One of the pleasures of being a heretical Catholic (retired) is going on trips to ancient abbeys and pretending I can imagine living in silence and fasting rather than joyfully reading out menus. In this particular case, my companion was the novelist Patricia Duncker, who lives part of the year in the Midi, in a tiny village high up on the Montagne Noire where she goes to write her books. She had driven me towards the Aude, to the Abbaye de Fontfroide, where we were to have lunch. The monks are long gone, but their magnificent Romanesque home remains. Perhaps they feasted as well as we did. I hope so.
Too hot to eat anything rich and elaborate, we tried the carpaccio of poisson a l'aneth et fleur de sel. I had always thought a carpaccio meant thinly sliced raw beef, but the method worked with salmon. Next, salade maraIchere offered layers of artichoke heart, tomato and potato on green leaves, and came crowned with a neat little tatin of chicory, a caramelised triumph. Tatin was the name of the sisters who invented the famous upside-down apple tart, but nowadays it refers to any sweetish glazed circle of fruit or veg. Patricia ate a golden tagine of chicken. We simply read the names of the puddings like poetry: la legendaire nougat glace et son coulis de fruits blancs, "Mel y Mato" (miel avec faisselle). Lots of Occitan words. We drank the abbey's excellent white wine and agreed with the menu's dictum: "Le vin est le medecin de votre ame."
Patricia was the real medecin of my ame. With her I did serious food tourism. In and out of markets and cafes, sampling, nibbling, enjoying. One day she drove me up towards the Haut Languedoc, through steep hills smelling of wild thyme and sage, to Roquebrun, where a restaurant called Le Petit Nice hung out over the river; and, sitting on the balcony, you could watch the people frolicking below on the sandy shore. This time, the salad was Corsican, and came dressed with chestnuts, walnuts, chopped figs and sliced goat's cheese. At night, in Patricia's house, we grilled brochettes and merguez sausages over the indoor charcoal fire. The cigales fizzed and sawed. When you opened the kitchen window, there was a mountain bang outside.
A few days later, I lunched in a Trappistine convent. The nuns, very fond of my cousin (the local cure), had offered him and his family their guest house for the lunch to celebrate my aunt and uncle's golden wedding. Alas, we didn't eat the nuns' food. A local traiteur served us. Everything was presented in posh style with dribbled coulis, but was so much less delicious than the grills that nearly caught fire in Patricia's sitting room when the sausages sputtered fat on to the coals, when you could drink as much wine as you wanted and talk about books and sex late into the night. Mine is a sensual convent.
