you can get from Paris, in the foothills of the Pyrénées. It’s probably like France’s Tennessee — rural AF and very proud of it. It’s also a region that is rugby mad and actually reminded me a bit of parts of the Western Cape, where hulking ex-rugby players haul themselves off the farm to enjoy a crisp glass of white wine, complete with ice blocks, with their mates, completely content in their masculinity.
You can travel for miles through nothing but hills and farmlands. The landscape is beautiful and the villages are lovely, provided you don’t miss the narrow French lunch hours. Hills are topped by a succession of crumbling castles, many destroyed in the Albigensian Crusade. It’s the only crusade that was fought in Europe and, funnily enough, there’s still no real consensus on who the Pope was crusading against. We do know that it was finished by Simon IV de Montfort. I only mention this as it may shock some people to hear that he was the father of Simon V. Probably not because of the numbering, but rather because Simon V is often considered the progenitor of British parliament. Which means that the Father of British Democracy is, in fact, a Frenchman.
Bear with me a second as we get back to Ariège. In France, the year 1968 is known for an enormous wave of uprisings led by disgruntled French students. In typically restrained fashion, the French police beat the living shit out of dozens of these students. A sure-fire approach to mollifying protests, this brutality meant that students were later joined by millions of workers in a general strike. The movement contributed to the fall of de Gaulle’s government and significant changes in the public sector’s role in French society and industry. Today, the French lovingly refer to the children of this uprising as the soixante-huitards. The sixty-eighters, and one of the rare times any sort of slogan sounds better in French than English. Another outcome of this uprising is that thousands of these soixante-huitards gravitated south and found their way down to Ariège. While these geriatric socialists were never going to create a dynamic economy out there, they have reinvigorated villages that may have otherwise totally depopulated. That generation has also been followed by a remarkable number of younger folk, tired of city life. And so, unlike many village markets in southern Europe, once the Mamis, Papis have finished shopping at 8am, the second service begins and remarkable numbers of 20 and 30-somethings pop through in their organic hemp trousers to buy their groceries for the week. There are villages almost entirely made up of artists and you can actually find food without meat in it. All-in-all, it gives a sense of longevity that many rural, southern communities are losing.
I’m not saying you should skip Provence or Paris for Ariège, but if you’ve been to France a few times and are looking for something else. I’d put Ariège on the list.
The second thing I wanted to tell you about the South(west): they have this dish called Cassoulet. And, in a French turn of events, the ingredients of the dish are subject to intense dispute between neighbouring towns. Having done a little research, the Internet seems to be aligned that it originally comes from a town called Castelnaudry and that the Canon of Cassoulet accepts variants from Castelnaudry, Carcassonne and Toulouse, known as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of the Cassoulet Trinity (I kid you not). Though it seems Montauban is also permitted its own, lesser, version.
If you don’t know what Cassoulet is, you may still have in your head some sort of movie-version of French food — fiddly little bits atop a white table-cloth. I hate to disillusion you, but to give you an idea of the refinement of the dish, the exquisitely named food historian, Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, claims that “it would be sacrilege to make cassoulet in Corbières without lightly salted pig's tail and ears." Voilà.
Cloé has a guidebook brand that she esteems higher than practically anything — or anyone :( — else, that we get whenever we travel. Outrageously, we even picked one up for Cape Town. I very maturely took this as a personal affront and went page-by-page writing in the margins when I disagreed with their recommendations. In any case, the Guide Routard for this trip recommended a spot in Toulouse where, thankfully, neither Pig tail nor ear are accepted components.
So, what was in it? All officially accepted versions of Cassoulet use what we seem to call Haricot beans in English. As Haricot means ‘bean’ in French this is, of course, ridiculous, and sits alongside some other wonderful English tautologies that come from the English not having a word for what they saw when they arrived somewhere and misunderstood what the locals explained to them. In this case, no doubt, someone heard a French person refer to the beans they were eating alongside frogs legs as haricots, and decided they must be eating Haricot beans. And thus, Bean beans are core to a Cassoulet.
While pig ear may not find their way into every version of the dish, meat in various forms is obligatory. Toulouse being Toulouse, it starts with a bit of crispy confited duck, which is very welcome and really quite good. There is also pork belly, roasted for hours, so the fat has mostly rendered (into the Bean beans) and is tender enough to be cut apart with a spoon. A bowl of duck, pork and beans feels like a good place to stop. However, there is then Saucisse de Toulouse, which, as a bit of an outlier for French foodstuff, does not have a legal definition. So far as I can tell, it’s a pork sausage. I don’t have anyone from Toulouse in my handful of readers and so a pork sausage it shall remain. So, we’re at duck, pork belly, pork sausage and beans. But, asked some enterprising ancient Toulousain grandmother, why stop at 1 sausage, when you could have 2? And so they add what feels like an entirely unnecessary second sausage — Saucisse de Couenne. Regrettably, there is an official recipe for Couenne. For context, South African boerewors is considered a fairly fatty sausage at about a 30% fat content. Couenne puts this in the shade, with a recipe that calls for 1/3 pork meat, 1/3 crackling (which is essentially pork skin and fat) and 1/3. Pure. Pork. Fat. So this thing has at least a 66% fat content. It is a well-marketed fat sausage. A lardy little landmine hiding amidst a duck leg, pork belly, pork sausage and Bean beans to round out Toulouse’s Cassoulet.
For me and Cloé, the Couenne was unappetising as I make it sound. Our waiter, however, told us it was his favourite part of the dish and if we wanted some to take home with us, he pointed out the little butchery down the road that they buy it from. All in all, though, the Cassoulet was really very good. We only managed one portion — and a very excellent Baba au Rhum — between the two of us. But we had not been chasing sheep up and down the Pyrénées all day, so it’s not really the Cassoulet’s fault.
As we drove the rental car back to Toulouse at the end of the trip, to take our train back to Paris, so the radio reported to us that general strikes were being prepared in response to the government’s budget and that the prime minister had called a no-confidence vote on 8 May, which he seems almost certain to lose. So, I’ll finish here and see if I can get you another potted political analysis, informed by my 60% French comprehension and liberal market-biases before the lights go out.
Love this. Love you xx