La Grande Armee

Oct. 12

The French were out in force today.

Not right away, mind you, because it seems Saturday starts out slow here. We went this way, that way on some little streets to get to Les Halles, the city market. The streets at 11 a.m. were pretty empty.

We stopped for breakfast around that time at a place really called Joke & Co., a small cafe with a long list of crepe choices and a dining room upstairs. We had the place to ourselves and sat by a window. Some people walked by, but not many.

Joanna had crepes with a chestnut topping. I had mine with Calvados.

I also finally got to have wine with breakfast, a glass of a white that the proprietors said came from Aix-en-Provence. I had asked for a white Cotes du Rhone, but they didn’t have one. Maybe that was one of the jokes.

No complaints, though. The wine had some flavor and went down reasonably well.

The Les Halles market is newer, smaller, and less gritty than the markets in Valencia and Barcelona, but well worth a stop. There are wine sellers, bars, lots of places that will shuck a plate of oysters for you. We didn’t stop for oysters because Joanna doesn’t eat raw fish, and we had just eaten crepes. But damn, they looked good.

One thing on the fish counter that I had not seen before is aile de raie. It reminded Joanna of shark fin. I think the name refers to the fin of a ray or a skate.

We picked up some very expensive macarons for fun and some very cheap fruit for breakfast because we are going to leave the hotel relatively early Sunday morning to get a 10:14 train back to Paris.

In our wanderings on the way back to the hotel, we found a 13th century synagogue next to Place de Jerusalem in what was during the Middle Ages was the ghetto of Avignon. I believe the synagogue is still used for marriages and possibly for regular sabbath services, but am not sure.

The first big surprise of the day came around our lunch time, which was in the middle of the afternoon. We went to the Place de l’Horloge for some wine and cheese.

There were some tents set up in the square, one with an exhibit about insects, another with a clown show, a couple of others. An acrobat disguised as a giant red bug of some kind had huge stilts that resembled lobster claws on his legs and arms and lumbered around the crowd. At one point, he trapped a lady inside his four limbs.

We sat in the sun in front of one cafe that ignored us. We went next door and got a white Cotes du Rhone and a cheese plate.

This order should be a good bet in France, because there are the three things the French really pride themselves on: wine, cheese, and bread. I think French restaurateurs are transported to the Netherlands, where they have to eat the food for two years, if they fuck up one of those things.

Before we had polished off the cheese, we heard drums. It seems there is a local festival this weekend involving several hundred medieval reenactors. In the States, we have Civil War reenactments, Revolutionary War, and my brother-in-law Mark goes back as far as the French and Indian Wars. I believe some Americans also belong to a Society for Creative Anachronism, but they are largely confined to Renaissance Faires.

But over here, they have knights in mail and yeoman with crossbows.

They had drums and bagpipes, hunting horns, and banners. The guys bringing up the rear were in white with red crosses on their tunics. And they were really into it. I think they were supposed to be the Templars, kind of the Marine Corps of the Crusades. The Templars were scary in real life and these guys had their game faces on to uphold the tradition.

The procession also included camp followers, at least one jester, a couple of bishops, a cardinal, and maybe a pope impersonator.

The whole group marched through the Place of the Clock and went up to the plaza outside the papal palace, where they clowned around for an hour or so. Some were chanting marching songs, or maybe bawdy songs.

We watched a duel between two knights with a third acting as referee. Whenever one tried a low blow or some other infraction of the rules, the ref hit him with the flat of his sword.

A thief grabbed a woman’s pocketbook, and the guards grabbed him, and then they all had a photo taken together. We saw the Wife of Bath using a video camera.

After a while, the reenactors formed up and marched back. Their route took them past the site of the old Templar commandery of the city.

There is a sign there that I found the other day. It’s right across the street from St. Agricol, which is the name of that very old church named for the even older bishop.

We wandered around looking for a restaurant in the evening. For all I know, there is no bad food in Avignon, but we stayed away from the Place d’Horloge, because if there is substandard food, it will be in a tourism navel like that.

Most of the menus offer five or six choices of entree, generally something beef, something salmon, duck, and tartare.

We wound up at a place on Rue Bonneterie called Chez Rippert.

We got a bottle of red Cotes du Rhone called Terres de Galets from a company or person named Gabriel . Meffre (yes, with a point in the middle). It was good, but nowhere near as flavorful as the wine we had last night.

The Galets had a mild fragrance and was reasonably fruity with a little bite going down. After four or five sips it started to grow on me and the aroma seemed to get stronger.

The flavor improved significantly once the snails came. They were plump and garlicky. Escargots is one of the few dishes that I enjoy with a strong garlic scent and flavor.

When we were choosing the main course, I came across one with “pulpeaux.” I couldn’t remember what pulpeaux. Was it a vegetable? Or meat without a backbone? Then I remembered.

I confirmed with the waiter, who spoke some English, that pulpeaux is octopus. With an X on the end, it probably referred to more than one, but I was not being punctilious. As long as it was dead, I would eat it.

The dish turned out to be a brown broth with carrots, potatoes, and little octopuses. It wasn’t exactly the comfort food that we have been eating for days, probably because it wasn’t as fatty. But it was very good.

Back at the hotel, we polished off the bottle from Gabriel . Meffre with some of the macarons we bought at Les Halles.

I arranged a wake-up call for 6:30 to make that 10:14 train without having to rush, and thus assured of my schedule, slept the sleep of the mildly buzzed.

Back in Paris on Sunday afternoon, staying in the Montmartre.

Be well, all.

Oct. 23

Larry,

According to your Grasshopper, my walking Google, the people in Paris are very serious about their wine, cheese, and bread. Whoever screws up those three will be sent to Holland and eat Dutch food for two years.

Fact or did he make that up?

Joanna

Oct. 23

Joanna,

When I saw he wrote that in one of his e-mails, I was quite impressed.

The concept is so excellent, who cares whether it's true or not?

Although I have seen a few lost-looking souls wandering around Amsterdam muttering in French as they scoured the streets for a decent loaf of bread and a drinkable bottle of wine (cheese isn't a problem — while the Netherlands might not have the variety France does, quality is hardly an issue), I don't know if their situation was self-imposed or by judicial directive.

Unfortunately, some of these guys became cooks at some of Amsterdam's most popular restaurants.

Who am I to argue with an older and wiser man whose travel mileage is quickly catching up to mine?

We should discuss this further over a bowl of laksa or hokkien mei in Singapore.

See you then!

Best,

Larry  

L'On Y Danse

Oct. 12

Another life ambition achieved today: I danced on the bridge, or what’s left of it, at Avignon. To my own extremely poor accompaniment: “Sur le pont d’Avignon” et cetera. OK, so I don’t dance well, but I try to move like a movie gangster when I do it, so nobody will give me a hard time.

From the time more than 40 years ago when I first heard the song and learned what the words meant, I have wanted to come here and see the bridge. Then I learned that most of it had fallen down centuries ago. That’s all right, so did London Bridge, and I crossed the ocean to see that.

If you’re old like me you pay 11 euro for one ticket that gets you onto the bridge and also into the Palace of the Popes. Quelque chose! a bargain.

And it was an all-day trip. We left the hotel around noon and went to the post office because I had a couple of cards to mail to the States.

The post office is right by one of the city gates. The walls run all around Avignon. They are largely intact, but in bad repair. People aren’t allowed to walk on them because some of the stones are loose. You could fall, or knock one down on somebody’s head.

Many of the old stone walls here are made of limestone or sandstone, or maybe chalk and butter. I’m not sure. In the Palace of the Popes, Joanna brushed against a wall when she was trying to take a picture, and there was white dust all over her trenchcoat.

Many walls have deep holes where the stone has dissolved in the wind and the rain. I put my fingers into one stone and some grains came away. It was upsetting. Oh no, I just took six months off the life of somebody’s house.

In fact, the window of my room looks out on some ancient-looking stone walls. You can see where a piece of one of them fell and lodged in the roof of an adjoining building. Now, if that happened in New York, or maybe anywhere in the States, there would be a dozen hungry lawyers trying to find out who owns the roof and how much they can get.

The bridge that stands in the Rhone now consists of four arches. There used to be more than 20. The original bridge was the inspiration of someone named St. Benezet. He raised money in the 12th or 13th century and roused people to build it.

The Rhone at this stage outweighed medieval bridge work by a good measure, so the thing kept falling down. It was abandoned in the 17th century. The last remaining arches were restored in the 19th or 20th century and are now part of the Unesco World Heritage Site at Avignon. The papal palace and a couple of other things are also part of that.

It is made of blocks of stone and is paved with a difficult surface of river stone laid in concrete. Think of round bulbous things poking up to torture you.

Joanna says this kind of surface is recommended for reflexology. If you walk on the surface in your bare feet, it makes you healthy. I walked on that pavement in my long-distance shoes, a pair of rubber-soled Rockports, and those stones took some work.

I have learned on this trip that the Rhone was the border between France and somewhere else. The popes lived on this side and Philip the Fair had the other. the bridge was heavily protected on both sides. There’s something, the tower of Philippe le Bel on the far side of the Rhone. The Avignon side includes a drawbridge.

I suddenly remembered my Monty Python. Imagine a bunch of French guys running across the bridge shaking their swords. The drawbridge goes up. They fall into the river. The pope is on the wall saying, “Aha, you silly French persons, your father is a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. I fart in your general direction.” Or words to that effect.

I’m sure that Matt, who has the movie memorized, can give me the correct dialogue.

When we came to the end of the current bridgework,  Joanna got a cool shot of our shadows in the water. There we are on the Rhone.

We left the bridge and climbed a tower to see if it led to the palace. It didn't, but that's all right. You can see why.

We backtracked and wandered toward the plaza where they actually let you into the palace. It was 2 o’clock by then and I hadn’t had wine all day. But there is always a cafe when you need one. I was able to order a cheese plate with bread and a glass of white Cotes du Rhone.

There were two soft cheeses and one hard, served with a fig and some tapenade, probably egg plant. This white was very interesting with the cheese. It had several fruity and sometimes even mineral flavors, and they changed depending on the type of cheese I had just eaten. I think Joanna noticed that too.

After lunch, we climbed a steep alley of stairs and came out into the plaza of Le Palais des Papes.

The palace has wings inside wings, and there used to be more. After the Revolution it was adapted to serve as an army barracks and several structures were torn down.

I think the place was planned to be confusing, to control housebreakers and assassins. Unless you were an insider and knew your way around it, you would get lost in there and starve.

We followed the tour circuit because there were signs pointing the way, but I had no idea where we really were at any time inside the palace.

It is fascinating even now with the furnishings gone. Some rooms, like the papal apartment, have period furniture, but the pieces are not original to the house.

Many rooms—and this I found astonishing—are still covered with vivid painting from the 1330s. Chaucer really was a boy then. The pope’s room is decorated with a tracery of vines with birds and small animals hidden in the motif. The recesses for the windows are painted with trellises and trefoil arches so they look like corridors or alleyways.

It’s very amusing stuff, and according to the notes, shows the influence of early Renaissance techniques being developed in Italy at the time.

There is a chapel dedicated to John the Evangelist and John the Baptist that is still very much preserved. In the panel where they bring Salome the head of the Baptist on a charger, there is a puppy standing next to her.

The consistory, where the pope met the cardinals for official business, the chapel, and the dining hall are huge spaces with Gothic vaulted ceilings.

There are displays of fragmentary objects found during excavations on the grounds, often they are bits of stained glass, or small ornaments. There is a pile of round stones in one corner outside. They are bullets thrown by ballistas or trebuchets, or some other kind of early artillery during various times when the palace was under siege.

One display includes fragments of the pope’s artillery. That case also includes a human skull pierced by the quarrel from a crossbow.

The tour lets out on the far side of the palace, and so we wandered for a while through some very narrow, very old streets.

We saw a drawing of the bridge of St. Benezet somewhere in the day’s travels, and it shows the palace, and behind it an open space with what appear to be windmills. They’re not going to fit any windmills in the old city now. There is no room for sidewalks so you have to watch for the cars and get up against the wall when they go by.

We headed back to the hotel for a breather. Joanna took a nap. I opened the other bottle that we bought at Et Si Bacchus Etait une Femme. The label says Les Tetes de Chats, Coteaux du Giennois, 2007. It is bottled by Mathieu Coste, vigneron a Villemoison. I think it’s form the Loire Valley. At least, that’s what the lady at the wine shop told me.

A very interesting drink, it had an almost spicy hot bite. If I remember what Larry told me, the Loire Valley sits on a vast limestone formation that flavors the soil, the grapes, and so the wine. I have sensed a pleasant mineral flavor in other Loire wines, but this was different, and very good in its own way.

Later, for dinner, we retraced our steps from the night before. On the way to New Ground, we had stopped in front of another restaurant to look at the menu. The waiter opened the door for us. We already had a reservation, so we told him “tomorrow.”

This was tomorrow. L’Hermitage is tiny and the menu very short. It bills itself as Provencal.

We started with appetizers. The terrine maison tout cochon was a mixture of onion, other stuff, and maybe pork. It came in two parts, one on a thick slice of lettuce and the other on a cake that may have been foie gras. Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce.

For dinner we had a filet of beef with real French fries. The meat was not as tender as you’d expect in an American restaurant, probably because the beef was grass fed, but that made it taste even better.

Wine, for my record, was Domaine du Coriancon by Francois Vallot, vigneron a Vinsobres. It was labeled “cru des Cotes du Rhone” and was a blend of Grenache, syrah, and Mourvedre grapes.

Hot damn! Vive la Provence.

Oct. 12 My dear Grasshopper,

"Les oeufs mollet aux girolle were poached and the yolk still runny, served in a bowl with a creamy sauce."

Did you copy the name of that dish correctly? I wasn't sure, so I did a Google translate: "the calf eggs with chanterelles." If I remember my French, folks would use "oeufs l'agneau" — the lamb eggs — as a polite way of saying one of my favorite dishes in Morocco, lamb's testicles. Is it possible your eggs had no yolks at all, but were indeed calf's testicles? Call me curious.

Larry

Oct. 12

Sorry to say, I'm pretty sure these were hen's eggs, Sensei.

Had I the slightest clue that I was eating anything even remotely like prairie oysters, you know I'd be bragging about that.

These were soft white eggs, with a runny yellow yolk. By the shape, I knew they were poached or cooked in a similar way.

Grasshopper

Oct. 12

Hmmm...how did they come up with that name for the dish? I will have to ask my friend Claude the next time I talk to him

Larry

Oct. 13

I have a Collins translating dictionary with me. The assumption that I have miscopied something in French is always a good one.

This time, however, the dictionary says “mollet” as a noun can indeed mean “calf” or “calf leg,” which of course I didn't know until just now when I looked it up. The word's also an adjective that means "softish" and that's where the dish name comes in.

Collins lists a special usage of “oeufs mollets” as “soft-boiled eggs.” So these may have been soft-boiled and taken out of the shell whole. Or maybe poached also counts.

Oct. 13

Mystery solved....nice work.

Larry

Under the Watch of Popes and Sphinxes

October 11

The wine I opened on the train was very good indeed. Of course, it’s hard to beat a smooth, fruity wine sipped from a plastic cup at some improbable speed across the Earth. I don’t know how fast the Train a Grande Vitesse goes, but I did notice that poles near the tracks disappear. An occasional blip of a shadow is all you see.

Riding on a train is always fun. In the States, you see the seediest sides of cities because that’s where the warehouses are.

On this trip, we went through farms and forests. The ground just south of Paris is as flat as East Texas or South Jersey. Then it starts to roll. The farms and villages have terra cotta roofs, maybe made by Rodin. Who knows?

We had bought a sandwich at the station. Sandwiches are very popular and are sold in most places that sell bread. It’s funny, though, because as rich and complex as so much French food is, the sandwiches are simple. This one had one layer of meat and one of cheese, no dressing.

Maybe the filling is considered dressing for the bread. The bread here can be a meal in itself.

The TGV has a station of its own in Avignon. The cab ride is OK. You see the Rhone and some hills. The shapes of the architecture, the cars, and the signs tell you that you’re someplace else. It doesn’t look like home, so it’s kind of fun.

Then you come to the city walls. Wow, now you know that you’re someplace else.

We’re staying on the second floor of the Danieli, a small hotel in the old city. There is no elevator, so carrying the bags up was good exercise. The room is at least twice the size of the one in Paris.

We had been sitting on the train for two and a half hours, so it was time for a walk. We headed toward the Palace of the Popes. It was around four in the afternoon, so we didn’t go inside then.

We did climb up to the attached church, but the entrance was blocked off by a truck and a temporary fence. The church is on a hill overlooking the Rhone. You can see the remnant of the old Pont d’Avignon, on which people dance, according to the song.

The bridge is one of the things I came here to see.

The wind was kicking up and the drizzle sent us back to the old town square, La Place d’Horloge, which is a few hundred meters from the hotel. It’s where the city buildings are and it’s named for a clock that was put there in the 15th century, when a clock was a rare thing.

We sheltered from the rain in a cafe called La Civette. Joanna warmed up with hot chocolate, and I saw white Cotes du Rhone on the menu. Wow, even the luncheonettes down here carry it.

So I had a glass from les vignerons de Roquemaure. The white Cotes du Rhone is hands-down my favorite white wine. I drink some others on occasion—Chardonnay with Thanksgiving turkey, for instance, or Loire Valley whites, which have a mineral aftertaste—but not a lot. I find them light and a little on the sweet side.

White Cotes du Rhone is almost as good as a red. It’s hearty and has enough flavor to fill the mouth.

We wandered down a couple of side streets after the rain let up. We came to a medieval church dedicated to an early Bishop of Avignon, St. Agricol. Parts of the building date back to the 7th or 8th century. Most of it is later, maybe 12th or 13th century.

Outside are remains of the old Roman walls of the city.

We came back to the hotel, which is covered in ornate Belle Epoque grandeur. You enter through an alley that makes an S curve. I like the sphinxes guarding the door. They make me feel secure.

We found a guide book in the lobby and took some notes on restaurants. We had a few candidates and wound up at one with the unlikely name of New Ground.

It specializes in Provencale cooking.

I was going to order the house red, which was 2 euros and change per glass. The waiter showed me the list of bottles. I could get a whole bottle of Cotes du Rhone rouge for less than the cost of three glasses of wine in Paris.

He recommended Les Amariniers, Cotes-du-Rhone Villages, 2012. The village is Signargues. The wine is made from a blend of Grenache and syrah grapes. I know this because the notes on the back label are in French and English.

According to a sticker on the front of the bottle, it took the Medaille d’Or at the 2013 Councours des Vins in Orange.

First course was grilled tuna. It was supposed to come with mashed sweet potatoes. There was a mashed vegetable, but I had never seen green sweet potatoes. There was a kind of ratatouille made of leeks and mushrooms.

We asked the waiter about the green sweet potatoes. So happens, they weren’t sweets at all, but mashed peas. “There was a problem in the kitchen,” the waiter said.

I can only say, give me more problems like that one. This was comfort food right from the start.

That was followed by duck leg with herbed rice and another ratatouille-like dish of sweet peppers, eggplant, and small tomatoes.

The food, along with numerous glasses of a superb red, put a great cap on the day.

I put the remains of the bottle in my raincoat pocket and we set out for a stroll.

I think we stopped at a bar back at La Place d’Horloge, then came back to the Danieli, where I polished off the Signargues.

Oct. 12

Grasshopper,

Enjoying your missives and so glad you know just how lucky you are to be there. One of my favorite parts of the world. Avignon is OK, but the surrounding country is incredible, with the occasional exception of suburban-style blight. I hope you get the chance to return for a longer stay.

Random thoughts:

The ramparts are really cool, yes? And the way they connect into the Palace of the Popes is really something.

Try to get to Les Halles. A modern market where you'll find lots of local products and flavor. 

Most of the restaurants in that big public square are not very good.

And I'm impressed with your white wine crusade. It's exactly what I do when I'm there. Some are really interesting. See if you can find a Vacayras white (the reds can be excellent, as well.) And need I say, if you feel like a splurge, a white Chateauneuf du Pape from the right producer, with a little age, can be a revelation. But proceed gingerly. Lots of bad Chateauneuf du Pape around in those parts. If it seems too cheap, it's probably not even worth what you're paying for it.

Try to eat some lamb. The area is known for it.

Have fun!!!

Larry