Scoop à la française

Mayor Claude Chave talks to his constituents at the opening of the local market

I have become the correspondant local de presse for the Bien Public, the daily local newspaper covering events in all of the Côte d'Or. I am "responsible" for all the events happening in Arnay-le-Duc, from official ceremonies with the mayor to the opening of a new producers market or a concert given by an accordionist at the senior center. Hard-hitting journalism, in other words. I have replaced a woman in her 80s who did the same job for approximately 35 years. The paper ran an ad for several weeks beseeching the population to sign up to cover events for the publication, but not a single French person submitted an application. When my friend Françoise told me she thought it would be a good idea for me to throw my hat into the ring, I said "Why not?" and called the paper's office in Beaune.

I explained to the receptionist that I was 100% American, and if this was a problem, we can stop our conversation right there. We stayed chatting, and it became clear that I was the only soldier responding for duty, and we were going to sink or swim together. A few days later, I was meeting with the agency head in his office. He spent a large part of our interview staring at the ceiling and taking deep breaths. It wasn't hard to read his thoughts. They went something like this: "What on God's green earth have I done to end up spending a Tuesday morning talking to an American in blue jeans about working for my French newspaper? What is wrong with my countrymen? How is it possible that not one French person wants this job?"

I couldn't blame him. In fact, my own thoughts were not that different than his: "What the hell kind of life choices have I made that have resulted in my being in this strange, windowless office with this man huffing in all his Frenchness, asking me to write a summary of a newspaper article to see if I can string words together in his native tongue? Why does every job I find pay less than the previous one?"

Regardless, we agreed it was going to be a great partnership. The chief told me he was going to be in Arnay on Friday, and we would go see the mayor at 10:30. Great, I thought, I'll get clearance with the main politician in town and be good to go.

Thursday evening the agency chief called. He wondered what time we had agreed to meet. I was startled that he was calling me for this information, but whatever. I gave him the aforementioned details and hung up. Thirty minutes later he called back, saying that the mayor was in fact going to be in Beaune the next day, so I should come and meet with both of them then.

This sounded fine, so I put on some quasi-professional clothes and went to meet with Mayor Claude Chave and the chief. We ended up talking for a good 45 minutes, with the mayor continually expressing mild astonishment at how many people I knew in town (he was among the last citizens I had not personally met in the small town of 1700 people) and the agency chief obviously enjoying being in the company of an elected official. As the meeting reached its natural conclusion, the chief clapped his hands and rubbed them together vigorously. "On boit un coup?" he asked. "Shall we have a drink?"

It was 11:30 in the morning in newspaper headquarters. Even though I had been here more than a year, and should have known better, I still thought this was probably an invitation for coffee.

Instead, the two reporters in the newsroom stopped their work and joined the chief, the mayor, and this out-of-place American in drinking a Chablis premier cru, full of minerality, citrus aromas, and surreal notes of feeling extremely foreign in a foreign land. We polished off the bottle, and-- bam! -- I was officially hired. 

I left the offices feeling pretty good about my professional progress, and continued riding high until the agency chief called me two days later at 10 in the morning with my first assignment. It will be the next post here...

Local Food At Home and in France

A new piece appeared in today's Valley News about how French and American people consider local food. The link is here and in the list to the right.

Souper Good

Soup is hot. Soup is pretty cool. And, in France, soup is borderline obsession. I asked my neighbor what French people eat for dinner. He said, "Un potage." That's French for "soup." Of course, "soupe" is also French for soup, but no matter. 

When we were in the southwest of France in late February, our hostess made Trash Can Soup: leftover lentils, bendy carrots killing time in the crisper, zucchini that should be making out with a Hefty Hefty Cinch Sack, mashed potatoes loitering behind the milk. Nothing a little water, salt, and crème fraîche won't cure. 

Soup comes with caution, naturally. A dietician recently commented on the radio that an all soup diet was no good because, "soup, it is just water and vegetables. We need protein, fat, and dairy in our diet." Clearly, this was a woman who had never tasted my wife's sausage/spinach/white bean soup dusted with parmesan. 

So what can you not make soup out of? I consulted my French "I Know How to Cook" cookbook. The answer is: Nothing. Want to make "economical soup"? Heat some chicken broth and grate an uncooked potato over it. Cook for 10 minutes, add some butter, salt and pepper. Serve and eat. 

Walking

When it comes to weather, Burgundy is in that tricky time of year. The sun has been rising bright and cheerful each morning, and lingers in the evening sky, covering the landscape in pinks and oranges. From inside the house, it is easy to think it is shorts and t-shirt weather. But it is still winter, and there is frost on the windshield most mornings before eventually heating up. Yesterday, we experienced a 68 degree temperature swing in under 10 hours. Regardless, after the cold we had in January and February, it is most definitively hiking season. In the past few days I have climbed up logging roads, down narrow woods trails, scaled rock faces, and, of course, walked trough some of the most famous vines in the world.

As noted in a previous post, French people like to brag about the diversity of their geography. As un-noted elsewhere, it can be extraordinarily annoying for an American to concede that the French are right. The problem isn't with the substance, it is just that they are always so blasé when you tell them they are right. "Beh, oui," they say, shrugging off any compliment you pay to them about their food, history, traditions, landscapes, wines, or architecture. It is as if you have just told them that the Sahara can be hot and dry.

Road Trip

Gorges d'Ardèche

French people love to brag about their country. Their favorite claim is that France has everything that America has, just in a much smaller area: mountains (Alps, Pyrenees, etc.), sea and ocean (Cote d'Azur, Biarritz, Normandy, etc.), rivers (Seine, Rhône, Dordogne, etc.), a world capital (check). But dig past these obvious ones, and one does discover amazing variety. In our recent 10-day vacation, we saw the chateaux forts perched on the rocks of Périgord, the deep gorges in Southern Ardèche, and the crowded Rhône river valley at Vienne, a town I had never heard of before arriving. 

In addition to memorable sightseeing, nice walks, and a big-time bike race that leapt up out of nowhere to surprise us in the hills around Vallon Pont d'Arc, we learned a lot about food and our children's ability to handle life on the road. 

Our French adventure started in December 2013 in Sarlat. We stayed with the family that hosted me in Paris in 1995-96. They closely monitored the way we fed our children -- aged 3 and 8 months at the time, who had just left the only home they had ever known, all their routines, all their extended family, their native language -- and found it woefully lacking. Our hosts deemed an innocent chicken sandwich as backwards as broccoli for breakfast. "Why are they eating dinner at 5:30pm? Children eat at 7:00pm." You get the idea. 

Now, back at the scene, our boys had mastered the schedule and were happy with their breakfast of cereal and chocolate milk, family lunch at noon, the nationally-mandated afternoon goûter at 4:00 or 4:30, and dinner before their parents. I confess I was a little proud of them.

Time and Again

In the 1600s, a man invented the pendulum clock and permanently eradicated confusion when one human being asked another, "What time shall we meet?" Henceforth, there are so many fun ways to respond: 10:10, quarter 'til 7, midnight, half past 4, at the top of the hour, in 20 minutes, high noon, eighteen hundred hours soldier! When a little less precision is necessary, our good friend Pope Gregory XIII hooked us up with an awesome calendar, so that two parties can easily agree on the date they will meet (August 12th). Over time, people and their governments have found other nifty ways to let us say a specific date without using any months or numbers: New Year's, Veterans, Bastille, Independence, Labor, Memorial, Boxing, Thanksgiving, Christmas Days, for example. There really is no reason nor excuse for obfuscation. The witches' answer to "When shall we three meet again?" is actually easy: Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 6:45pm. Just about everyone on planet earth could understand that.

Except, of course, the French. Even though I have tried to eliminate it from my vocabulary, I still ask, "What time?" or "When?" with regularity. And my Burgundy friends calmly, coolly, and consistently foil my efforts to get a precise answer.

Let's list some of the possible answers (not necessarily in increasing levels of difficulty):

• "Come over at the fin de la matinée." I generally get end of the morning: before noon, after 11:00. But is 11:15 too early? 11:45 too late? When this order is coupled with an expectation of alcohol, mass confusion can result. See: "Come over for apéritif."
• Recently, I dropped my son off for a play date at a friend's house at 2:00pm. I asked the mother what time my wife should come back to pick him up. "Fin de l'après-midi." Ok, end of the afternoon. I started to walk away and then wheeled around on one heel saying, "Actually, to my American ears, I have no idea what that means. 3:30? 4:30?" She laughed and said, "How about 5:30? That way we can have a coffee together." For once, bizarro French time constructs were working in our favor. You want our four year old until 5:30? Take him.
• "Come over for apéritif." As a college graduate, I have some experience with cocktails, and am generally game for coming over for them. But my USA-ness is hard to shake. Nobody invites anyone over for cocktails before 5pm in the Land of the Free (brunch bloodies potentially excluded). So when I hear "come over en fin de la matinée pour prendre l'apéritif," I confess to being boggled. If I am going to be offered booze -- including whiskey, wine, or homemade moonshine -- in the morning, I would prefer to push it to 11:59am. However, everyone here eats at midi, or noon, so if you show up one minute before twelve, you risk disrupting them as they shuffle to the table for lunch. However, of course, midi is a term that could very well designate 12:30, 1:00pm, or even 2:15pm. It's a hazardous guessing game. In the evening, this invitation means, generally, between 6:30 and 7:00pm and it can last anywhere from 1 to 7 hours.
• Today a got a double-dip in a voicemail: "We should get together un de ces quatre" and "let's try to see each other en fin de semaine." It's Tuesday, and my correspondent thinks we should see each other "one of these four days" and/or "at the week's end." How do I schedule "one of these days/end of the week"? Thursday morning is too soon...but what about Thursday afternoon? And if we are talking about "one of these four days" literally, well, we're into the weekend. That cannot be right.
• "Oh, my son and his family are coming to spend huit jours with me." So they will be spending one full seven-day week, plus one additional day? Wrong. "Not sure. They will figure it out when they get here. Could be three days or three weeks."
• On Saturday, February 7, a man said to me, "See you in quinze jours." 15 days. In fact, we were scheduled to meet on Sunday, February 15, precisely huit jours away. As usual, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, France was right and I was wrong. 
• Both huit and quinze jours are in the laborer's Hall of Fame. Plumbers, tilers, electricians, mechanics, farmers, and, mostly, public servants employ these terms with great regularity as a defense mechanism. It allows them to not work for an unspecified period of time, yet also gets the hopes up of the foreigner in front of them. "We'll look at that again in quinze jours," they will say, and, despite myself, I circle the date 15 days away. When will I learn?
• "Snail season lasts from July 1 until Easter." What a great juxtaposition of specific and vague! Easter changes every year; that cannot be the law of the land. Just don't tell my friend that.

Nowadays, I am starting to get the hang of it. Éventuellement rolls of my tongue pretty easily. Soon, I'll invite someone over without uttering a number. When do I expect to be a master? Before too long. 

Warmth for Lunch

Sometimes, lunch is just food. It gives your body fuel for the rest of the day, each bite forgotten as soon as it swallowed. Sometimes, lunch is an eating marathon, the principle activity of one's day. Sometimes, lunch causes personal injury. And sometimes, lunch is a time to warm up.

It has been cold. Not cold like in my US hometown, where it was recently -22 in the sun, but cold for Burgundy nonetheless. A wind was whipping through the streets of Beaune at noon, and it was time to seek shelter and food. I stood in front of an Italian place I had been eyeing for some months and decided today was the day to take the plunge. 

The windows tipped the scales for me on this visit. As I stood on the frozen cobblestones, the glass panes of the restaurant were fogged by the breath of patrons, the steam of cooking, and, no doubt, the hot air of conversation. I went inside and told the hostess I was alone. "Mais pas dans la vie," I was quick to assure her. Not alone in life.

She said she had a table for me, but I would be next to other people. Would that be ok? Naturally. 

I sat and perused the menu, deciding that a thin-crust 4 Seasons pizza would be just right (artichokes, olives, prosciutto cotto, and mushrooms). After ordering, I looked around at the other customers. There were men in business attire, finishing their meal with an espresso. Young couples corralled their children the best they could. A table of lunching ladies worked their way through beautiful salads.

The hostess noticed my table was wobbling and brought over a shim. When I asked if I could have some of the breadsticks that were on neighboring tables, the couple next to me quickly offered their own, one of those little restaurant moments where they weren't eavesdropping, but couldn't help but overhear and just wanted to be helpful. The breadsticks were Italian and divine, dotted with salt and brimming with rosemary. The chill was gone, the red Santenay in my glass was opening up nicely, and everywhere around me was a symphony of French. (There are not many tourists in Beaune on a Wednesday afternoon in early February.) 

Luncheoning alone in crowded restaurants is under-appreciated. This day was a wonderful chance to observe: no book, no phone, no distractions, just looking and listening to the world around me while I waited for my food.