A White Christmas

France Météo and social media had been predicting snow for lowland central France for a couple of days. I'd passed the départemental (county) snowplough heading in the opposite direction to me on Tuesday. The weather got very cold and windy on Christmas Eve. 

 

 View from our attic at 9 am.

Simon came to bed at a quarter past midnight on Christmas Eve and said there had been a light dusting. I got up at 8 am on Christmas Day and looked out our bedroom window. It wasn't properly light yet, but I could see enough to be disappointed. The street gutters were lined with snow, but the road surface was bare.

 

Our front courtyard, as photographed by me in my pyjamas at 8 am.

Nevertheless, I checked out the spare bedroom window just in case. This faces west, over our neighbours yard and across a small valley with village houses. Much better! All the roofs were covered in snow, as were our neighbour's cars and lawn. I took several photos then went upstairs to try my luck from the attic.

 

Our backyard at 8 am, with half our recent firewood delivery under a snow covered tarp, waiting for me to stack it in the garage out of the weather.

The local news media are saying that it has been 14 years since we had a white Christmas in the Touraine. That would make it 2011, but looking back on the blog, we made no mention of snow, so I suspect it did not snow in Preuilly on Christmas Day itself. It certainly did snow that year on other dates and close to Christmas. So this year has been my first white Christmas. 

By mid-afternoon all the snow had gone.

Happy Christmas

 Happy Christmas to all our readers. 

Thank you for loyally following us for all these years. 

 

Homemade mince pies with clementines.

 

The Chateaux Need Christmas

The chateaux of the Loire Valley are finding it is hard to make enough money to stay on top maintaining the buildings and remain relevant. Increasingly they are relying on Christmas visitor numbers and activities to get them through the year financially. And they have to spend increasingly to create the sort of spectacular displays that the public are drawn to. Chambord has spent 200 000 euros this year and hopes to bring in a million euros, which will go towards saving the Francois I wing from collapse. It is currently closed to the public for safety reasons.

Chateaux like Chambord and Chenonceau are constructed on wooden piles driven into a swamp and a riverbed respectively. Climate change is contributing to structural problems caused by subsidence and cracking which will require a serious injection of funds.

This problem and how you manage it is part of what I talk about to clients. Opening to the public is a double edged sword. On the one hand you make some revenue from the sale of entry tickets, but not enough to cover the increased costs of having thousands of visitors tromp through a fragile centuries old building which was not designed to take that many people every day. 

What you are actually doing by opening to the public is creating a brand, and you hope to break even by engaging in a variety of auxiliary revenue streams - gift shop, restaurant, pay parking, entertainment shows, concerts and events, filming, guided tours including behind the scenes, workshops to pass on traditional skills, boat or carriage rides or hire, and so on. 

The public have a right to visit these places. It is their heritage too, so you cannot put it out of their price range. You also cannot flog the very heritage fabric you are sharing into oblivion or even shabby disrepair. It is a very challenging tightrope to have to teeter across. 

In a multicultural and or class tiered society another emerging problem is that this is not everyone's heritage, and so large parts of the population don't care about these places, or are positively antagonistic.

 

Photos show the Christmas decorations at the Chateau of Chenonceau this year.

Civet de sanglier

The word 'civet' comes from the same root as the word 'cive' which is an old French word for 'spring onion' (the English word 'chives' is related). The word civet also tells you that this dish is a game stew, traditionally made with the blood of the animal. Sanglier is wild boar, so in English the dish would be called Jugged Boar I suppose. That's always assuming it's made in the old way, which it almost never is these days. Usually civets are now made using red wine and some liver or blood sausage ('boudin noir') to provide an approximation of the colour and texture of the original recipe. Often the liver is omitted and it's just red wine, which effectively makes it Boar Bourguignon. Onion of some sort is essential in a civet.

Ingredients for civet de sanglier.

 

Ingredients:
1kg wild boar meat, cut into 2cm cubes
100 g blood sausage, removed from the skin and crumbled
Olive oil
200g salt and smoke cured pork belly, cut into 2cm cubes
A large onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 carrots, cut into chunks
A bouquet garni made of parsley, celery leaves, bay leaves, sprigs of thyme and a strip of orange peel
10 juniper berries, roughly crushed
A bottle of red wine
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp Lapsang souchong tea, ground to a fine powder
200g mushrooms (ideally wild forest mushrooms such as porcini or black trumpets)

Slow cooking on our ever reliable wood stove.

 

Method:

1. If your wild boar is genuinely wild and not farmed, put it in the freezer for 3 weeks to kill any parasites.
2. Defrost overnight in the fridge, ideally in a marinade made of the wine, some oil, the bouquet garni and juniper. 
3. Drain the meat and brown in some oil. Transfer to a casserole dish.
4. Brown the vegetables and cured pork belly and add to the casserole.
5. Deglaze the pan with the marinade and tip the hot liquid into the casserole, along with the bouquet garni, the juniper berries and blood sausage.
6. Add the tomato paste and the smoky tea powder and stir to mix all the ingredients.
7. Cook at a slow simmer for 2 hours, either on top of the stove or in the oven at 150°C.
8. Sauté the mushrooms and either add to the casserole for the last half hour of cooking, or serve them as an accompaniment.
9. Adjust the seasoning to taste by adding salt and pepper.
10. Serve the civet with mixed root vegetable mash (celeriac and swede is particularly good).

Bon appetit!

PS. This recipe will work with venison (biche or chevreuil in French) and I reckon you could do roo meat like this and it would be very good indeed.

Making Do

If you are a fan of quirky rustic furniture then you could spend some time looking around the Touraine Loire Valley. Like in any provincial rural area people have found ways to be both thrifty and creative. Here are a couple of examples I've come across in my travels. Both, I suspect, are 19th century.

Above is a chair displayed at the Chateau de Bridoré. There is no information about the chair and I didn't get the chance to ask anyone. It is clearly hand made, with legs formed using a spokeshave or a drawknife. I don't know what the wood is but I would guess maybe poplar, willow or ash. The bent wood has been arranged in an unexpected way, by someone who was solving a structural problem on the spot. Not a professional chair maker, but someone willing to have a go. The seat and back looks like it could be woven reedmace.

The pair of chairs below are in the hunting museum at the Chateau de Chambord. Unsurprisingly I suppose, since they are made out of antlers and deer hide. I suspect they are masquerading as 'rustic', the sort of thing a bourgeois hunter might have furnished his hunting lodge with and paid a ridiculous amount of money for.

Sorry About That

No, we haven't been eaten up by a monster, we just haven't been blogging lately. With the weather as grey as it has been recently there's been no photo ops, and life is kind of getting in the way of being entertaining.

We did go for an opportunistic walk earlier this week. Look how calm it was.