Fraise – Fresa – Fragola – Erdbeere

I have little idea of the etymology of any of the words for strawberry in the title to this post, although I have long admired the pragmatic poetry of the German Erdbeere (literally, earth-berry) which has always sounded far more mammalian than vegetal to me. What I do know, however, is that the English word ‘strawberry’ has nothing to do with straw. The straw of the berry has instead to do with the straying, self-strewing behaviour of the plants along the ground. The referential wheel spins strangely in Corsica: the strawberry plants are tucked into beds of straw and called fraises.

Strawberries might be ruined for me. Firstly, I recently spent ten days doing little but care for strawberries on an organic farm in Corsica. I’ve weeded strawberries, I’ve scattered woodchips and straw over beds of strawberries to keep weeds away, I’ve aerated the roots of strawberries, I’ve pruned runners and dead leaves and under-achieving leaves and any unsightliness away from millions of strawberry plants and I’ve picked more kilos of strawberries than I care to count. I have implanted a visual guide to the strawberry in my brain and I expect fraise related imagery to punctuate my dreams for many decades hence. What it will mean for me to dream of strawberries in twenty years, I do not know. Nostalgia, perhaps, for my irresponsible tridecennial berry fling on the hills of Corsica where the plants are as tough as barbed wire?Or maybe strawberry dreams will draw to mind a place where the sun beats down like anything but honey on our ladies of the garden? Was it in one of Roald Dahl’s memoirs that the story was told about the boy who worked in a chocolate factory and got sick of the taste of chocolate? Was it my friend Skye’s grandfather? Was it family apocrypha? I’m not sure I will find myself sick of the taste of strawberries for a long, long time. What worries me is that I might never find strawberries to match those of le Jardin de Niolu, delicious, warmed by the sun, impeccables.I’m also worried that I might turn into one of those insufferable food types who points out all the flaws in the produce before them. ‘If your strawberry isn’t bright red and glossy right up to the stem, forget it, just forget it.’ Worse, I could become the tedious globe-trotting food nostalgists whose every bite is a pretext for a yarn. ‘Yes, these are nice strawberries that you are serving me, kind host, but not a patch on those wonderful, wonderful organic berries from Corsica, I ate them when I was young and the sun was warm… [Insert dull and self-focussed travel anecdote here].’

Mindful of these dangers, I register only the following. Recently, I have eaten the best strawberries that have ever come my way. They resemble only marginally the hard red pyramids which taste of wood and water often sold under the label ‘strawberry’ in Australia. This is an outrage.

Since leaving the rocky and mountainous terrain of Lozzi, I have been weeding the internet for useful information, a far less satisfying project than digging into the earth, albeit kinder to the knees, hands, and back. Had I been foraging through the internet and not hacking into Corsican soil, I might have come across this reference to the Strawberry Project earlier and tucked a few runners into my pocket; so equipped I would have strewn the strays all over Genoa and thus propagated the guerrilla gardening meme, one of my long-term (almost non-ironic) favourites.

Cynorhodons

Wild rosebushes sprawl unexpectedly over the harsh Corsican mountainsides. They flower in early summer and so now, in August, they are covered with hips, one of my favourite botanical phenomena.
It’s not often that English utterly trumps French for poetic expression. In English, we have rosehips; en français, on a les cynorhodons, a far less attractive term, I think, entirely arbitrarily; or course. Were I staying here longer, I’d insist on picking basketfuls to make jam and dry for tea. I’d also experiment with rosehip liqueurs, both to stay on the right side of wholesome and because, although I’ve never encountered them, I’ve long been convinced that they would be spectacular.
On flora, I post this photo not just because the onion flower is so impressive but because the backdrop – bright blue cloudless sky and dry stony terrain – encapsulates conditions here nicely. I have no plans for onion flower teas or liqueurs.

Strawberry Fields Forever

Corsica may be the birthplace of Napoleon, but this island is a land apart from France. Closer to Rome than to Paris, Corsicans insist that the French colonised the island. The Corsican flag is ubiquitous – printed on t-shirts, flapping in the sun, tattooed on forearms, stuck onto windows – whereas the tricolore only flies before official buildings. This distance from metropolitan France perhaps accounts for the fact that it is quite easy to get online. I’m wwoofing chez Myriam and Felipe, a Corsican-Colombian couple, until around the 27th in the high and searing mountains smack bang in the middle of Corsica – the nearest town is Ponte Leccia – and should be able to provide updates if not of the minute, then surely of the prolonged moment, on the reality of the frontline of organic strawberry production. Fifteen varieties of organic strawberry. Chèvre du maison. More chooks.

I’ve just finished reading the extraordinary first installment of Javier Marias’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Fever and Spear, a book which has given me more than enough to think upon as I pick strawberries, weed strawberries, prune strawberries in the Corsican sun. There’s a copy of the Slow Food manifesto and companion on my desktop following some interesting conversation on the matter in Aix-en-Provence; the most recent issue of a triennial organ devoted to Ecology, Civil Disobedience and Peasant Solidarity in Corsica is within reach, as are many Corsican cookbooks. I’m also in possession of a book about life on the other side of the Mediterranean that I’ve been wanting to read for years, Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. After that, I’ll have only one more hot weather, Mediterranean-appropriate book left, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain. In order to avoid the absurdity of Reading Thomas Mann in Corsica, I’m learning to incorporate Slow Reading into my Slow Living.

Flower Soup

Before leaving la Bastide Haute I was corralled into helping make a gêlée aux feuilles de ruisseau, jelly made from stream-side leaves. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked anything with such a romantic set of ingredients.

Meadowsweet. Filipendula ulmaria. Meadowsweet, along with water-mint and vervain, is a herb considered sacred by druids. Back in the day, it was used as a strewing herb and to flavour mead. It is apparently bad luck to bring it into the house as it may induce a sleep from which the sleeper cannot wake. No such qualms in the Auvergne.

Angelica. Angelica archangelica. Possessed of a most beautiful botanical name and big dramatic flowers, angelica is what the green stuff that sometimes comes with mixed dried fruit is supposed to approximate.

Stinging nettle. Urtica dioica. There is nought that the nettle cannot fix. Sting they do, but they are overwhelmingly wholesome. Nettles are good for your blood because they contain iron, histamine, formic acid, and silicic acid and apparently improve circulation and purify the system, nettles are good for rheumatism and sciatica, nettles lower blood sugar and blood pressure. – to use for cooking when they are young shoots –ie in spring and early summer. The Scots and Irish peasants who, according to my book, subsisted on a broth called Brotchan Neanntog made of oatmeal, nettles, water and salt (mmm) would have had some important dietary requirements satisfied. Although nettles perform well as a tasty lead in the jelly, I cannot say whether a diet heavily reliant on the nettle would be delectable.

Mint. Plain old mint. Mentha ordinairia. Here’s a factoid about mint: it was named after a nymph named Minthe. According to Ovid (who else would be the source of such a tale), Minthe tempted that shady character Pluto and was metamorphosed into a herb by his jealous wife, Prosperine. Remedies for marital discord aren’t what they used to be.

The leaves, blithely plucked in the morning, were steeped and soaked like this, a cooking process that an airy-fairy five year old would appreciate. The liquid was strained and weighed and sugared and cooked and cooked and set with agar and voila! Gêlée aux feuilles de ruisseau!

Les Patates de mon Coeur

Potatoes are big news in the Auvergne. Near Thiezac, there is a small village called Ville-dieu in which a potato conservatory is maintained. Myriam tells me that more than one hundred different types of potatoes are cultivated and, er, conserved there. This is why there are Tibetan and Hungarian varieties of potato in the vegetable garden here. September is the month of the potato fair, an event which sounds something like a potato-fanciers swap-meet, gab-fest and love-in all rolled into one. You can buy any one of the mythical hundred varieties of potatoes and the wherewithal to grow them yourself. You can bring new varieties of potatoes along and donate them to the conservatory for the good of the potato-loving community. You can talk potatoes until you grow tubers.

According to the locals, potatoes are the truffles of the Auvergne and prized as such. There exists a local specialty named the ‘truffade,’ so named in honour of the truffilicious standing of the potato. Although every Cantal kitchen dishes up a different truffade, the basic ingredients – equivalent quantities of potatoes and Tome fraîche, salt, garlic – are fixed. For one such as myself, who invests both potatoes and cheese with miraculous healing properties, it is a fine dish. A light dish, however, the truffade is most certainly not. I think the ideal conditions for eating truffade are in the middle of winter, following many hours of serious physical exertion and before a long sleep.

Hélas, the first time I ate truffade was in the middle of a hot day, after a few hours in the garden, and before a long walk home. The sections of the walk which were not downhill were extremely challenging.

The second time I ate truffade, I helped with the preparation and understood why I had so much trouble the first time. Peeled potatoes are firstly lightly fried in lard with some onions. In my book, light frying in lard is an oxymoron. That chapter is not written in French, obviously. Once the lard has penetrated the spuds, they are boiled to complete the cooking then drained and smashed up a bit. Loads of garlic are chopped into the pot and a handful of salt stirred in. Enfin, a vast amount of very young cheese is thrown in and left to sit with the potatoes with the lid shut for a little while. Before serving, a few glugs of olive oil go into the pot and the dish beaten until the cheese is stringy. Incredibly rich, incredibly good.

Aperitifs sauvage

Sloe gin is great stuff.

Aperitifs made from sloe, or blackthorn, shoots, might even be better.

Dipso du Jardin

Who can identify this plant? I’m restraining myself from issuing a roll-call of those who might (or should) be able to do so.

Give up? Les français call this l’absente. Les anglais call it wormwood. The world calls the drink brewed from its root – yes! – Absinthe! – and shudders with an odd mixture of apprehension and maniacal excitement at the very thought of the green fairy’s tipple extraordinaire. Had I been born a wench in Rouen in 1875, there is no doubt that I would have turned to absinthe just after running away from the evil Marquis’ scullery, hotfooting it to Paris and starting modelling for Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec. Had I been born a wordy, rebellious, precocious bourgeoise in Paris in 1845, I would have, to the distress of maman et papa, become hooked on the stuff as I tried to emulate young Rimbaud. God knows, I probably would have had to smoke hashish to keep up that act. And then? Downhill. Thank heavens for 1977.

In the vegetable garden which occupied my attention for such a prolonged period, l’absente grows wild. Myriam allows it to grow because the silvery leaves are so very beautiful in a flower arrangement. So wild was the path of the wormwood this summer that I was charged with digging up many stands of the silvery stuff. I made a feeble comment about cooking up some absinthe sauvage but the mirth which greeted my proposal was of the sort which made it very clear that there was not going to be any homebrewed absinthe. What did I do? Some will be shocked and disappointed to learn that with a heavy heart, I dug up the wormwood.

Here are some wormwood roots, which are what you need to make absinthe. If memory serves me correctly, the internet is a great source of guidance to those who wish to make absinthe de la maison. Vodka is required.

I have greatly enjoyed the gentle absinthe available in Australia, purged as it is of psychotic and hallucinogenic ingredients. The Symboliste poet lurking in the lower cerebellum is coaxed out hiding – one blusters with dreamy Baudelairean eloquence and yet one’s inner psychopath stays under lock and key. My one experience drinking the real deal absinthe in the Czech Republic, on the other hand, had somewhat dire consequences: a lengthy argument of the blazing variety devoted to the relative merits of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, conducted over several hours in a public square, several lost hours, mysterious bruises, a sore throat, and, of course, an almighty hangover dredged from one of the more fetid levels of hell. Just in case my dear grandfather is shaking his head in concern and wonder at such depravity in one just past the heyday of her youth, I note that I do not know anyone who has consumed absinthe in the Czech Republic. without such dire consequences. I will hopefully be happily in the C. R. in the next few months and this will give me the opportunity to consider whether I want to sample the fearsome genuine article once more, albeit with care. As a dilettante scholar of literary Modernism, I do consider it my professional duty to investigate such matters. Fear not, I shall treat the green fairy with extreme prejudice.

Le grog sauvage

Juniper, the berries of which are vital ingredient of that most vital spirit, the gin of my heart and dreams, grows wild on the hills and plains of the Cantal. I have been avidly reading through a library of books on wild foods and la cuisine sauvage and so am overburdened with botanical lore. The remarkable powers of the juniper tree (ahem, Juniperus communis) are lauded by folklorists, particularly those averse to the supernatural. Juniper branches hung over doors and windows on May Eve repel witches; smoke from a juniper fire keeps demons at bay. An infusion made from juniper berries apparently restores lost youth. To dream of a juniper tree is bad luck but, oddly, to dream of juniper berries signifies coming success. The herbals proffered no information as to the significance of dreams of gin.
After lunch chez Roselyne, a hoary organic old chestnut who deserves but probably won’t get a post of her own, I decided to walk home to la Bastide and was duly charged with the collection of juniper berries. Life would truly have exceeded art had the juniper berries been solicited in order to produce organic gin du maison. They were in fact picked for the enhancement of the pâté and terrines du maison made later in the week.

To access the bright blue berries of the juniper (which ripen only in their second year on the bush), one must negotiate some tough and spiky leaves. Picking juniper berries is more taxing than drinking a gin and tonic in the late afternoon, to this I can attest. Berried picked, fingers pricked, I found myself terribly lost in the forest. My orienteering skills never were that crash-hot. I was charmed by the deer I saw leaping through the trees – such charm! – until I stumbled over a sign which designated the area a hunting reserve and had a strong and unpleasant sense of myself as a moving target. Oh là là… Clambering, trampling, muttering, sliding, swearing, deep-breathing, back-tracking and clear-headed focus were required to get me home. In spite of the trying circumstances, not one juniper berry was lost.

Woofing like a blog

So I wrote the below labouring under the expectation that Myriam’s computer and mine might be able to collaborate in such a way that I could post live and direct from organic bliss-ville. Alas, not only could my memory stick find no safe haven in Myriam’s computer, almost as ancient as the farmhouse, but much less charming, the internet connection moved so slowly as to thwart any alternatives. So that was that. I post it nonetheless as an eccentric historical piece. Like a newly trained forager, I have gathered much trivia, many photographs, and too few pieces of genuine wisdom on topics like la vie auvergnate, flora of the Massif central, botanical history, la cuisine sauvage, quirks of pronunciation in the South, potatoes, cheese-making, and so on. I shall post my gleanings in due course. I have nought to lose. I am, after all, now in Toulouse, if only for a night.

Ahem.

Yes, I’ve left the fleshpots of Paris far behind. There and then, I was trawling the Place de Clichy after midnight; here and now, I am collecting wildflowers from fields unadulterated by pollutants. I’m two days into the first of two woofing stints, this one in the Auvergne and the next in Corsica, and la vie is looking pretty belle. Woofing, I will remind you, is a scheme whereby likely types, like myself, work for four to six hours a day on an organic farm in exchange for food and board. I seem to have fallen into rather the right situation here in the Auvergne. Auvergne is the region, Cantal the département, Thiezac the nearest Holbrook-sized village and Aurillac the nearest Albury-sized town. I’m staying with a lovely woman named Myriam who lives in a big sixteenth century farmhouse, la Bastide Haute, perched on the side of a hill nicely plonked in the middle of the Massif central. It is a most ridiculously scenic place. There are po-faced sheep wearing bells bleating around the place and at least four dormice resident in the beams above my bed. There is a rooster, an orchard and a big stand of wormwood. There are fruit trees, raspberry and blackcurrant canes, beehives, nettles, and many varieties of potato, zucchini, carrot, turnip and beans. I’m tasked with pottering in the vegetable garden, picking wildflowers and herbs for dinner and tisanes, chatting to the chickens, and learning to cook a few new dishes. I’ve got a huge stone barn cum studio to myself (plus the local dormouse population), the dog, Gigi, seems to like me, and if it rains tonight, we’ll go on a trip into the pine forest to pick mushrooms tomorrow. It’s all rather nice.

As proof that I’m not fabricating this substitution of good, wholesome, hearty, living for fast, bad, and loose life, I tender the following.

Some valerian picked by mine own hands.

Chickens cavorting beneath the washing line. Cavorting, I might note, before the revival of my long-buried lawn-mowing skills and the subsequent transformation of the lawns.

As a consequence of this new phase of healthy living, I won’t be as proximate to the toxic fumes of the internet as usual. This is one reason why this may be an ephemeral – if entirely delightful – phase. If you have urgent questions about matters dilettantish, note that I’ll be following a slow-dripping herbal clock for the next few weeks.

Preliminary explanations

Q. What sound do dogs make?
A. Woof!
(Those who answered bark, bowwow, arf arf, I am a sentient being, grrr, etc, scroll through your answers till you get to woof.)Woof, woof, woof!

Q. If you were to make the words Willing Workers on Organic Farms into a catchy acronym, what would it be?
A. WWOOF! Sounds like… Woof!

Woof, woof, woof! WWOOF, WWOOF, WWOOF!

Hilaaaarious!

Brace yourselves, because I’m going woofing in France all through the month of August. First stop, herbs in the Auvergne. Second stop, strawberries in Corsica.