Pets de Nonne

I bought a cookbook as a present for my sister recently, and since I had it for a couple of weeks prior to seeing her, I got to road test some of the more interesting looking recipes. The first one that caught my eye was for Pets de Nonne, since it called for two ingredients I am always keen to be using up, egg whites and walnuts, and the book said it was a traditional recipe from the upper Loire. They are sort of like Rocky Road meringues with their chunks of chocolate and walnuts. The recipe also includes angelica. This is an ingredient I could have purchased locally grown, from the marais poitevin village of Coulon a couple of hours to the west of us near Niort, and which we visited last summer. Angelica grows wild in many wet places in central western France, and was traditionally cultivated in the Coulon area. However, I didn't have any, and to be frank, although it's a pretty green colour, it's basically candied celery, and I thought orange peel was a safer bet tastewise.

Angelica growing in a public garden by the canal in Coulon

I had not heard of Pets de Nonne before, but the name alone makes them stand out. Look away now if you were delicately raised...


The name means 'Nun's Farts'. Because this was a new recipe to me, I looked up other recipes for Pets de Nonne, none of which are anything like this one. Apparently, French Pets de Nonne are normally what I know as beignets – little sweet deep-fried balls of choux pastry, sold by the boulangerie in brown paper bags holding a dozen. The French-Canadian recipe is different again, being a way of using up scraps of pastry by making spirals of pastry and spicy Maple syrup.

Susan

Irises - Les Iris

Bearded Irises are one of the glories of Loire gardens in May. No wonder the most famous iris breeder of them all, Cayeux, is based in the Loire.

A gorgeous, almost black specimen from Coulon
in the Marais Vert near Niort.

A pretty lavender and white pair.

Rich cream and lavender, and an unusually
broad profile, at Giverny.

Everyone has these pale lavender irises,
but they are no less pretty for that.
These particular examples are opposite the Château in Preuilly.

At the Australian War Memorial near Villers-Bretonneux
the irises have fancy variegated leaves.

Susan

La Vache Qui Rit*

Isn't this the most smugly contented cow you have ever seen? She is a Maraichine, a breed developed in the Marais Poitevin** from the blond Limousin breed, and she lives on an island in the network of canals around Coulon. She is a beef breed (or perhaps a dual purpose breed). According to the official breed description the usual number of horns is two. (I checked other breeds for 'usual number of horns' -- disappointingly, they all seem to be zero or two -- I was really hoping to come across 'three' or 'six' or something a bit more out of the ordinary.)

I did wonder whether I should call this post 'Les Vaches Maigres et les Vaches Grasses'. The phrase comes from the story in Genesis about Pharoah's dream of the seven thin cows and the seven fat cows. In French the expression is used to indicate a state of penury or plenty. She is clearly the fat cow and we are the thin cows just at the moment. Apparently, all sorts of animals can be used to create this metaphor, including, to my surprise, les ornithorynques (platypuses). My source for this information does admit, though, that some animals are easier to slip into the conversation than others.

Susan

*La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) is a brand of processed cheese, most commonly encountered in the UK as the snack-sized red-wrapped cheese disks sold as Babybel.

**The Marais Poitevin is one of the top three most important wetland habitats in France, situated to the west of the Touraine, in the Vendée between la Rochelle on the coast and Niort. Much of the land is reclaimed.