First French Friends.

Many years ago now, while living in rural France, I wrote a recipe book. To be strictly accurate, I wrote a series of vignettes connected with our experiences in our adopted homeland and added recipes at the end of each snippet as, invariably food had formed a prominent part in the story.

Recently, an old friend died. We met Joel in the first week after our arrival and became firm friends. His death had been unexpected, given his remarkable constitution, and made even more regrettable by only hearing the news after the funeral had already taken place. One of the penalties of moving around the globe so often. Here’s what I wrote about Joel shortly after meeting him. It’s untouched, so don’t expect perfection – writing was strictly for my own amusement back then with no reason to believe anyone would ever want to read anything I wrote.

 

Joel and Marie are in their mid-sixties and live in a charming farmhouse on the edge of the next village. Joel is now retired from farming, although the distinction is a fine one as he still spends most of the day in the fields. He receives a pension equivalent to 80% of the average wage, which, to him, represents riches almost beyond his imagination.

The life of a peasant farmer, despite recent adverse comments over subsidies and the inequalities of the Common Agricultural Policy, is one of back -breaking labour.  We’ve all heard of farmers pleading poverty, but with a new Jaguar or Range Rover in the garage. No such person lives around here. True peasant farmers farm this area, each with insufficient land to do more than keep a single family and no scope for luxuries.

Around here, farming is not an exact science.  A farmer will do as his father did before him, usually scorning modern agricultural methods.  Occasionally, a son will stay on after the usual age of leaving school to attend the college of agriculture, but most will leave school as soon as possible to work on the farm, or, in rare cases, pursue a completely different career.

Farmers have a passionate relationship with their land, an obsession with the very soil, itself. They devote themselves, body and soul, to working the earth, the spectre of devastating ruin always lying in wait, just around the next corner.  Pests and disease, climatic excesses, ill-health, all are potential disasters.

This does not encourage optimism, rather a fatalistic attitude to life.  Their natures are frugal in the extreme. Nothing is wasted. Restraint is the watchword; resources and possessions are cherished, especially the land.   No farmer will happily give up his land, even if it is of no immediate use, clinging to the earth with the stubborn pride of possession.

The young do not have this restraint which was imbued in their parents over successive generations. Comparatively well-educated and with the benefits of television, computers and a consumer-led economy, they refuse to settle for the life of their parents. The drift from the countryside  escalates year by year.

Joel has never known prosperity. Life has been hard and he knows the value of every single centime.  Waste, whether of food or resources is anathema, and he is the master of making- do.  Nothing is ever thrown away, an old van, minus engine and wheels, is the ideal shelter for a family of ducks or a sick calf, and the kitchen garden is divided by neat rows of upturned and partially buried empty wine bottles.

 

Joel is small of stature; perhaps only 5’4″, with more than a hint of a pot- belly, always wears a cap, even in the house, but has a smile that would light up any room. His sunburnt cracked leather face seemingly fixed in a broad grin, gleaming false teeth – a comparatively recent acquisition – prominently displayed.  He is completely without guile, honest, cheerful and unfailingly ready with some humorous quip or other.  He thrives on vulgarity, but has the gift of a natural comedian and never knowingly causes offence.

My first meeting with Joel had an alcoholic connection, rather appropriately given the nature of the man. In April the hedgerows of the surrounding area are swarming with the local population busy gathering the ingredients to make Épine Noire, an alcoholic drink based on the shoots of the blackthorn bush.  This grows all down the road below our house and is, in fact, prolific throughout the area. Accompanied by the only other English person in the area and his neighbour, I went on an expedition to collect these precious shoots. The neighbour, whom I had not met previously, was Joel, who insisted on driving ten miles away to a place he had heard was “superb”, kissing the tips of his fingers as he said the word. We three men set off, Joel insisting that such work was far too important for women to be involved, each of us equipped with a basket and a razor-sharp hooked knife.

Joel brought with him two plastic bags which he set on the ground, about a metre apart, and weighted with stones.  This was done with great ceremony, Joel very much in control of the two English “amateurs”.

“Toilette“, he announced, and proceeded to urinate in the area between the bags. We felt obliged, nay, compelled, to follow suit while Joel explained, quite unnecessarily, that we should not collect from the toilette area for reasons of hygiene – surely the only time he had considered the word and its implications.

We spent the afternoon picking the delicate shoots of the new growth, suffering stinging nettles, thorn scratches and other privations, secure in the knowledge that the end result would be worth the effort. Conversation rarely flagged, despite occasional misunderstandings of a linguistic nature.

My friend told us that he buys sardines from the fish van that calls to his village.  Each week he orders a dozen sardines.  The fisherman counts out twelve sardines, and then, tapping his nose as if adding a free gift, adds a further fish to the dozen. He then proceeds to weigh them, thus charging him for thirteen sardines rather than the twelve he asked for.  My kind-hearted friend has never felt able to decline the “extra” sardine. Joel was most amused at this story and laughed so much he fell into the ditch below the hedge and had to be rescued.

Driving home, laden with our treasure, Joel offered to show me his traditional recipe for Épine Noire, an offer too good to miss.

On arrival at Chez Joel, we repaired to the kitchen where the shoots were sorted into three equal bunches. Joel laboriously wrote down his recipe, involving much head scratching and licking of his pencil, and then asked us to follow him to the cave where he stored the containers in which the épine noire would be made. The container was a huge metal drum into which the ingredients were tipped and stirred around with an old shovel. It all looked very rough and ready, not to mention un-hygienic, but Joel assured me that the Eau-de-Vie kills all germs.

Eau-de-Vie is a pure alcoholic spirit distilled from a variety of sources, usually plums or pears, and can only legally be made by persons who were in the business of distilling before 1960.  The law was changed at that time and only the existing licence-holders had the right to distil their fruit, usually plum or pear, and the privilege would not be allowed to pass down to their descendants. Residents in this area, especially farmers with a ready availability of excess fruit, bitterly resent this law, which was passed in an attempt to discourage alcoholism and increase revenue to the Exchequer.

We have seen no signs of drunkenness being a problem around here. Any alcohol problem in France is mainly confined to the Northeast, where beer is drunk in preference to wine and in Normandy and Brittany where cider drinking is the norm. The sober citizens south of the Loire resent interference in their traditional way of life, and a flourishing black market exists, rather like the days of prohibition in the United States.  In a French home all Eau de Vie comes from bottles inches thick in dust, apparently from stocks laid down many years ago! Joel is allowed to make a maximum of 10 litres of eau-de-vie a year. I would never wish to suggest that he exceeds this quota, but he has certainly mastered the art of making a little go a very long way!

Joel’s wife, Marie, is a prodigious worker. Her hands have never known the protection of rubber gloves and bear the marks of half a century and more of hard work.  Bony knuckles, nails clipped short, unadorned, apart from a plain slim gold band on her wedding finger.  Hands that can sow, weed and cultivate a garden deliver a lamb, calf or kid, bale, how, scrub, clean, knead bread and darn socks.

Yet, these same hands will create a delicate fantasy in lace for a wedding gift and bake pastries of astonishing lightness and delicacy. Whether gardening, cooking, sewing or working with the animals, she never seems to pause in her efforts.  Slender, but with that wiry strength that comes from a life of hard work, she possesses that capacity of coping with all life’s problems which is so typical of country women of her generation.  She has never in her life travelled more than 20 miles from her village.

Marie is a very private person, invariably friendly and hospitable, but always holding back a little. The contrast with her husband could not be more marked. Joel is a walking cliché, wearing his heart on his sleeve; what you see is very much what you get while Marie is a real lady, well-mannered and always in control.  An apparently ill-matched couple, they have survived forty-odd years together in relative harmony, Joel being the cross Marie has elected to carry through life. We adore them both and look forward to many wonderful evenings together.