TOULOUSE
: POETIC AND CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE SOUTH WEST.
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Un
torrent de cailloux roule dans ton accent
Ta violence bouillone jusque dans tes violettes
On se traite de con à peine qu'on se traite
Il y a de l'orage dans l'air et pourtant
L'église
Saint-Sernin illumine le soir
Une fleur de corail que le soleil arrose
C'est peut-être pour ça malgré
ton rouge et noir
C'est peut-être pour ça qu'on te dit
Ville Rose
Claude
Nougaro
Toulouse,
'La Ville Rose', is full of the character of the warm
south. Its name comes from a pre-Celtic word of Aquitain
that evoques the Garonne's waters and stones. The
red brick façades of the houses built by the
rich woad merchants of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries
change from a pink hue in the morning to a purple
hue at dusk. The large open arcaded square of the
Place du Capitole makes one feel as if one is in a
small Tuscan town. Cafés surround the square
on three sides and the classical eighteenth century
'Capitole' itself stands the length of the last side
with the grand Toulouse Opera House nesting in the
south wing. Toulouse was the fourth city of the Roman
Western Empire, the capital of Visigoth 'France',
the capital of the Languedoc and Catharism and today
the capital of Aerospace and Rugby.
A
day spent here can have not a moment wasted, even
if one spends the whole day imbued in café
culture: writing letters, reading books, setting the
world to rights intermittently gazing into the space
of the historic square as the world bustles by.
CULTURE
Landmarks
of Toulouse culture lie in the great Romanesque church
of Saint Sernin and the gothic church of Les Jacobins
with its extraordinarily beautiful 'palm-tree' vaulting
. These are well worth visiting if you are interested
in history and the beauty of architecture. Also the
Hotel d'Assezat is a fine example of sixteenth century
'merchant' architecture and is the home to the Bemberg
Collection which is a fine collection of paintings
from the Renaissance (Cranach and others) the seventeenth
century (Pieter de Hooch and others) and Post Impressionists
such as Sisley, Matisse, Gauguin and Signac and others.
An excellent collection and well worth visiting. (Admission
5 euros - within walking distance).
For
science enthusiasts the 'Cité de l'Espace'
is an excellent visit but would probably take up all
your time. It is a theme park on the outskirts of
town with a life size model of the Mir Station with
gravity defying space toilets and intriguing interactive
exhibits bringing space travel to life. Highly recommended
if you like that kind of thing. (Admission 12 euros.
Taxi there around 13 euros).
SHOPPING
Last
minute shopping can be done at the covered market
in Place Victor Hugo which locals say is not an ordinary
market but a religion. (Open mornings only). Chic
clothes shopping can be found around rue St Antoine
du Toulouse and rue Croix-Baragnon. Basic clothes
shopping also at Monoprix and Nouvelles Galleries
in the same area, or Rue St Rome off the Place du
Capitole.
CINEMA
Just
behind Nouvelles Galleries is a bohemian style cinema
called the 'Utopia' showing excellent film club films
always with French subtitles. The main cinemas at
Place Wilson will have films invariably dubbed in
French.
EATING
OUT
There
are plenty of cafés to eat croque-monsieur
or croques-madame (those of Place du Capitole and
Place Saint Georges having the greatest character).
Should anyone be keen on more haute cuisine after
our weeks walking and eating then there are four Michelin
starred restaurants of which our favourite is L'Amphitryon
(30 euros for lunch) or Brasserie des Beaux Arts next
door to the Hotel Assezat in the rue de Metz with
its charming Belle Epoque style dining room.
This
is just to give you a general idea of possibilities
of entertainment. Of course when you are here we will
be able to suggest any other ideas of particular interests.
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THE
CONCEPTION OF BASTIDES.
I always thought that a bastide was a fortified town that
sat on top of a hill like the cherry on top of a Victoria
Sponge. I was wrong.
I
got inspired, you see, from my childrens' 'Aquila' magazine
a few years ago. I saw there that it all started when the
Cathars had suffered under the heavy handed sword of Simon
de Montfort who had been sent by the King of France to sort
out these infidels at the beginning of the twelfth century.
The story of the Cathars is a separate issue which I will
write about another day. The king of France, Louis VIII, saw
how much the area had been devastated by the rampage of 'crusade'.
It was an area of insecurity harbouring gangs of pillagers
who continued to devastate the country. Therefore it was decided
to create new towns and to let the land become a source of
income for all. These new towns were called 'Bastides'. The
first was built at Cordes in 1222. 'Bastides' developed into
a revolutionary idea that proved incredibly successful - some
four to five hundred bastides being built within a period
of two hundred years.
The
King felt that by allowing the individual a certain amount
of freedom he would gain commitment and support from those
people. It was decided that the individual would be allowed
rights that would allow him to prosper without any of the
usual contemporary difficulties. He would be allowed to buy
his own house and make his own will. He would be allowed to
marry his daughter to whom he wanted. He would not have to
fight to prove he was right. A court would make judgement.
He would be able to trade freely according to certain written
rules.
A
charter was written up putting the legal status of the individual
at the top including the assertion of individual freedom and
the right to benefit from one's property without fear of the
arbitrary. It was truly an extraordinary leap forward in political
thinking and the beginning of the rise of the merchant class,
the bourgeoisie.
The
early 'bastides' were built in strategic positions on the
top of hills so as to be aware of opposition. So yes, maybe
here a little like the cherry on the cake but these new towns
were built specifically non-fortified. This was to avoid any
kind of trouble in the form of rebellion. They were built
in stone in geometric orthogonal format so as to be easier
to lay out and to administer. They were built around a central
market square. This was revolutionary in that before this
time the church had been central focus. The church had dominated
all aspects of life: spiritual, intellectual and material.
Here it was pushed aside to let the central space be taken
by merchants. Trade was evident everywhere. Taxes would be
paid to the bailiff or seneschal (representative of the king)
and no longer was the mafioso foot of the baron ready to stamp
out any luxuries of profit. No sale took place without the
use of scales. Any cheating was taken to the courts and dealt
with by the judges. To avoid the introduction of legal inequalities,
the nobles and clerics were not allowed to live in the new
towns.
After
the Albigensian crusade (1209 - 1229), Alphonse de Poitiers,
the brother of Louis IX, was strategically married to the
Count of Toulouse's daughter and succeeded the Count of Toulouse
upon the latter's death in 1249. At this point Alphonse de
Poitiers continued to build these bastides unfortified. He
believed it would work in controlling his territory peacefully
and, by affirming Capetian presence hopefully weaken the local
lords sympathetic to the English cause (the English of course
having been ever present since the marriage of Henry d'Anjou
- later Henry II of England - to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152).
He gradually extended his area of influence to the borders
of his territories but with Edward the Ist of England taking
much interest in the Aquitaine and Philippe III taking the
reins of the Comté of Toulouse after Alphonse de Poitiers
death in 1271, the building of bastides soon became fortified
and the positioning and building of them became like a game
of chess. By the time we arrive at the Hundred Years War (1399
- 1453), both sides were pretty equally balanced for battle.
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CHEESE:
NOT AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS
I
remember hating the idea of cheese as a child. "What's
for lunch?" we would ask. "Macaroni cheese"
would come the reply or: "Cheese rolls". So at home
it was either used as a basic flavouring ingredient or crammed
between two lumps of plastic and smeared with chutney. Yes,
I had been told that it was good for me but I always thought
the chutney was there to help it go down like a polio vaccination.
I'm surprised I wasn't scarred for life.
Years
later came France and the cheesemonger … 'Then felt I
like a watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into
his ken'… it was not just the sight of the variety of
cheese that one could find at the market, but the beauty of
them. All shape and colour and size like shells on a seashore.
Some smooth skinned, some richly mould-encrusted, some blue
veined, some spilling forth in plenty, some seeped in wine,
all enticing. For in the coolness of Monsieur Marty's stall
lay the riches of small farms from all over the great hexagon.
In the mouth they were salty, nutty, smooth, peppered, pungent,
crumbly, creamy and so I could go on.
The
art of producing good cheese goes back as far as which cow,
which grass, what flowers and what time of year for grazing.
Ewe's milk is the most highly concentrated and gives strong
robust and full-flavoured cheeses with a lingering aftertaste.
This is because a ewe produces at least ten times less milk
than a cow per year. The use of raw milk then adds complex
tastes and flavours due to the natural bacteria it contains.
Pasteurised milk will tend to simplify the flavours. Cheese
made from lactic fermentation will be much stronger than those
where rennet has been added to speed up coagulation. Then
there is the ripening or maturing period ('L'Affinage'). This
intensifies the flavour and hardens the texture. A Brie de
Meaux for example will be matured for around eight weeks and
will result in the soft creamy texture we all know so well.
A Brie Noir on the other hand has an 'affinage' of a year
and comes out dull brown in colour and thick and velvety in
texture. Locals dunk this in their coffee like a biscuit.
There
are some thirty six different cheeses in the appellation system.
This is the system of quality control that the French are
so famous for. An example of this control I quote below for
the great Basque cheese Ossau-Iraty-Brebis Pyrenées.
1.
No ewe's milk may be made into cheese until 20 days after
lambing.
2. Renneting must take place within 48 hours.
3. Coagulation must be obtained by renneting. Any other enzyme,
especially of fungal or microbial origin, is forbidden.
4. The term 'montagne' (Ossau Iraty Montagne) may be used
only for cheeses made from the milk of ewe's grazing on summer
pastures between 10th May and 15th September.
5. Any cheese not conforming to the regulations must be sold
as 'fromage de brebis', or sheep's-milk cheese.
So
to think of cheese as a basic flavouring ingredient or something
to be smeared with chutney to help it go down is a thing of
the past. They call the holy trinity of the table; bread,
wine and cheese, for the simplicity and ease with which one
can acquire and eat it but it is not as simple as it seems.
Holy Trinity?? Surely, like there were never three musketeers
but four, we cannot forget the d'Artagnan of the group: the
apple or pear. All for one and one for all!
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A
NOTE ON WINE
Our children are getting very knowledgeable about wine. This
has come about by careful nurturing of their olfactory systems.
Each time I have a glass of wine in my hand and the children
are near, I say: "Now, tell me what you think this one
smells of" and with great aplomb they take the glass,
swill it around and sniff. "Wine" is what they say.
"Anything else … blackberry perhaps?" I ask.
"No, no, just wine" they say. Well, it is a start,
and at the ages of ten and nine I think there is still hope.
I
think I started with wine when I was sixteen. It was something
that I had never really enjoyed before but, like with girls,
I had felt that there was something definitely worth while
there … I just couldn't see what. My father had decided
it was time for wine for his son and the place was to be Rules,
that bastion of the Englishness of English cuisine. Roast
beef on the plate and a Léoville Barton '66 in the
glass. I knew it was important and big and with my first sip
I knew that I didn't really like it. Wine was not for me.
Not as easy as beer but somehow it did go rather well with
the meat. Of course now the palate has matured but I think
I probably fared as well as my children do now with me. I
enjoyed the experience though and as Léoville Barton
is now our wine for extra special occasions this only goes
to confirm my belief that wine is not just what is inside
the bottle but has as much to do with where you are and who
you are with.
Moving
on to more serious fare, I read somewhere that the top one
hundred wines in the world would always be French. I then
thought: "Can this really hold true today?" All
one hears now is that, for decent drinking wine, Australian
and Chilean reds for example are streets ahead of the frenchies.
In olden days a glimpse of a wine list would show that eighty
per cent of the wines would be French: shocking! Nowadays
anything goes. In fact you would be lucky to find twenty per
cent that would be French. So to the question: would the top
one hundred wines in the world always be French? I would wriggle
around it like a politician and say this: that if one said
that France has the greatest acreage in the world in quality
of wine one might be getting nearer to the truth. Or, maybe,
if one is talking about the most 'collected' wines, you might
feel that, in the top hundred wines, there is little space
left for the New World to fit in to.
The
' New World ' has posed a problem for this, the once greatest
of all wine countries. It must be said though that France
has for quite a while been looking to 'flying' wine makers
from the New World to improve the quality of their wine. Not
so much as before though as now many viniculteurs are working
hard on a move away from the Robert Parker flock of easy drinking
oaky wines to those that are more atypical and with more influence
of terroir. The goal for many French winemakers is to attract
those people who are looking for a distinct style of wine
that comes from a particular model of viticultured earth,
and which is made by a particular wine-maker. The style of
the wine is all important. The problem is of course that most
people just enjoy wine for wines sake and maybe it is this
attitude that makes the French market suffer. Market Research
perhaps would be the answer to the problem for the middle
market winemaker. The rub lies in the arrogance of the French.
It is kneaded into the blood. They cannot see that to listen
to consumer needs can be beneficial to sales. Having lived
now in France for fourteen years we can still see how this
philosophy of 'like it or lump it' is prevalent in whatever
field one wishes to mention.
It
is therefore understandable that France will still have a
problem for a while as the New World mass co-operative way
of making wine is faultless in this respect. The professionalism
of the New World has shocked them. Clear easy-to-read labelling
and a guaranteed quality of consistency of taste makes this
wine almost as easy to drink as Coca-Cola. The Appellation
system makes it difficult for the French to compete. Having
said that though it is maybe because of this system that France
can achieve the typicity they are looking for and the hope
is that the swing in taste will come back towards the wines
of more depth and subtley and then the winemakers of the New
world will have to look to their laurels.
As
you are here in the southwest we want to introduce you to
the wines that may not be so easily available across the Channel
or elsewhere in the big wide world and which distinctly fit
into the 'typicity' style. Cahors of course will take a major
part in our happy consumption. It is a wine made up of a minimum
of seventy percent auxerrois (better known elsewhere maybe
as malbec or cot). The other thirty percent can be made of
either auxerrois, merlot or tannat or a mix of any of these.
We will try various concoctions to see how they differ.
SOME
OF THE APPELLATIONS CONSUMED DURING THE WEEKS:
COTES DE BERGERAC The most prolific of vignobles of
the south west France outside Bordeaux and closest in character
to Bordeaux itself in that it uses similar cépages.
MONBAZILLAC
Ancient vignoble renowned for centuries. There is a higher
proportion of Muscadelle to Sauternes which gives it a quality
contribution and which gives it its particular individuality.
A slight lack in finesse in comparison maybe but Andrew Jefford
says that it makes up for that in 'honeyed volume and succulent,
thrashing power'.
SAUSSIGNAC
An exciting satellite appellation. One wine from this appellation
has been compared by Robert Parker to 75°/° Climens
25°/° Rieussec. It may not be quite as luscious as
its neighbour Monbazillac but it can have better acidity.
Interesting.
CAHORS
Regarded by many as the top producer of reds in the south
west. A great red from the Malbec grape and with more typicity
than the Argentine equivalents. It compliments the rich cuisine
of the area to the enth degree and has recently been voted
the most inspired appellation of France due to some great
ideas from the young winemakers here.
MADIRAN
Great things happening here under the flag of Alain Brumont
and others. Regarded also by many as the appellation that
produces the best reds of the south west! These are high tannic
reds coming from Tannat grapes and an addition of Cabernet
Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Fer Servadou. Not to be drunk
as an aperitif! This is a wine that will compliment all the
riches that the South West gastronomy has to offer. It needs
time and food.
IROULEGUY
The pride of the Basques. An ancient wine dating back to the
creations of the pilgrimage of Saint Jacques de la Compostelle.
A similar cépage to Madiran with the greater part of
the wine consisting of the Tannat grape though the two greatest
exponents of
Irouleguy beg to differ over this. One claiming that Tannat
has very little to do with the end product!
JURANCON
Absolutely delicious sweet wines being produced here at the
foothills of the Pyrenees. No noble rot, just late picked
Petit Manseng on the whole. Vines are trained 'en hautais'
to prevent the pockets of freezing mist ruining the crop.
The flagship domaine is Domaine Cauhapé.
FRONTON
Sometimes still known as Côtes du Frontonnais. Our favourite
red simply because it is so well priced and delicious. Regarded
as the Beaujolais of the South West but having an unusual
taste from its cépage of Negrette.
COTEAUX
DU QUERCY Some lovely reds coming from this satellite
appellation of Cahors. Primarily made from Cabernet Franc
it can have a lovely balance of fruit and tannins.
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PIGEON
RECIPE : start night before with olives
Serves
4
2
pigeons
4 tbs butter
4 shallots
1 spanish onion
1lb unsmoked bacon
1 tbs flour
½ pt stock
1 tbs parsley
seasoning
thyme, marjoram
16 stoned green olives
4 tbs cognac
Brown
pigeons.
Finely
chopped shallots, onion and diced unsmoked bacon in pan -
sauté till golden; sprinkle with flour.
When
flour combined with butter, all stock and stir till comes
to the boil.
Skim
well. Return pigeons to sauce with parsley and salt and pepper,
thyme, marjoram.
Cover
casserole and simmer gently 2 hours.
20
mins before done add stoned olives (olives blanched to remove
salt, and soaked overnight in cold water and cognac)
Remove
cover and continue cooking.
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