L'Epicure, La Roche-Posay

Last Wednesday was my birthday (65!) so we went out for lunch. We chose L'Epicure in La Roche Posay because it opened just before we left for Australia and our friend Sihan (from the Restaurant l'Image in Preuilly) recommended it. 

It looked like everyone else dining there was with business colleagues. The restaurant offers a three course menu du jour Tuesday to Saturday for €25, and they are closed on Mondays. They have taken over the former pizzeria in rue du Falk.

We had parsnip soup to start, thankfully without the curry spice that is ubiquitious in British versions of this soup. It was the best parsnip soup I've ever had, thick, velvety and nicely parsnip flavoured. Then Simon had whiting and I had flank steak, with mash, seasonal vegetables and pesto. Once again, a perfectly cooked 'onglet', and super tender without sacrificing flavour. For dessert Simon had a crème brulée and I had a pear tartelette Tatin. Crème brulée is a classic and I always like a Tatin of pears as a change from apple. I had a glass of sparkling wine and a strawberry Diabolo, and we shared a bottle of sparkling water to drink.

Check the restaurant out on their website: https://restaurantcaveepic.wixsite.com/epicure

 

 

Thanks to l'Epicure for a delicous birthday lunch.

Long Nosed or Flat Faced?

That's right, I'm talking about prime movers for semi-trailers.

One of the things Australians who are paying attention will notice in Europe is that there is not a long nosed prime mover to be seen. They are all flat faced (I believe the technical term is something like 'cabin over engine').

Road train on the Newell Highway, New South Wales.

 Why is this so, and why do long noses dominate in Australia? I went digging on the internet to find out.

The short answer is space. Flat faced trucks take up less space and are more manoeuverable, so in Europe they are more practical. Whereas in Australia the environmental factor that trucks struggle with the most is dust, and long nosed (technical term 'bonneted') are easier to maintain. They also allow for a more powerful engine.

Road train on the outskirts of Goondiwindi.

 The long answer involves regulations that specify different axle configurations and load weights in different regions and is too complicated to go into. But if you are interested, I suggest you read this article: https://historicvehicles.com.au/working-vehicles/why-australian-heavy-trucks-are-the-way-they-are/

In the course of my reading on this subject I also discovered that the term 'B-double' is only used in Australia, and that any multi-trailered rig is a roadtrain. I had thought there must be some technical difference between a B-double and a roadtrain, but the reason we have two names for the same thing turns out to be political. When roadtrains were allowed into the more populated areas of Australia, the politician in charge of the change thought the public would be scared of having roadtrains in their home towns so he coined the term 'B-double'.

Coffee Here and There

Yes, let's return to the vexed issue of coffee. Australia versus France. Knickers will be twisting already...

Vietnamese iced coffees, Sunny Café, Merimbula, New South Wales.

Since we have been living overseas café culture has blossomed in Australia, and it's lovely to see. Even the smallest towns have at least one thriving café, and many have two or more. My home town has three, for a population of about 3300. The cafés that do the best are those serving breakfast burgers, good house made savoury pies and the sort of cakes that look traditional and home made, like your granny would have made. 

However, since we have departed the sunny shores Australians have taken to boasting about the quality of their coffee, and that's not so lovely. That's just parochial, tedious and irritating.

 Roses Café, Goulburn, New South Wales.

In the majority of cases the coffee available in Australian country towns and big cities alike disappointed us. Most of the coffee we were served was faintly flavoured foamy hot milk. We tried asking for extra shots of coffee, but it made no difference. In the end I realised that it was not entirely the coffee that was the problem. It was the enormous quantity of foamy hot milk plonked on top of it that was the main culprit. Bear in mind that we were not asking for 'lattes', we were asking for 'flat whites', and we were not asking for 'large', just 'medium'. Finally we resorted to asking for milk on the side and that more or less solved our problem. 

 Cakes, Bottlebrush Café, Pittsworth, Queensland.

The French aversion to milk in coffee must have been absorbed by us to some extent I think. I was quite repulsed by the quantity of milk that it appears most Australians habitually consume in their coffee. The French are more tolerant of dark bitter roasts too, and we found most of the Australian coffees a bit bland.

 

Iced coffees, Garden Café, Tenterfield, New South Wales.

Flavoured milk drinks are available everywhere, and I had a strawberry one for old time's sake. It was a lot of milk and I struggled to finish it! On the other hand I also had an old fashioned strawberry milkshake in a down and out roadhouse, which was excellent. You just can't tell until you try with this sort of childhood nostalgia. 

 

 Bakery/café, Adaminaby, New South Wales.

On the whole, cold milk drinks generally worked better for us. Because it was hot much of the time we opted for iced coffee, something most of these cafés can do well, and a treat for us because it's not something you see so much in France. The best was in a Vietnamese takeaway in Manly. 

The best hot coffee I had was in the National Portrait Gallery café in Canberra.

The best coffee I've had since our return to France? That's to be had in the Bar Restaurant de l'Image, just round the corner from where we live. The proportion of coffee to milk is good, and a flat white tastes like coffee, not milk. Mathieu, the owner and barman, says the milk is important though, and he always uses milk from our local dairy co-operative Laiterie de Verneuil, as it is higher in protein than the milk from Poitou that our shops also stock.

Footwarmers

This is the last blog post about Tumut Station - at least for a while. And finally, it's the reason why it made such an impact on me.

Tumut Station

While we were there we took a photo of this structure, helpfully labelled as a footwarmer boiler. I'd never seen one before (they were rare, even in the heyday of the railways) and whilst researching them I learned something*. I have read early fiction that mentioned railway trips and footwarmers (Conan Doyle, Collins, or Wodehouse, can't remember) but I always assumed they were either hot water bottles or a box of embers. The truth is more complex than that.

The remains of a footwarmer boiler 

Australian railway footwarmers were reusable heat packs provided to train passengers during colder months. They were sealed metal tubes containing a supersaturated solution of sodium acetate. They were heated in baths of boiling water, and provided a couple of hours warmth. Also inside each warmer were small metal balls which meant that when the footwarmer was cold it could be shaken, and the balls provided a nucleation point around which the liquid crystallized. This process released heat, warming the pack for several more hours. Once cooled, the footwarmer was reactivated by boiling it in water, which dissolved the crystals back into liquid form, ready for reuse on the next journey.

*This is partially the reason we blog - take a photo, research it, blog it, discover facts

Bike Paths

On our walk yesterday (3.17km) I got to thinking about the differences between Australian disused railway lines, and French disused railway lines.

In France, over 6,900km of disused railway lines have been converted to voies vertes - cycle and walking paths. There is an ambition to increase that to a network of 20,000km by the year 2030.

This is our local voie verte, yesterday.

And this is the goods shed (also yesterday)

In Australia there is an ongoing - sometimes very heated - discussion on the wisdom of converting railway lines to bike paths. Many people are in favour of the plan, but there are those who want railway lines reopened. Even if they were closed in the 1940s and serve areas of decreasing population.

One of the schemes under "discussion" is the old railway between Tumut and Batlow. As far as we could tell, the residents of Batlow are generally in favour, and show this by displaying an old bicycle on their verandah roof.

This is the state of the railway - and goods shed - in Tumut.

Fontbaudry

Fontbaudry is the neoclassical chateau (built 1845) that you glimpse through the trees as you approach Preuilly along the Loches road. You can also see it (side on) if you walk along the northern edge of town. 

Usually we only see it in winter, once the trees around it have lost their leaves. Yesterday was a typical sighting: I was on a perambulate around town and I snapped it from a distance on my phone.

It wasn't a great day for walking yesterday: I think the photo says it all.