Arrazat's Aubergines

Patrick Moon

Description

In the sequel to Virgile's Vineyard, Patrick Moon explores the world of Languedoc food and cuisine. Returning to his challenging home in southern France, Patrick could easily fill the days protecting infant vines from marauding wild boar and hiding baby truffle oaks from unscrupulous neighbours. However, the local campsite caf has just been transformed into an ambitious new restaurant and he is intrigued by the talented young chef's determination to achieve perfection on a shoestring. Patrick soon finds himself pitching in, sleeves rolled up, to spend a year 'backstage' and share the triumphs, disasters and sheer hard work in a small but serious French restaurant kitchen. But will the VIP diners guess that he has never made mayonnaise before? Or that he put the wrong sauce on the starter?Not content with all this, Patrick also embarks on a wider exploration of the Languedoc's finest produce for the table, from mighty household names to eccentric peasant smallholdings. Throughout the seasons, his quest uncovers the secrets of olive oil and salt production, the mysteries of Ricard and the Roquefort caves, and the miracle of the sparkling Perrier spring. He even finds time to visit some of the region's top chefs for more 'behind the scenes' discoveries. But there are always the vines and olives, not to mention aubergines, demanding attention at homeFirst published in 2005, Arrazat's Aubergines, Patrick's second book, is a great stand-alone read for any Francophile, food-lover or armchair chef, deploying a colourful cast of entertaining characters and a rich vein of humour to deliver a wealth of fascinating information. For fans of its predecessor, Virgile's Vineyard, it also continues the story of many favourite figures, including Virgile himself.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783067893
• Langue: English

Extrait

Arrazat’s Aubergines
Inside a Languedoc Kitchen
Patrick Moon

Copyright © 2014 Patrick Moon
Cover image © Adrienne Fryer 2013
Frst published in 2005 by Profile Books Ltd,
58A Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8LX
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1783067 893
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For Kathleen and Dennis
Contents

Cover


Spring


Summer


Autumn


Winter


Spring


Afterword


Author’s Note


Acknowledgements


Also by Patrick Moon
Spring

‘Do you feel as bad as you look?’ asked Manu, pausing briefly at the top of my drive to let his heart slow down after the sprint across the bridge from his neighbouring cottage.
‘It’s the birds,’ I explained, as a couple of litres of homemade rouge emerged ominously from a pair of faded blue dungarees. It was useless to point to my half-finished breakfast. If Emmanuel Gros was determined to celebrate my return to the Languedoc, then celebrate we both would.
‘It seemed I’d only just gone to bed,’ I continued, as he brushed aside the dining-room cobwebs that separated him from my wineglasses and started pouring. ‘I’d hardly turned out my light but there I was – woken by the dawn chorus. I struggled up, thinking I must already be late for the market, but when I opened the shutters, I discovered it was still pitch dark. The birds were singing at the tops of their voices but it was only two o’clock in the morning.’
‘Nightingales,’ said Manu authoritatively, having evicted an item of unopened luggage from his favourite armchair to settle in comfortably. ‘The first ones of spring. They arrived a couple of days ago. I’m surprised you don’t remember from your whatsisname…’
‘My sabbatical?’
‘ Voilà! From two years ago… But, oh mon dieu , you do look bad,’ he laughed, as he replenished his already empty glass.
‘Of course I look bad,’ I grumbled, looking wistfully at my fast-cooling mug of coffee. ‘So would you, if you’d driven all the way from England and had barely two hours’ sleep.’
‘Have you had a chance to look round?’ he asked, with the air of someone bracing himself to receive praise. ‘I think you’ll find we made a pretty good job of things, me and the wife, looking after the place while you were away. Bit of mowing, bit of strimming. Even your precious vines,’ he added, with a new note of bitterness. ‘Miraculously, even those survived without the interference of the great Monsieur Joly. You’d never think I’d had vines of my own for decades. Coming up here, trying to poke his nose in…’
Virgile Joly was the talented young winemaker from Saint Saturnin whose work I was lucky enough to ‘shadow’ in my first year here. When I decided to plant some vines, he tried to encourage me to plant wine-producing varieties but, more timidly, I’d opted for table grapes. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I could be here all the time to look after them and, anyway, perhaps the most important thing that I learned about winemaking during my year at his side was how difficult it was. Even so, I was relieved when Virgile offered to look after them in my absence. Far better his pursuit of quality than Manu’s dogged adherence to quantity. But now it appears that Virgile’s perfectionism has been shown the gate, leaving everything at the mercy of Manu’s laissez-faire .
‘The only thing is, we did have a few problems with the strimmer. Well, the lawnmower too, really,’ confesses Manu, reverting to his normal jovial manner. ‘Nothing that the garage won’t be able to fix, I’m sure. In fact, I meant to get them mended by the time you arrived. But what with all the fruit to pick and so on…’
I resisted enquiring what unseasonal harvesting could have monopolized his recent months. It was about to be Easter and nothing could have needed picking since the autumn olive crops.
I could see from the kitchen window that I had missed the fruit blossoms by several weeks. Even the late-flowering cherries had started setting their fruits and the bright yellow mimosa on the tree that I planted eighteen months ago had already turned a dusty brown.
Beyond this, I had scarcely begun to explore but what little I had seen suggested that Monsieur and Madame Gros had confined their horticultural efforts to the preservation of access routes to everything remotely edible. It had been the same on the handful of holiday visits that I’d managed in my fifteen months away: weeds and brambles gradually reasserting themselves in every corner of the ancient stone-built terraces – except where there were things to be eaten.
Somehow, my short periods of occupancy had never quite coincided with the harvests. Either the fruits were frustratingly under-ripe (‘a crime to pick them yet,’ was the oft-repeated verdict from the other side of the stream) or a well-developed sense of neighbourly duty had required a total stripping of the trees in the preceding days (‘another day and they’d have rotted,’ the alternative judgement).
‘Such a pity about your freezer breaking down,’ said Manu, cheerfully draining the first bottle. ‘Otherwise, we’d have filled it for you. But then I was always telling your Uncle Milo it was on its last legs. Outlived him, though, poor fellow,’ he added, with a respectful raising of his glass to the memory of the generous, childless relative who made me the heir to this house.
‘Surprised were they?’ asks Manu, in more expansive, enquiring mode, now that the second bottle has been broached. ‘When you told you them you were leaving the office for good?’
‘I’m sure they could see I was tempted,’ I tell him. ‘From the moment I got back from that first year. But they didn’t think I’d be daft enough to actually do it! Too late to worry now though…’
‘That’s what the wife was asking the other night,’ says Manu with an embarrassed cough. ‘I mean, it would be too late to change your mind, would it? If you decided you couldn’t afford to keep this place going without a regular income? I know poor Milo found it a bit of a struggle, even before his illness… Ah, there you are, ma chère! ’
A tall female figure in a tightly buttoned nylon housecoat has appeared at the doorway, casting a long, dark shadow across the room, as she favours me with the briefest of nods.
‘Have you asked him?’ she demands of her husband.
‘I… I was just working round to it,’ he stammers, looking quickly over his shoulder, as if for the means of escape. His questioner tuts an ‘as usual I have to do everything myself’ kind of tut; then two surprising things happen.
The first is Mme Gros’s smile. This is an eerily unaccustomed phenomenon under any circumstances but even more exceptional on this occasion in being targeted unmistakably, almost beamingly, on me. I have no idea what I can be about to do to deserve it.
The second is a lacerating reprimand to Manu. ‘Your neighbour’s glass is empty!’ she snaps, as he leaps to his feet to remedy the omission. This is even more astonishing. Historically, Mme Gros was always relentlessly unforgiving of the fact that my proximity afforded potentially round-the-clock pretexts for her husband’s deeply disapproved-of liquid hospitality. Yet amazingly, this morning she is abetting the crime.
‘Such a view,’ she sighs, striding purposefully past me to the panoramic window at the end of the barrel-vaulted dining-room. ‘But such a waste.’ She encapsulates several overgrown and under-exploited terraces in a single decisive gesture. ‘I mean, look at that silly little vegetable garden of your uncle’s. I know he was unwell but, if you really intend to make a go of this place…’ She squares her sizeable shoulders in the way that she always does when coming to the point. ‘We wondered whether you might consider a bigger potager ? You could fill the whole of that bottom terrace with vegetables? Maybe the one above it as well, now that your income’s not what it was.’ She adjusts the earlier smile to something more sympathetic and solicitous. ‘Some more fruit trees perhaps? Extend the greenhouse even?’
‘All the things we wish we could do,’ chips in Manu supportively.
‘If it weren’t for the vines,’ his wife adds acerbically. The sacrifice of most of their own half hectare to wine production has long been a source of bitter recrimination between them.
‘Manu will help all he can,’ Mme Gros volunteers. ‘Though of course, he’s not as young as he was.’
*
‘I know you’re tired but it has to be tonight,’ said Virgile, when he telephoned at lunchtime. ‘They’re fully booked for the whole of the weekend. It’s Easter, remember.’
‘But I thought it was a new restaurant…’
‘New to you. And to me, if it comes to that. Although, I do know the chef. He’s bought my wine. But he opened before you left. I can’t think how you missed it, being so near.’
‘It’s on the campsite, you say?’
‘It’s next to the campsite. It used to be the campsite café. But trust me,’ he laughed, ‘it’s changed.’
So I agreed to meet him at Le Temps de Vivre at eight.
‘We did it all ourselves,’ says a welcoming figure in immaculate chef’s whites. He le