Buy Local Honey

If you want to support your local economy and ensure you are buying a quality product produced by someone who cares about the environment, then buy honey directly from your local small scale apiarist. In France, look for the wording on the label which says 'Récolté et mis en pot en France' ('Harvested and potted in France'). Reject honey that says 'Miel d'origine UE' ('Honey from the EU') or worse, 'Miel d'origine hors UE' ('Honey from outside the EU').

 

Chestnut honey and forest honey, from two different Loire Valley apiarists.

Why buy local honey? Beekeepers themselves will sometimes spout a load of nonsense about how you are helping endangered pollinators and biodiversity, but this is rarely true [see my post about 'The Trouble With Honey Bees]. What you are doing though is contributing to a circular, short distance economy, helping it to be resilient, durable and if necessary, reactive. 

 

Buckwheat honey.

You will also be getting a much more interesting range of flavour profiles than anything in the supermarket, which is nearly always blended on an industrial scale, not single source. You will quickly learn how to tell honey produced in the spring (pale, floral, very sweet) from honey produced in the autumn (dark, fruity, with a touch of bitterness to balance the sweetness). Then you can learn the differences between linden (Fr. tilleul), robinia (Fr. acacia), sunflower (Fr. tournesol), buckwheat (Fr. sarrasin), chestnut (Fr. chataigner), heather (Fr. bruyère), canola (Fr. colza) and buckthorn (Fr. bourdaine). I've even had carrot honey from one apiarist!

 

 Linden honey.

Cheap honey is always adulterated with syrup. If it is imported it has been through several hands, all with the opportunity of cutting it to make more profit. It has been transported long distances and has thus contributed to air pollution and greenhouse gases. 

 

A swarm of honey bees in a bush.

I recommend visiting your local apiarist and buying direct from their shed. Ask if they will show you around -- usually they are delighted to show you how they work and to talk about honey bees. And now that you know them, you will have someone to call when one day a swarm of bees takes up residence in your peach tree (or whatever, in your garden...). Your apiarist friend will come and collect them, and thank you for calling them.

 

Bernard the apiarist, showing Joy and me inside a hive.

If you can't make it to your beekeeper's shed, buy from them at your village market. You can still have a chat about the bees, their work and the honey, and they'll still come and gather up the swarm in your garden if you ask them.

My personal preference is for the dark strong autumnal honeys like chestnut. I'm not overly impressed by 'acacia', which is the most popular honey in France. But at least in France there is an expectation that you take food seriously and treat it respectfully, hence people knowing what the different varieties of honey are like, just as they know what the different varieties of strawberries or apples are like. Honey is not just honey in France.

What is so Special About the Tours Trams

When you are designing public transport, nothing is left to chance. Lighting warmth, the colour of metal grab bars, the texture of the seats, everything is considered and carefully designed. Passengers are 'nudged' into the desired behaviour by clever science and design. 

The lighting in the trams in Tours is set to more 'warmth' in winter, and 'colder' in summer, which influences how comfortable passengers feel. Studies show that manipulating the light makes people perceive the temperature as nearly two degrees warmer or cooler.

The trams in Tours are intended to look radical and different. They don't have headlights for example, but instead they've been fitted with two big vertical strips of lights, which act visually like an extension of the rails. The trams are the very incarnation of the City. The mirror surface created by polished steel and tinted glass is intended to play with the water flowing alongside in the Loire River, and reflect the surrounding landscape. 

Inside there is a nod to the former industrial heritage of the City, which was one of the first producers of silk in France. The interiors reference a special silk called Gros de Tours, which was a particular shade of red. The red interiors of the trams give a sort of special Tours heritage corporate look, but they also create a warm and comfortable feeling.

Tram design is not just about making them attractive. It must also correspond with the identity of the City. It's a subtle piece of territorial marketing.

The Co-operative Bakery

Fabrice Doucet is our remarkable local historian, and his depth of knowledge about Preuilly's past is incredible. He's meticulous about accuracy and sources, and maintains a very extensive personal research archive of clippings and photos. He's active on Facebook, and every now and then I cheekily 'steal' one of his posts and translate it for the blog. The story of the co-operative bakery on what was then known as Place du Marché (today Place des Halles) is one such post.

 

The co-operative bakery was to the right of the angle in this building. Now a private home, the windows have been altered so it is not so obviously a shop front.

 

"In the wake of workers movements in the 19th century, co-operative societies appeared all over France. The aim was primarily to get the price of sales as low as possible. This was the case in Preuilly, and from 1909 there was a co-operative bakery on Place des Halles, just down from the current co-operative grocery store.

In 1928 the co-operative society had 280 members. The term Place du Marché was still in current usage and was what appeared on the bakery's invoices. In 1931 the co-operative bakery was taken over by Roger (Gaston) Nibeaudo, and he ran it until 1946. The co-operative was dissolved at an unknown date. Following this the baker was Roger Dubreuil (1957)."

Fabrice also includes a newspaper clipping reporting on the new bakery on 19 September 1909.

"A co-operative society has been formed in Preuilly, with M. Clément as president, for running a bakery outlet. 

The sale of bread will start at the beginning of next month and the depot is installed on the Market Place. The oven has already been built and the workers are putting the final touches to the storefront. Different local workers were employed for all the improvements, and the creation of this co-operative bakery is an important event for our area."

[Source: Opening of the co-operative bakery at Preuilly, la République, weekly newspaper, Indre et Loire.] 

According to another source, this is where the baguette first made its appearance in provincial Preuilly sur Claise.

Velpeau

Velpeau is the name of a district (Fr. quartier) in Tours and named after a 19th century doctor who trained here. He is one of a group of doctors, all contemporaries, who began their working lives in Tours and made their names here. Dr Velpeau has a type of heavy compression bandage used for burns and other mishaps named after him. He was known as an absolute stickler for best practice, a ceaseless worker who had come from very humble beginnings.

His last words were supposedly 'You must not be lazy, always work'. He was born in 1775 in a village near Tours, where his father was the farrier. This allowed him to gain some idea of veterinary practice. Because of the interest he showed in medicine, it seems a philanthropic neighbour sent him to be trained in the hospital in Tours in 1816. It was there he met Pierre-Fidèle Bretonneau, the head doctor at the hospital, and they remained associated until Bretonneau's death in 1862. 

In fact, it is really Bretonneau who introduced the compression bandage. He drew on the work of an earlier Prussian surgeon and advocated the use of such bandages, especially for burns. Velpeau in turn made the bandages better known, widened their usage and as a result this type of compression bandage now bears his name.

In 1820 Velpeau left Tours to graduate in Paris. We know a lot about what he got up to because of his extensive surviving correspondence with Bretonneau. With Armand Trousseau, another of Bretonneau's brilliant students, Velpeau was at the centre of a remarkable Tourangelle medical network who all published their research in leading medical journals. They became celebrities, being referenced by Balzac (also a native of the Touraine).

Velpeau was a researcher, practicing surgeon taking both private and public hospital patients, hospital administrator and medical training lecturer. He was the Chair of Clinical Surgery at la Charité Hospital in Paris for thirty years. He was interested in a wide variety of medical conditions, especially diphtheria, typhoid and other fevers, quinine, and compression. 

He was described as the clinical doctor who had the biggest following and was the best liked, open to new and progressive ideas but hostile to dangerous eccentricities. His strong character and unwillingness to accept poor unscientific practice did make him enemies early on in his career though. 

Sadly, although Tours has hospitals named after his colleagues Bretonneau and Trousseau, there is none memorialising Velpeau.

Further reading: An article in Gallica, the Bibliothèque Nationale (National library) newsletter (in French) https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/fr/html/velpeau-linfatigable-chirurgien

Ronsard's Melons

The modern variety of Charentais melon, with its yellow netted skin and green ribs, was developed in the Poitou-Charente area, just to our south-west, in the 1920s, but the original Charentais Melon goes back to the 15th century, brought here by Charles VIII as a prize from his Italian campaign. He had them grown in the Touraine Loire Valley, close to the many chateaux which were now serving as luxury country residences for the King and his courtiers. By the 16th century the court poet, Pierre de Ronsard, was moved to write a hommage to eating melon in the summer by the side of a stream.

 

Pierre de Ronsard, regarded as "the Prince of poets and the poet of Princes", was Prior of the Priory of St Cosme from 1565 to 1585.

 

 Pierre de Ronsard's private apartments at the Prieuré de Saint Cosme.

 
Pompons (or pepons), imported from Italy during the Renaissance, are melons that Ronsard, a keen gardener, grew himself at the Prieuré de Saint-Cosme. Behind his house, built in 1348, there is an 'exotic' kitchen garden dedicated to Ronsard's taste for the new fruits and vegetables that were appearing in France at the time. In 1565, Ronsard offered a basket of his melons to the royal family (Charles IX and Queen Mother Catherine de Medici), who were stopping off at the nearby château du Plessis-Lès-Tours, with this poem for the occasion:
 

Vous qui semblez de façons et de gestes

Aux immortels, imitant les Célestes,

Prenez de moi ces pompons et ces fruits.

Les-vous offrant, je ne crains que personne

Blâme mon don : car, Sire, je vous donne

Non pas beaucoup, mais tout ce que je puis.

 

A la Reine, Pierre de Ronsard, 1565

Breakfast in Tours

I mentioned yesterday that on Monday we had a nice breakfast in Tours. That was in a café/pâtisserie/salon de thé /chocolaterie/confiserie called Aux Délices des Beaux Arts which can be found here.

The view is good, the pastries and coffee are nice, and the man behind the counter will insist on taking your photo as soon as a camera appears.

We didn't have any of the following, but they look too good not to show you

A Meal With Ukrainian Friends

Some weeks ago our friends Antoinette and Niall replaced their television, and asked me if one of 'my' Ukrainians would like their old one, which still worked perfectly as a television but wasn't as modern and connected as a new one. I knew my Ukrainian friend Natacha D had been without a television since she and her family arrived as displaced persons in April 2022 so I offered it to her.

Natacha now lives in Tours because her teenaged children will have better opportunities there. Her son M is training with the firefighters (perfect for him as he is very sporty and not at all academic) and her daughter V is attending high school (lycée). We don't have a high school in Preuilly, and most kids board during the week in Tours or Loches.

I messaged Natacha to say Simon and I would drop by with the television late morning. Natacha promptly messaged back to say 'don't eat too much for breakfast, I'm going to make something!' I thought she meant a cake for morning tea, but it turned out she meant a proper Ukrainian meal, with kotleti (Ukrainian rissoles), potatoes topped with cheese and baked in the oven, chunks of red pepper, cucumber and tomato, blue cheese and olives, plus homemade pizza, washed down with soursop tea. What she didn't realise was that we were due to go to lunch with a colleague after visiting her! So that was two lunches! I tried to stick to mostly salad in both cases...

We talked a bit about how things were going. She's doing an internship in a small neighbourhood shop. V is doing very well at school and all her teachers are impressed. They had just come back from Romania, which is where her parents have fled to. She said it is very hard for her parents as they are in their mid-seventies and there is no State financial support in Romania. So they find themselves working in a paint factory. She also showed us a video from her cousin's wife as she planted a flag to remember him by in Maidan Square in Kyiv. He was killed not so long ago. Her cousin had been a strawberry farmer. By chance his flag was being planted very close to an Australian flag and some International Brigade flags. M and V's father is still in Mykolaiv where they come from. It's a big river port city in the east, on the Dnipro. He has found work as a window fitter. There is a lot of call for new windows because of the shelling, but he is afraid of heights, so it is not his ideal job. He had sent a huge box of Ukrainian lollies (candies, sweets) and Natacha sent us on our way with a big bag of them, and some of the soursop tea leaves. She says she won't return to Ukraine if the Russians take power.

Sad News From Tours

Yesterday the local newspaper revealed that Papy, the emu that lives in the botanical gardens in Tours, has died at the age of 43 years.

 

Papy, photographed by me a few years ago.

He arrived at the gardens in February 1982 and came from the Parc Floral de la Ville d'Orléans.

Papy was the oldest of the hundred or so animals that live in the Botanical Gardens of Tours. In the wild emus only live 10 - 20 years.

A Hero of the Resistance

As we were walking back to our garage from lunch at a pizza restaurant with our mechanic and a friend in Saint Pierre des Corps one day I noticed this commemorative street name plaque on an ordinary private house. Who was Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves I wondered. And what a mouthful of a name!

He turns out to be a fascinating character, a real old school patriot. He was born in 1901 into an old aristocratic family, became a French naval officer, and when France surrendered in the Second World War he joined de Gaulle's Resistance in London. With the Dutch Resistance fighter Yan Doornik and fellow Frenchman Maurice Barlier he set up the Free French information and communications network Nemrod. 

His mother was a Vilmorin [link], the family of famous horticulturalists and seed merchants (botany was an aristocratic pursuit back in the day...). At one stage he seriously courted his cousin Louise Vilmorin, but at the time she preferred Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Just before Christmas 1940 he and a radio operator called Georges Marty (real name Alfred Gaessler) crossed the Channel and established themselves in the Nantes home of Resistance members, a couple called Clément. Theirs was the first radio communications link between Occupied France and London. He then went to Paris to get his friend Max André to set up a network there. When he returned to Nantes it became clear that Alfred Gaessler was a double agent, but the group found out too late and 23 members of the network were arrested.

D'Estienne d'Orves was condemned to death along with 8 of his comrades. They were not executed immediately though, and kept in prison until a real showcase moment occurred. He was arrested in January 1941, but not shot until August of that year, an act of reprisal against the assassination of a German officer in Paris. Barlier and Doornik died alongside him.

Further Reading: an article in History Net on the 80th anniversary of his death [link].

Celebrating National Acadian Day and Going to the Guinguette

15 August is a public holiday, Ascension, in France, but in Canada it is la Fete Nationale de l'Acadie, celebrating the French Canadians known as Acadians, who found themselves in difficulties when the British took over the French territories in Canada in 1759.

This year several places locally decided to celebrate as well. Many Acadian families came from the area just to our south and west, and the history is well known here.

La Halle, the popular guinguette in Boussay, staged a 'Fete Acadienne' on the eve, featuring French Canadian 'artists' such as 'Carine' Dion, 'Jules' Vigneault and 'Foie' de Pirate. I actually don't know who the performers really were, but a lot of the audience clearly did. The crowd loved it. I must admit, I was expecting a more zydeco infused evening, but there wasn't  an accordion in sight.

 

I joined friends (after aquagym) and it was a great night out. The poor staff at La Halle were overwhelmed by numbers though and we didn't get to eat until 10 pm. Even for France in the summertime, that's a bit late! The meal was a set menu of cooked ham, mashed potato and salad, followed by squidgy chocolate cake, costing €17.

Two nights earlier I had been there for a different local group, and got to witness a respected regional television journalist starting a conga line (Fr. une chenille). I was invited to join (she's one of my swimming buddies) but being uptight and anglo I declined.

August in France is all about going to the guinguette in the evening! A guinguette is a summer pop up open air bar that serves simple food, has live music and dancing and is almost always situated on a river or a lake. We have an equally popular one in the old public laundry, La Lavoir, in Preuilly, and recently we went with clients to the big one in Montbazon for that authentic French holiday experience.

Pruneaux de Tours

This is a repost from May last year, because very few people know about pruneaux de Tours, but may have read how Elizabeth David came to Tours especially to eat the traditional local pork and prunes dish and wondered why Tours should have been so famous for such a dish.

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Before there were pruneaux d'Agen there were pruneaux de Tours. Pruneaux are prunes ie dried plums. Nowadays the town of Agen in Aquitaine, south-west France, is famous for them, but up until 1970, it was the small oval yellow oven dried whole Saint Catherine plums from around Tours that were the most highly regarded product. Sometimes other small local plum varieties such as Damas de Tours or Rochecorbon (also known as Diaprée rouge) were used. Then in the spring of 1970 there was a tremendous frost which almost entirely wiped out the orchards in the Touraine and production of pruneaux de Tours ceased.

Sainte Catherine plums in our orchard.

I learnt all this because my friend Christian has a plum drying oven in his troglodyte cave. It is missing the platform on which the plums would have been arranged on racks to dry, and under which a fire would have been lit. The old Tourangeau variety Sainte Catherine plums are still widely grown in domestic orchards in the Touraine. We have two in our orchard, but they are no longer a commercial variety. Supposedly Eleanor of Aquitaine brought damsons back to France from the Holy Land after the Second Crusade in 1149. Both Sainte Catherine and Agen plums were developed from these original plums.  Sainte Catherine plums are found only in Touraine and Burgundy, and likewise Agen has its own variety.

Plums used to do very well in this area, but many people, like us, haven't had a decent crop for several years now due to frost and dry. In the days when there was an over supply most years, drying the plums was one of the most practical ways of preserving them. After all, there is only so much jam one can eat, and what else does one do with plums to preserve them in the days before refrigeration?

Interior of Christian's prune drying oven.

Pruneaux de Tours were eaten with goats cheese (of course!), as something to nibble with an aperitif, used to make tarte aux pruneaux, or combined with pork in a traditional Tourangeau dish.

Sainte Catherine plums are ripe in August, and the production of pruneaux de Tours dates from before the 16th century, when Rabelais writes about it. In the 17th century they were all the rage in Paris, and later shipped up and down the Loire to be exported beyond France. The First World War caused a great decline in their production, due to lack of agricultural labour, the appearance on the market of Agen prunes and Californian imports, and changing agricultural practices. By 1930, the village of Huismes, near Chinon, was the last place producing genuine pruneaux de Tours. 

Exterior of Christian's prune drying oven.

There are some well preserved prune drying ovens at Huismes, and in the early 20th century there was 80 000 tonnes of plums harvested annually in the area around Chinon. A typical orchard was 6 or 7 hectares, with 100 plum trees producing a tonne of dried fruit per year, from 8 ovens.

To process the plums they were first laid in locally made wicker baskets. They were then heated and cooled successively five or six times, over a blackthorn or gorse fire. They were done when the prunes were covered with a fine white powder which was formed by the dessication and deposit of flavour elements in the prunes. It is this bloom, known as 'pruneau fleuri', which made the pruneaux de Tours special.

These days commercial plum orchards are rare in the Loire Valley, but you can still occasionally buy a product labelled 'pruneaux de Tours'. However, the plums have been imported from California, and the product is now specifically a prune filled with almond paste to be eaten as a rather upmarket snack.

A Well Head in Saint Pierre des Corps

On our way back to the garage after lunch with our mechanic and a friend at a pizza restaurant we walked past the Saint Pierre des Corps community garden. Bernard piped up and said his grandparents had lived in Saint Pierre des Corps. He could remember all the allotments in the area had these unusual (for here) well heads. The water isn't very far down, as it is very close to the Loire and about the same distance to the Cher. He had very fond memories of being a little kid (that would have been in the sixties) 'helping' his granddad in the veggie garden and getting to scoff all the sun ripened tomatoes and fruit right there in the garden. He grew up to be a chef.

Espace Malraux and Cultures du Coeur

 

Coffee in the meeting room.

As part of my role to organise social and cultural outings for 'our' displaced Ukrainians on behalf of the Association d'Accueil et d'Accompagnement des Réfugiés en Sud Touraine (AARST) I was invited to participate in a meeting of Cultures du Coeur 37. They are an organisation which acts as an intermediary to facilitate access to cultural and sporting events in Indre et Loire. Joining Cutures du Coeur had been suggested to me when I got in touch with the Musée des Beaux Arts in Tours about the possibility of organising an outing to the public fine arts gallery.

Main entrance to the Espace Malraux.

Espace Malraux is a municipal multi disciplinary events and performance facility in Joué les Tours. It comprises three types of spaces -- a 1000 seat auditorium, a 250 seat room that can be adapted to many different arrangements and functions, and meeting rooms or work spaces. This allows the facility to simultaneously fulfill a regional role, with big events and well known artists, but also have a programme for families and the youth audience in the smaller rooms. Some events, especially those for children, are free.

Grand piano in a corridor.

Cultures du Coeur can organise their own events using Espace Malraux as a venue and working with them, or issue invitations to their partners and those their partners work with to existing scheduled events. Cultures du Coeur also works with many other cultural institutions such as museums, sports clubs and theatres in similar ways. Volunteer associations and those working with the disadvantaged join the Cultures du Coeur network and then work with the museums, sports clubs and theatres to create events, outings and workshops attended by people in difficulties, such as 'our' Ukrainians. Some of the possibilities they mentioned for Espace Malraux, beyond scheduled performances, was behind the scenes visits or workshops with the artists.

A meeting room.

The one disappointing feature of Espace Malraux is that getting there by public transport is complicated if not impossible.

Discussing the adaptability of this room.

The room that can be adapted to many configurations.

Les Entresols

An entresol is a level usually between the ground floor and the first floor of a building. They were originally designed to gain space above rooms that were not high status and did not require high ceilings. This type of entresol is often completely hidden on the facade, or presents an assymetrical facade. Entresols are distinguished from mezzanines because they are intermediate floors which are enclosed on the interior too, not open.

Entresols are essentially utilitarian, therefore their appearance on the exterior of the building is traditionally supposed to be as discreet as possible. But sometimes private houses have entresols that are obvious from the outside and decoratively treated.

Architects generally take the view that entresols should be as low on the building as possible, and it is considered ugly and out of proportion to set two entresols directly above one another.

Historically entresols are accessed by hidden staircases and discreet entrances. Often, for example there would be a shop on the ground floor, and residents could pass from there to an apartment in the entresol.

Initially designed for storage with lots of cupboards, they sometimes also had apartments for servants, with small but comfortable rooms. In some really big buildings the entresol was entirely dedicated to housing the staff who worked there.

In Paris, grand carriage entrances meant that the ground floor of 19th century buildings was very high and the first floor apartments were an entresol to compensate. On the exterior the facade was designed to look like the ground floor was one and a half times the height of the other floors, thus creating the characteristic appearance of Parisian avenues. Entresols had been used extensively in Paris since the 17th century, but the Haussmannian style of architecture really took advantage of them to create the unique architectural identity of Paris.

Tours, being a major provincial city, promptly copied the look along its main avenues, and all these photos come from central Tours. In all cases the entresol features big semi-circular windows.

France Won.

 

On Saturday I encountered these fine gentlemen at Saint Pierre des Corps railway station. I was waiting for clients who were arriving on the train from Paris, they were waiting for their train to get to Paris. They were off to see the France - Australia rugby match, and were quite surprised to meet an Australian so early in the day. They got a bystander to take a photo of us all together with one of their phones.

Les Halles de Tours

Les Halles de Tours is the covered produce market right in the heart of the old centre of the City of Tours. It's full of food porn and top quality fresh ingredients. The thirty-eight stall holders are established butchers, bakers, greengrocers, fishmongers, cheesemongers, wine merchants and delicatescens. I must admit, I don't shop there. Everything is a couple of euros more per kilo than I'm used to in Loches. It's a very prestigeous location though, everything in Les Halles is in the best possible condition and sold to you by an experienced and knowledgeable artisan. There is clearly a loyal local (and aging) customer base, comfortably off, used to good service (yes, this is the sort of place it exists in France) and advice, and knowledgeable in their own right about French food.

Centre top, rillons (slow cooked pork belly chunks, a local delicacy), bottom right, oxtail, and behind that beef cheek, at one of the butchers. Next to the rillons is meat for pets, to the left of the oxtail is beef ribs.

In 1866 the City of Tours started work on a metal framed covered market on the site of a large and thriving existing outdoor market. Roads were altered and churches demolished to improve the site. This original building was demolished in 1976 and a new building erected by 1980. The wholesale market which had shared the space was moved to Rochepinard, a quarter in the east of the city.

Soft and stinky northern French cheeses at one of the cheesemongers.

The new building took its aesthetic from the great cruise liners, and the market traders were joined by Picard, the frozen food specialist, a newsagent, a perfumery and a couple of banks. Upstairs is a big meeting and events venue, offices and the studios of France 3 Tours television. Underneath is a large carpark with 670 places.

A fishmongers on one side, a greengrocers on the other. The smiling blond woman is the stallholder and has come out from behind the display to serve the elderly women customers. Customers do not touch the fruit before purchasing.

Les Halles is often referred to as 'le ventre de Tours' (Tours' stomach). 

Greengrocers.

Scallops.

The little 'grey' shrimp bottom left are considered a great delicacy. You eat them whole, head, shell and all. Personally I don't know what the attraction is.

Maison Clement is an épicerie fine (high end specialist grocer) and a cave à vin (wine retail cellar).

A range of salads. The 'pommes harengs' (potato and herring) and the carottes rapées (grated carrot) are very traditional.

The exterior of Les Halles de Tours.

One of the poultry and game merchants.

Hams and patés at one of the charcutiers. These are all cooked hams (aka Paris ham) and by their colour I would say that nitrite was not used, which is good to see.