Food
Michele Roberts celebrates a triple harvest festival
Published 13 October 2003
I didn't want to leave France - so I made do with a triple harvest festival
How many harvest festivals are we allowed? One friend says: when in doubt, overdo it. Excellent advice.
The first harvest festival took place last week. I didn't want to accept it was time to leave France but the calendar pointed like a stern forefinger. Like those Annunciation angels saying get on with it: cut all the last flowers in the garden, the dahlias, nasturtiums, roses and Michaelmas daisies, and distribute them among the neighbours. Ditto the grapes, the best crop ever, because of the heat this year, fat black bunches dangling down, and the apples, the figs, the pears.
Everybody had a glut of fruit and veg and we all raced around with full baskets giving each other presents, praising each other's beautiful stuff, kissing four times, swapping recipes, sipping aperitifs made with eau-de-vie from last year's fruit. Everybody was bottling madly. When I went to lunch with Yvette, after market, we spent the aperitif half-hour finishing peeling the peaches she was packing into glass jars. Then down into the cellar with them, to stack them inside a huge boiler over a gas flame, let them jiggle for 20 minutes, leave them to cool. After that she planned to tackle pear jam and apple compote.
The second harvest festival involved cooking at home. Farmer friends came to supper bearing colourful baskets (cut from cardboard beer cartons) of home-grown peaches, grapes, pumpkins, courgette flowers and zinnias. With my late crop of those rosy-podded haricot beans we call haricots cocos, with all the last produce from the vegetable garden, I made an elegiac soupe au pistou to mourn the end of summer and to use up all the basil plants and garlic. The second course was dedicated to the last of the tarragon: poulet a l'estragon, by way of an Elizabeth David recipe gleaned from la Savoie, which involves a sauce made from stock and cream and tarragon, a crust of breadcrumbs and grated Gruyere. Pudding was pears poached in red wine. Rock-hard wretches: what else can you do with them? By now we were tipsy, and laughing, and crowning each other with vine wreaths for drinking toasts.
The third harvest celebration was the last visit to the market. The glory of the produce made you want to burst out singing. Like plunging into a painting by Caravaggio: Bacchus hosting his chums at a feast. The voluptuous gods and goddesses were us, having a sit-down outside the cafe, crumpling our shopping lists. What to choose from all this richness? The beginning of autumn provided nothing but sensual images of plenty. A young man lolling against the handles of his wooden barrow spilling over with oranges. A stalagmite of plaited baskets just behind him, waiting to be filled. Wooden tubs of inky olives, gleaming with oil. Tawny piles of mixed varieties of apples and pears, pots of sage, parsley, sorrel. How can I help it if my ideas of friendship, love and sex are inspired by all this sweetness and abundance? Everybody bumped about, smiling and intent, cheerful and exclaiming, as they held up melons and sniffed them and debated whether they would keep until Sunday lunch, stood patiently in the haphazard queues, smiled to each other about what they'd got, grinned at strangers. Polymorphous perverse? Forget it. Just vegetable love.
Nor are carnivores forgotten. We kill to eat (even carrots have to be pulled up) and in butchers' shops you see the blood and corpses, which does seem more honest than pretending, as supermarkets do, that meat is just a sort of shrink-wrapped pink sweetie. In the shopping street parallel to the market, the butchers, in their sawdust-strewn establishments, were flicking deft knives through calves' liver, hacking and hewing through bone and muscle of beef, tossing aside scraps of unwanted flesh. Caravaggio would have painted them, too. The clients watched the butchers acting so sexy, pinching each other, jostling and flirting. Then they calmed down, swapped roles, merged into therapy-speak, sympathised with pensioners on tight budgets, tut-tutted over children who were fussy eaters, gave good advice about what to give Grandmere for supper. It was all so real, this redness and wetness. The customers bore away biftecks and game, lamb, and tripe sausages. Holy communion.
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