Deep France (41 page)

For the uninitiated, a Weight Watchers meeting will comprise the following essentials: a registration desk, at which the member presents her membership card for the sticker of the week; a
weighing machine, on which the member then steps to find out how much she’s lost that week; a table displaying Weight Watchers products for sale; a row of chairs on which the members will sit
while the group leader gives her talk; and the before-and-after pictures of the leader to prove that you really can get thinner here.

In France, two things were different. One was that you
were weighed with your shoes on, for ‘hygienic reasons’. In Britain, you take your shoes off in order to
weigh as little as possible, and think nothing of stepping on another member’s verruca viruses.

The other difference was that the weighing machine was discreetly screened, in what looked like the cardboard box that had once housed a big fridge, carefully covered with coloured crepe paper
and plastic flowers. Thus you could step on the scales and nobody but the meeting clerk would know how much you weighed. Nobody mentioned the figure; the clerk wrote it down on your card in silence
and handed the card back to you closed, so nobody would know the awful truth.

Our leader was another Françoise. She was divinely tall, which reassured me, since I wasn’t looking forward to being lectured by some Edith Piaf clone of 4ft 11 in who would,
inevitably, have been jealous of anyone taller. She was also very pretty and only about twenty-one; she too had joined Weight Watchers to lose weight after having her first baby. She was a
sparkling performer, and soon her group engaged in an animated sharing session about their dieting experiences of the past week.

It was far more about boasting than sharing. ‘I don’t snack any more,’ announced a grey-haired lady, rattling her gold necklace with self-satisfaction. ‘I’ve simply
stopped. I don’t nibble at all.’

‘Nor do I,’ responded a bouncy young woman next to me. ‘I eat exactly what it says on the sheet. Four meals a day. Not a scrap of food passes my lips except what I’m
allowed. No more nibbling for me. I’ve given it up forever.’ There was much preening from the speakers, fortified by much nodding and muttering of approval from the listeners.

‘They must be lying,’ whispered Annabel.

When it came to following the diets, another major difference in style was obvious. There was a huge emphasis on the pleasure of food. The cover of the welcome booklet bore
a picture of nine fruit tarts and the booklet for week two featured the cork of a wine bottle suggestively speared on a corkscrew. Inside, however, we discovered the unpalatable truth. Instead of
encouraging members to live on skinless chicken breast and Quorn-burgers with unlimited vegetables, like the British food plans, the French menus were simply scaled-down versions of the full meal.
A tiny veal chop with four green beans, a microscopic piece of bread with a half-portion of Camembert. A spoonful of beetroot salad, a tiny wing of skate in yoghurt and dill sauce, six prunes
poached in tea. Half a stuffed quail.

The recipe which had Annabel in hysterics for a morning was for stuffed roasted lamb’s kidneys. It was excruciatingly fiddly to prepare and it was not until she pulled the dish
triumphantly out of the oven that she realized that her portion was to be one single kidney.

It was then that I understood the real secret of French women’s figures. Their food-labelling regulations are not the same as ours. It’s very rare to find the energy value printed on
the label of anything. The label on meat will tell you exactly who raised the animal and at which abattoir it was killed, but nothing on a pot of yoghurt will tell you how many calories it
contains.

The French disdain calories. Their secret is portion control, enforced with a rigour that Chairman Mao might have approved. I had had an inkling, when Reine sweetly offered to fetch me a plate
from my own buffet at my birthday party. I thought she was just being bitchy when she reappeared with a carefully composed artwork including three green beans, one scrap of chicken and a lone tiny
potato. Now I realized she had just served me as she would have
served herself. Thus may one remain thin from the cradle to the grave, without ever having to raise the pulse
rate. I tried to learn, really I did, but spending an hour preparing a courgette quiche with a single courgette and the white of an egg seemed like a great waste of life.

Corny but Essential

The harvests which were celebrated in October were of the humblest and most central foods – the beans, which must have been the staple starch food in the region for
centuries, and the maize, now a heavily subsidised export crop, which has transformed the agricultural profile of the whole of the South-West.

The most famous haricots were from Tarbes, introduced into the valley of the Adour in 1712 by the Bishop of Poudenx, a hamlet in the Gers which must have been considerably grander in those days.
The city of Tarbes, for all its urban pretensions, laid on a grand celebration of its beans, but it wasn’t enough to persuade us over there. In any case, the
haricots maïs du
Béarn
, smaller, sweeter, with thin, satiny skins, were obviously superior.

The maize festivities were inescapable, and since everyone was fed up with the damn stuff by then they seemed highly appropriate. By this time the maize plants were three metres high, dried out
and brown. When a strong wind blew the stems rattled against each other, making a sound like ghostly skeletons clattering their bones. Everyone was sick of the ugly sight of the maize fields, and
fed up with the huge bugs of every shape and colour which seemed to hide out in there by day.

In the evenings, which were getting longer and darker now, they flew out in squadrons to bomb the villagers’
lighted windows with such force that in Maison Bergez it
sounded as if someone had thrown a tennis ball at the glass. When I went out to investigate I found one of the copper-coloured beetles, as big as a small apple, lying dazed in the border, feebly
waving his legs. I wasn’t woman enough to turn him over and the next morning, thank the hedgehog, he was gone.

The village of Laàs went maize-crazy, with a three-day festival for the harvest. The music and singing and the shrieks of the children floated up from the bottom of the valley on the
humid autumn air. The local schoolchildren were all invited to help with the festival cutting of the first hectares, and rewarded with a distribution of popcorn. The major enterprise, the felling
of the labyrinth, or the maze of maize, was left for Sunday, after the festival mass and the second
grand répas toutenmais
, for those still fit to lift a fork after Saturday
night’s dance.

At the Auberge de la Fontaine, Alain Darroze put his
milhassou
back on the menu. Darroze is an ambitious young chef who’s determined to reinvent the classic dishes of his
childhood for a sophisticated clientele. The Auberge has a pretty terrace on the square, and an attractive dining room with an open fire in winter.

It was when I tried
milhassou
that I realized that maize dishes are the comfort food of Gascon cooking. They play the same role as suet puddings in Edwardian England or oatmeal in
Scotland, a warm, substantial end to a winter meal for hungry people who’ve been out in the cold all day.

The maize flour specified in the old Gascon dishes is the same product as fine polenta used in fashionable ‘Tuscan’ cuisine. Maize dumplings made with finely chopped ham, liver or
herbs can enrich any soup you like. In Gascony,
milhas
, a maize porridge or soft polenta, was traditionally served with the
poule au pot
or the
pot au feu
. It inherited
the name from millet – called the same in French – which was the staple cereal eaten in the region before the maize was imported.

Milhassou
, a cross between a cake and a custard, made with milk and eggs, is a traditional dessert, a beautiful rich gold in colour, served with anything from chocolate sauce to a
simple sprinkling of sugar.

Le Milhassou

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas4 and butter a 23 cm (9in) cake mould or deep tart tin.

Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them briefly to mix yolks and whites well.

In a medium-sized saucepan, bring the milk to the boil and sprinkle in the maize flour or polenta. Add the butter and sugar, and whisk energetically, so the polenta doesn’t form lumps.

Add the beaten eggs, salt and orange-flower water, and mix well.

Pour into the mould and cook for three-quarters of an hour, checking to see that the top isn’t blackening. If it starts to turn dark, protect with a piece of foil while the rest of the
cake cooks. It’s definitely done when the sides are starting to pull away from the tin and, if you stab the centre
with a skewer, the skewer will come out clean, without
any smears of half-cooked mixture on it.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes before unmoulding onto a plate. Serve warm or cold, by itself, sprinkled with a little caster sugar, or with the sauce, ice-cream or fruit
of your choice. Alain Darroze makes a mini-
milhassou
in a dariole mould (a small individual dessert mould, a little bigger than a ramekin) and serves it warm, with a chocolate sauce and a
scoop of supercooled ice cream nestled in the centre.

Aztec Gold

In honouring the origins of the crop that changed the face of their region, the Béarnais firmly identify it as a gift of the Aztecs, whereas we in the Anglophone world
regard the Native Americans as the first cultivators of what my mother called ‘Indian Corn’. So the French discreetly express their disdain for the United States in a bag of popcorn. At
every celebration of the crop, there are colourful reminders of the grain’s origins: an Aztec-style idol in papier mâché, a photo on the poster, or a tableau vivant of an emperor
and his handmaidens on the float in the Fête du Sel.

The maize suits the soil and climate of the South-West perfectly. It’s a coarse, grown-anywhere crop, equally happy in the poor soil of the Basque valleys and the rich land of the Adour
valley. I’ve even seen it growing on traffic islands in Croatia. It’s perfectly happy in a deluge. In fact, it’s such a thirsty crop that there is an issue with local
environmental groups about the effect of its cultivation on the water table. Many farmers, particularly in the less rainy regions like the Gers, have built reservoirs to conserve rainwater.

In the wet summer of 2002, maize was probably the only crop in south-west France which didn’t fall prey to mildew, though the crop of 2003, ironically the driest year
in living memory, was useless and by July the farmers were ripping it out of the baked soil.

On a small farm, the maize cobs are dried in tall, narrow racks walled in chicken wire and roofed with wood or corrugated iron, which give the grain the maximum exposure to sun and air.
They’re used principally as animal feed over the winter months, and are the staple food for the chickens and ducks. Perhaps as a consequence of Henri IV’s famous promise, the South-West
is considered the premier poultry region of France, and the Landes the absolute centre of barnyard excellence.

The total dominance of the duck in Gascon cooking is probably due to the fact that, for a smallholder’s wife, rear­ing around a hundred birds every year, ducks were much more
profitable than chickens or geese. The preferred breed is the French Muscovy duck, a much beefier bird than any of our British fowl. From one of these magnificent creatures, the breast, called the
magret de canard
, and the
aiguillettes
, which are simply
magret
sliced longways to make it go further, can be as tender and meaty as fillet steak.

A small-time poultry keeper would also fatten her own ducks to produce one of the ultimate delicacies of France, the
foie gras
. The name literally means ‘fat liver’, and it
is obtained by selecting mature ducks, cooping them up in a warm barn for the last three weeks of their lives and overfeeding them with maize two or three times a day. By the end of this period,
they are so fat they can hardly walk, and their livers have become pale and enlarged.

To eat,
foie gras
is less like liver and more like butter; to the unaccustomed digestion, a bilious attack on toast, but to its devotees, one of the ultimate gastronomic luxuries. In
the days before industrial agriculture, the feeding – called
gavage
, which means stuffing – was a skilled art. Every duck was individually and very gently
hand fed with a small funnel, while the feeder stroked the bird’s neck to make sure it was swallowing comfortably. The old cartoons of knowing-looking poultry maids embracing their ducks
always featured old hags with nutcracker faces because the skill took half a lifetime to learn.

Today, with the large-scale
poie gras
producers, the
gavage
is a semi-mechanized and undoubtedly cruel process. It also results in inferior
foie gras
. The livers
produced by the old method were smaller and fleshier; the livers produced by modern methods are so fatty that they often disintegrate if you try the old ways of cooking them by roasting or
poach­ing. You can still buy hand-reared
foie gras
, directly from hundreds of small farms all over the South-West, and if you really can’t live without this controversial
delicacy, that would be the most civilized thing to do.

The maize is also fed to the cattle, and the butchers shamelessly advertise ‘Traditional Corn-Fed Beef’ when, of course, traditional beef would have been fed nothing but the long
green grass. Feeding corn, however, is seen as a much safer alternative than fattening cattle on the high-protein nuts that carried the prion proteins which are thought to have caused BSE.