Читать книгу Tarte Tatin: More of La Belle Vie on Rue Tatin - Susan Loomis - Страница 8

I love waking up on Saturday morning; even from inside my bedroom I can feel the lilt in the air because it’s my favourite day of the week, market day.

I like to get to the market by 8.30 a.m. If I go any earlier the vendors won’t have their stands fully set up; much later and the crowds who at that hour are still at home taking their last sips of coffee and wiping the crumbs of baguette from the corners of their mouths, will descend to block the passages, chat with the vendors and stand in long queues in front of the most coveted produce. By getting there before them I can do all of these things at a leisurely pace, and still be home in time to put in a good, full day of cooking.

I have a prescribed order to my marketing, which rarely varies. I walk out of our courtyard and head right down the main street of town to the bank’s cash machine. I am already in heaven as I watch the street wake up: the florists are putting out the last plants and buckets of flowers on the pavement; Brigitte, the owner of Laure Boutique is arranging the precarious stacks of baskets and postcard racks that announce her store; and one of the women who works at the charcuterie is carefully spelling out the daily specials on a sandwich board outside the shop. I always, every time, admire her slightly Victorian handwriting and the way she manages to produce a perfectly straight, perfectly justified list.

Brigitte looks up as I pass, takes off her glasses and we kiss twice on each cheek, then I go on. When I turn the corner from the main street I can hear the hum of the market, which will build to more of a crescendo as it swings into its full, mid-morning rhythm.

When I turn again, into the market, I get the same feeling as when I set foot on the dance floor: the rhythm takes over and I pick up my pace, straighten my back and hold my head a bit higher as I meet the sounds and colours.

I refer to this street as ‘goat cheese alley’ because the goat’s cheese producer is here with his soft, creamy fresh cheeses. I don’t dare buy any now because they’re so fragile they need special handling or they’ll turn to mush, but I smile and nod to the producer, who is usually sharing a rillettes sandwich with his neighbour, the produits de luxe, or luxury products man across the way. I’ll buy cheese from him just before I leave the market to return home.

I smile at the produits de luxe man, too. He has the most exquisite smoked herring, fat, luscious fillets of salt cod, dried and peppered mackerel fillets, gorgeous smoked salmon and trout. I buy the herring and the salt cod most often – the first to serve with boiled potatoes and fresh onions, the latter to serve in dozens of different ways, though my favourite preparation is a silken, garlicky puree called brandade.

Next to him is the plant man who, each year, has the most beautiful pansies and petunias. I always buy royal blue pansies for the autumn and winter window boxes, which I like to mix with white, or white and salmon. Come spring and I plant pots with his deep purple petunias, which fill our courtyard with their vanilla aroma. Along with the fuchsia and white and mauve petunias in the window boxes, they make a riotous display of colour that lasts right into autumn.

The long farm-stall next to him is manned by a trio of young farmers who laugh and make jokes all morning long. The mother of one of them is there sometimes, too, and she is just as jovial as they. I check out their produce as I walk by, cataloguing it in my head in case they’ve got something I’ll need when I return. The market is full of quirky personalities, and across the street is one of them: a woman with an assortment of fruits and vegetables that she grows herself and that she claims are all organic. She’s got that honest, country look that can’t help but be attractive; I bought most of my vegetables from her when I first began shopping at the market years ago. But I learned to pass her by, because each time I returned home I would find something rotten, unripe or otherwise inedible in the bottom of my bag. Then I began hearing others complain about her. How she stays in business I’ll never know, but she seems to do just fine. Kitty corner from her is a snaggle-toothed man with unkempt hair who sells very few items, all of them slightly smudged and grubby. I cannot imagine anyone actually buying the smashed pats of butter he says he makes, or the boxes of nuts that are surely from several years ago, judging by their allure. He is a distant cousin of people we know, and all they can say is that he was put on this earth to be mean. Mean he may be and a cheater to boot, if what they say is true, but he certainly seems to enjoy himself at the market, and is always in conversation with one of his neighbours.

The Portuguese stand at the corner scents the air with peppers, garlic and lemon from a dozen varieties of seasoned olives. The charming proprietor and his carbon copy of a son smile shyly as they spoon them into small plastic bags, then knot them tightly with a quick flip and turn. They also sell strings of gorgeous sun-dried figs, white and yellow cornmeal, deliciously salty air-cured pork loin called luomo, candied fruits including kumquats – which I buy at Christmas – and an assortment of Portuguese wines, cheeses and spices.

Once past this stand I make a beeline for Jean-Claude and Monique Martin, the undisputed reigning family of the market. Oh, there are many other wonderful producers and much delicious produce, but none have the finesse of character and produce that Jean-Claude and Monique possess. My mouth waters as I stand there looking at their crates full of violet-flavoured mâche (lamb’s lettuce), delicate cauliflower, sweet carrots, earthy potatoes and celery root.

Jean-Claude is small and wiry with intense blue eyes that burn with humour and intelligence. Monique is small and much calmer, with a steady, direct gaze. Their daughter Myriam, with her choppy punk haircut and her slim 1950s glasses doesn’t say much, but she’s got a lively glint in her eyes, as does her older brother Xavier, who speaks with a charming lisp. They both work hard at the market stall with their parents, though each holds a full-time job during the week.

It pays to get to the Martins’ stall early, as they are extremely popular. Jean-Claude is full of mischievous comments, and when he sees someone he knows well he booms a greeting of ‘Ça va ti?’ which is the local patois for ‘How’re you doing?’ Monique gives a kiss on each cheek to customers, some of whom the couple has served for the twenty years they’ve been coming to the market in Louviers. I’ve learned over time that Monique has a quick wit. I was reminded of it most recently when I was struggling to find exact change in my purse full of euros and cents. France had changed its currency from francs to euros about two months before, in what had been an amazingly tranquil transition. There were some complaints, particularly about the size of the small denominations of coins, the kind I was trying to locate so that I could give Monique exact change. ‘Oh, I’m just like an old lady digging in my purse,’ I said, frustrated with the sameness of all the coins.

‘Suzanne,’ Monique replied with a straight face, ‘the old ladies have a lot less trouble than you.’

I first struck up a friendship with the Martins over recipes. Monique is a good country cook who loves to talk food, and I have several of her recipes in my French Farmhouse Cookbook. Jean-Claude is a good country eater who couldn’t care less about technique, but loves to eavesdrop and add his two cents worth. I’m not really sure which recipe was the first Monique shared with me – I believe it was for a salad tossed with apples sautéed in butter – but ever since then we’ve been friends. I’ve been to their home to cook with Monique and I’ve shared meals and aperitif hours with them, too, sitting at an outdoor table that overlooks their rectangular farmyard.

Monique and Jean-Claude live in the lovely old farmhouse that sits at one end of the farmyard, while Monique’s parents’ house stands at a right-angle to it, and Myriam’s house is across the patch of green lawn with its big flower pot in the centre. Beyond, completing the rectangle, are hangars filled with farm equipment, hutches for dogs and refrigerators for storing produce.

I’ve seen the Martins prosper in the ten years I’ve known them. When I first visited them at their large farm it was dusty and in desperate need of some loving attention. The big storm at the end of 1999 caught them unawares and their chimney crashed to the ground, destroying a good part of their roof with it. They used this unhappy event and the repairs it required as impetus to redo the entire façade of their farm in trompe l’oeil timbers, which brightened it up immensely.

I believe one of the reasons the Martins have prospered is because they added an extra farmers’ market to their week. For once, in a moment of seriousness, Jean-Claude took the time to explain to me the marketing of vegetables, helping me see how much more advantageous it is for them to sell directly to the consumer than to go through a middle person. The organization required to sell at several different markets is daunting, and it means that Jean-Claude often stays at the farm to harvest while Monique and their children sell. But it makes their hard work and the long hours they put in worthwhile. For the consumer like me it means that I’m getting produce that was harvested just hours before I buy it from the person who grew it. The only thing better than this would be if I grew and harvested the produce myself.

It is relationships like the one I have with the Martins that results in the intensely flavoured food I have the privilege to cook and eat. I am so thankful to farmers like the Martins and consumers like the French who demand the quality of goods they produce, for they are responsible for the network of vibrant markets throughout France. They are the country’s soul, and no one would want to live without them.

The Martins raise basic produce on fertile fields that are scattered around the area. There are some behind the farm, and some down a lane and across a bridge to a bucolic island in the River Eure. Further down another road is yet another field. The Martins are fortunate to have their fields nearby; I know farmers who travel many kilometres to work their land, which makes their days long and inefficient.

The alluvial soil of the Martins’ fields makes for sweeter-than-average carrots, crisp, tender lettuce with a delicate flavour, spicy shallots and lush, sweet spinach. They sell many other vegetables including gorgeous tall leeks, incredibly delicious cauliflower and tasty broccoli, celery root, sweet and hot ‘jaune paille’ onions, courgettes, tomatoes, squashes and fat round beets as well as long slim ones. When I first began buying from the Martins’ they sold only cooked beets, a custom that dates from the Second World War when fuel was scarce. Farmers had a more generous fuel allotment than other citizens then, so they cooked beets in huge vats at the farm and sold them cooked to save their customers fuel. I prefer to cook my own beets, and I also love them raw, tossed in a cumin vinaigrette, so I asked Jean-Claude if I could buy some raw beets from him. He brought a crate the next week and found that other customers liked them raw, too. Now the Martins always have raw beets along with the cooked.

I noticed that each week the Martins would sell crate after crate of black radishes, and I asked Jean-Claude what people did with them, for I had only ever come across black radish grated and tossed with rice-wine vinegar. Jean-Claude opened his eyes wide and looked at me as if I was an imbecile. ‘Suzanne, you don’t know what to do with black radishes?’ he said in an exaggeratedly surprised tone. ‘Monique, viens dire à Suzanne ce qu’il faut faire avec les radis noir. Come and tell Susan what to do with black radishes.’

She laughed and said, ‘C’est simple.’ She told me to slice them thin and serve them on fresh bread slathered with butter, or toss them in a shallot-rich vinaigrette. I do both and we all love their nutty, slightly hot flavour. It turns out they have medicinal properties, too, the most common being a cure for a sore throat once they’ve been cooked with sugar to a golden purée.

The Martins periodically invite me to stop by the farm, which is a twenty-minute drive from Louviers. Most recently I took Fiona, and with Monique we ambled along the ‘chemin de halage’, the towpath that was used by horses to drag barges down the River Eure. Almost every riverside town and village in France has such a road, and it provides an insight into the life of the community, as it is hidden from the main streets behind homes, farms and factories. In this particular farming village it runs along behind tidy productive gardens and small fields, a restored manor house and little fishing huts that have been turned into vacation homes. We saw flowers and vegetables, rabbits and chickens, people having drinks under huge parasols, fishermen reeling in their small, wiggly catch. We even picked some redcurrants that hung over a fence into the pathway. Our return to the Martins’ farm, which is in the centre of the village, coincided with Jean-Claude’s return from the fields, and it gave us a chance to take a drink together at the large table outside. Monique’s parents joined us too, and it was a warm, friendly time.

When I’ve finished at the Martins’ stall at the market I pack everything carefully into my basket and they tell me what I owe. How, I always wonder, is it possible to get so much for so little? I would be willing to pay so much more for all this gorgeous produce that my family, my luncheon guests and my cooking school students enjoy so much. I walk away from the stand thinking that I’m getting much, much more than I’ve paid for.

When I’m shopping for my cooking classes or for a special lunch I buy a lot of produce, and take no end of teasing. After I’ve chosen multiple heads of lettuce, enough carrots and leeks to make soup or turn into a garnish, radishes and baby potatoes for an appetizer, aubergine and tomatoes to accompany something from the grill, my basket is overflowing. One week I was asking about the keeping qualities of their shell beans: I needed them on Friday morning to serve as a garnish on sautéed foie gras, and our market is on Saturday morning. ‘Xavier can deliver them to you on Friday morning: he goes to Louviers every day,’ Monique said. Xavier nodded in acquiescence. I looked at him a bit sceptically. ‘Are you sure that this is convenient for you?’ I asked. ‘If you don’t mind getting them at seven-thirty in the morning, I’ll do it whenever you want,’ he responded. Imagine: farm-fresh vegetables delivered to my door. I accepted, gratefully, realizing that this might change my shopping habits forever.

I walk right by the gorgeous loaves of sourdough bread that are displayed at a stand next to the Martins’, and which beckon like a siren’s call. I’ve succumbed before to this bread, which is sold by the pound, and each time I’ve been disappointed. The crust is dark and shatteringly crisp, the ‘mie’, or crumb, is filled with irregular holes, just like good bread should be, but there is an aftertaste of chlorine. I assume it is from the water used in the bread since, according to the man who sells it-who I don’t think is actually the man who makes it – the only ingredients in this bread are the sacred triumvirate of flour, water and salt. Unfortunately, not everything at the market is as it seems.

Baptiste’s stand is next. The farm he works with his uncle must be in a microclimate, for while he has just about the same variety of produce that the Martins do, his is always a bit in advance, which gives him an edge – he’s got the first tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, courgettes, and a variety of strawberry called Mara des Bois that produces from early spring into autumn with a flavour and aroma so musky and sweet it should be bottled. I always think I’ll serve them with a cake or a crème brûlée, but we usually end up eating them all before I can do anything with them.

In the winter Baptiste makes his fortune, a word I use as hyperbole, on Belgian endive. This he cultivates in soil, unlike most endive in France, which is cultivated hydroponically. It is in season from November to March or April, depending on the year, and he sells every single endive that he harvests.

I get milk across the way from Baptiste, then continue on down the row of stalls to a vendor who specializes in Hass avocados which, depending on the time of year, are either from Spain or Israel, and are unparalleled in flavour. On my way I bypass Guy-Guy, the charcutier, despite the delicious aromas emanating from his huge pan of bubbling choucroute, or sauerkraut, his fat sausages, his smoked hams and his enormous, garlicky pâtés. I shopped at this large, colourful stall until I discovered a charcutier whose products are finer, more richly and carefully flavoured, less mass-produced than Guy-Guy’s.

I don’t know why it took me so long to discover him, for his pork products are head and shoulders above anyone else’s at the market, or in the town of Louviers, for that matter. A dapper little man with pomaded hair and a tidy white coat, he and his plump, blonde-haired wife are old-fashioned and gracious, products of a different era. On Saturdays they have two young men working alongside them, one of which, I’m almost certain, is their son. Though they are all very pleasant, they have no time for chit-chat, since the queue at their stand is long and insistent. As I wait I watch people load up for the week on pâté, sausages, garlicky saucisson à l’ail, ham, tripe, head cheese, jellied pigs’ feet. I buy ‘jambon à l’os’, ham on the bone, which the charcutier hand-cuts into sumptuous, uneven slices, which I like to serve along with a green salad dressed with chive vinaigrette. I’m not even a ham lover, but for his boiled ham I make a huge, almost gluttonous exception. We all love his garlicky sausages, which I serve with vinaigrette-dressed green beans and potatoes, or atop a salad. His lightly smoked bacon, which, like all bacon in France, is lean and delicately flavoured, is delicious too.

Beyond the charcuterie truck and past the honey man, his card table loaded with several kinds of honey and handmade beeswax candles, is the quiche truck. Here Madeleine, Monique Martin’s cousin, and her husband Jean-Pierre sell quiches, cakes, pizza and a few fruit tarts. They make everything themselves at home, except for the quiches – their specialty – which they cook in the two gas ovens inside the truck. I always wonder, when I watch Jean-Pierre put a baking sheet crowded with quiches into his oven, where I can see the blue flame burning, why the whole thing doesn’t explode. I would have thought it would act like an incendiary bomb, but so far as I’m aware there has never been a mishap. And the quiche truck is hardly a threat compared with the pizza truck and its wood-burning oven that parks in one of Louvier’s car parks every Friday night – but that’s another story. In any case, Monique and Jean-Pierre make the most delicious little quiches I’ve ever had. The crust is crisp and tender, while the filling – which is seasoned with Gruyère or a classic blend of Gruyère and bacon, with salmon and leeks, or with tomatoes and garlic – is just the right creaminess.

Often Fiona and I go to the market together, and when Monique sees us coming she’s already got a quiche that’s not too cold, not too hot, all ready. ‘Bonjour Mademoiselle,’ she says, and hands it down into Fiona’s waiting hand. Sometimes I’m so hungry I’ll eat mine right there, too, along with all the other people who are doing the same thing. Like them, I’ll go ahead and get myself another one for lunch, along with those I’m buying for the rest of the family. Madeleine and Jean-Pierre’s quiches are one of our Saturday lunchtime treats.

My périple, or route, through the market is not as quick as it may sound, for I’ve undoubtedly run into several people on my way. Xavier Rousseau who, with his wife Virginie, makes the beautifully delicate Rouennais-style pottery across town from us, which they paint in the traditional seventeenth- to eighteenth-century decor, is an early market goer too. We buss each other on the cheek, then do a quick catch up, our conversations usually revolving around the same subject. ‘How’s work?’ I ask him. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Too busy, mais qu’est-ce que tu veux?’ ‘Too busy, but what do you want?’ I often visit them at their studio and they are always there, sitting on tall stools by their big front window, painstakingly painting the dishes they so carefully throw and mould.