The French Journal

Lifestyles of the rich and richer:Cap Ferrat

The writer of an article for Condé Nast Traveler tries to make the case that you don't need to be wealthy to enjoy Cap-Ferrat, a resort off the Côte d'Azur. But with hotel rooms mostly in the $500--$1500 per night range, let's just say having a fat wallet might increase your options. (And forget about owning property.)

Nevertheless, the article offers an interesting history of the town. Once attracting celebs ranging from Somerset Maugham to Liz Taylor, it has become a playground for the super-rich; these days that means "Russians, Lebanese, and Italians of obscure power and wealth." They're the kind of people that can pay millions of dollars for properties that they stay in only occasionally.

On the plus side, the Cap has remained relatively unspoiled, someplace that gets pointed out by tourist buses which then pass it by. The beaches are pristine and many of them are free, which I suppose is the justification for the claim that wealth isn't a prerequisite.Yet it's difficult to escape that notion when you read that a bid by Bill Gates on a nearby villa -- listed at $295-million -- was turned down.

Six writers, six escapes to southern France

Dream fodder. The Guardian (U.K.) asked six writers, living in France, to name their favorite places to escape to when they want to go far from the madding crowd. Here are their selections; take your pick for a quiet Monday morning.

• Gigaro, Provence. Chosen by Stephen Clarke, who begins by trashing St. Tropez -- the man can't help himself. When he writes of the nearby town of Gigaro, however, his tone (almost) changes: "...in one corner of the bay is the start of a coastal path that winds for 10km through fragrant pine forests. If you don't fancy a long hike, you can stop at one of the rocky coves that might just turn out to be your private beach."
• Buoux, Provence. Jamie Ivey, who keeps the blog Extremely Pale Rosé, says that "Buoux is a small hamlet set amid towering pine-crested cliffs. The shape of the valley contrives to drive traffic away, and only the curious discover the untouched heart of the Luberon."
• Banyuls-sur-Mer, Languedoc. Chosen by Rosemary Bailey, Banyuls is a "modest Catalan fishing village of Banyuls-sur-Mer. I love its old town with its steep whitewashed streets with shady patios filled with palms and bougainvillea..."
• Vence, Provence. A neighbor of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence is the selection of photographer Tania Cagnoni. "Vence's forte is daily life: sipping rosé in dappled sunlight under the plane trees in the square, buying freshly baked bread from the boulangerie and punnets of Carros strawberries at the daily market."
• Eugenie-les-Bains, Aquitaine. Emily Barr, a novelist, reveals that the "test kitchen" of a popular, nearby three-star restaurant is a "sublime experience," and a bargain.
• Northern Ardeche. Correspondent Jason Burke says, "Here there are fewer gorges, fewer people, fewer caravans and fewer German school parties. Instead, you can enjoy a landscape like a warmer, drier Scotland, with high moors, plunging valleys, sheep galore, rushing torrents and superb walking..."

Enjoy. I'm off to speculate whether I'll ever visit any of the hundreds of places in France that I write about and other ironies.

Five "intriguing" French castles

France is lousy with chateaux, and while it's probably an exaggeration to say that most of them are a worth a visit, they nonetheless enrich the patrimoine enormously. Since seeing them all would be a formidable task, for our Monday morning escape we'll just go to five of them, chosen by France Magazine for their mysterious, or notorious, pasts. They include:

• Château d’If - Prisons don't get too much bleaker than this, where you could be dropped into a hole that was accessible only through an opening in the roof. Located off Marseille, it's claim to fame is that it held the fictional Count of Monte Cristo -- the only person to escape its horrors.
• Montségur - The site of a massacre in the thirteenth century, when 200 Cathars were martyred for their beliefs.
• Rennes-le-Château - A modern day mystery (or is it)? The puzzle: how did a priest in the late 19th century, serving the poor parish where the chateau is located, get the funds necessary to restore it magnificently? Was it hidden treasure? Or a lot of hooey? (There's a video visit to the chateau at the top of this post.)
• The Château at Lacoste is the home of the famed Marquis de Sade. (You've been very bad lately, haven't you? And you know what happens to people who've been bad...)
• The Castle at Tiffauges once claimed Gilles de Rais as a resident, a rouge who inspired the story  of Bluebeard.

In retrospect, these stories make for a grim way to start the week, but given my home team's loss in the Super Bowl last night, grimness is appropriate.

Adding art to Nice

Why we love France, Reason 6,012: Part of the budget for a new tramway in the city of Nice was designated for works of public art. Now, as you travel around the line, you can see fourteen installations; guided tours of them are available, should you wish. Among the works, as reported by France Today, are:

"...an electric-blue light sculpture strung across Avenue Jean Médecin, Nice’s main commercial drag, by artist Yann Kersalé. Just up the road is German artist Gunda Förster’s installation—a railway bridge bathed in deep blue light...Corsican artist Ange Leccia created Solar Disk, an incandescent circle of orange, red and violet, installed on the façade of the terminal building in Las Planas district...Visitors who take the tram in the summer may be startled to hear the sound of waves or cicadas mixed into the jingles written by French composer and multimedia sound designer Michel Redolfi, who wanted to create the effect of a tram “without windows” that reminds passengers of the local soundscape."

A French news report at the top of this entry offers you a glimpse. The France Today story also has details about other efforts to reinvigorate the Nice scene, including new galleries and unique takes on food at a few recently opened restaurants (Food: Why we love France, Reason #1).

Another chef's tour: Provence (sort of) this time

You should know the routine by now if you read this blog regularly, but it's a good one. Find an old farmhouse, gather together a handful of tourists, put a chef in charge, serve them to-die-for pastries for breakfast, teach them some cooking tricks, tour the local producers of specialties, and make sure you visit as many great restaurants as is possible. Drink wine.

The only thing that changes is the locale. Travel + Leisure has an account of a cooking class run by chef Carole Peck at her manse in Montfrin, not far from Avignon. "Days pass in a mellow haze of sunshine and sated appetites." While there are those of us who might not want to take a tour of France, preferring to manage ourselves, there is something very appealing in any case about this structure for a visit.

Try this for a first night:

"The menu on our first night exemplifies the best of Provençal home cooking: simple, savory, soul-satisfying. We are preparing confiture d'oignons, a sweet onion relish jazzed with red pepper flakes; caviar d'aubergines (an eggplant caviar); salade composée, a mixed salad with artichokes, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, and green beans; aigo boulido, a classic Provençal garlic soup said to cure everything from a hangover to the flu; grondin rouge rôti, a bonito-like Mediterranean fish baked with lemon, olive oil, and herbs; a Swiss chard tian baked with feta, preserved lemon, and fennel; and, for dessert, plum-and-almond clafouti."

A quibble. The ever reliable Villorama, which I use when researching towns and their locales, says that Montfrin is really in the Languedoc.

Here's a link to Carol Peck's website.

The Times (London) goes to France (with kids, pétanque, skiing, and sun)

The Times (London) went fou for France this week in its Travel section. I'm tempted to dole out their stories one-by-one -- content is valuable -- and, indeed, I've already served up Porquerolles and andouillettes from their offerings. But to avoid seeming like I'm just an RSS feed, I'll offer a quick recap of the remaining items for you to explore as you wish.

• Kids with a glass of wine. For family vacation types, The Times visits Château Rigaud in St. Emilion, a child-friendly boutique hotel where kids are tended while the adults lounge around and eat late dinners.
• Kids with bullet holes. Another family rents a spa/villa in Corsica, where they are spoiled with pain au chocolat and massages, and titillate themselves by checking out bullet holes made during regional vendettas.
• France versus Switzerland, ski edition. Two sporting types point and counter-point on the merits of Val d'Isère and Verbier in Switzerland, which I hear is a nice country but which isn't France.
• Back to the Golden Isles. Duplicating its efforts, The Times had a second story about the Golden Isles off St. Tropez, which offers more on Porquerolles and adds a leg to the trip with a visit to Port Cros, "... covered almost entirely in pine and holm oak trees...highly regulated. You can’t even smoke there. There are no forms of transport, not even a bicycle."
• Pétanque at the source, or, How I Learned about Boules in Provence and Met Renoir's Descendant.
• A tour round-up. Need suggestions for a thematically organized vacation? Here's a list: new hotels, surfing jaunts, more options for kids, wine tours, cooking classes, etc.

A dream island: Porquerolles

With heavy, wet flakes accumulating in Boston, and my snow blower in the shop, what better place to go mentally than an island off the Provençal coast. Anthony Peregrine of The Times U.K. takes us to Porquerolles, with only 350 inhabitants, no cars, and pristine beaches; while there are plenty of day trippers, it's easy enough to get off the tourist trail, have the crowds disappear, and see "...beaches fringed with pines, of huge skies, cliffs, creeks and sea, at once limpid and brochure-blue. I’m dreaming of forests full of eucalyptus and other Mediterranean items smokily scenting the warm air."

To complete the fanciful vacation, go over to ProvenceWeb, where there's a video (with terrible music) of island scenes.

All about Noël

In my imagination I see French students all over the world given assignments to write about holiday traditions in France. So, to help all of those dutiful éleves, I'll direct them to a great resource on Christmas in France: the one compiled by FranceGuide, which is the official tourism site of France. In it you will find articles about how the holidays are celebrated in Burgundy, the Franche-Comté, Normandy, Alsace, and elsewhere. Another page is devoted to the best-known Christmas markets, such as Montélimar, Montbéliard, Chartres, and seven others.

There's a bit more.  The wife of the French ambassador to Trinidad talks to a local newspaper (Trinidad & Tobago's Newsday) about how she and her family recognized the holiday in Provence. It includes this local precept: "Christmas is for family, New Year is for friends.”

For the rest of us, the non-éleves, we get to enjoy the articles without having to regurgitate any of them.

A Provençal Christmas eve (featuring 13 "desserts")

Having read Anthony Peregrine's maligning of the traditional thirteen Christmas desserts of Provence last week -- he called them "mueslix" --  I've decided to research the matter and elaborate.

The desserts are part of a Christmas eve, pre-Midnight Mass gros souper at a table set with three tableclothes and three candlesticks. The starting courses of the meal include a bagna cauda (a kind of fondue), cardoons (a kind of artichoke), and a fish soup.

The first four desserts are the mendiants, representing orders of monks and the colors of their habits: hazelnuts (Augustinians), almonds (Carmelites), raisins (Dominicans), and dried figs (Franciscans). As someone who was taught by Franciscans, I have no comment on that pairing.

Next comes walnuts and another dried fruit, followed by either a quince paste or candied fruit. Then there's three fresh fruits, usually apples, pears, and one of grapes, tangerines, melon, or oranges. This brings us up to ten. (So far, this is sounding like a deconstructed fruit cake.)

Two nougats, soft white and hard black, make it twelve. The final dessert is a cake, pompe de Noël à l'huile d'olive, made with yeast, egg, sugar, and citron flavors, pulled apart and not sliced. This may be served with a vin cuit -- a sweet wine -- or a Carthagène, a combo of spirits and grape must.

All in all, they sound fairly simple to gather, except for the cake, and here's a recipe for that.

Source: Culinaria France

Horses and elephants and history in Provence

Daphne Beames, a travel writer from the IOL - South Africa with kindness in her heart, has taken a journey along a historic route: that used by Hannibal and his elephants as he traveled through France on his way to Rome. The trip, mostly in Provence, starts in the Camargue, refuge of white horses, where hundreds of them can be seen, along with flocks of flamingos and bulls. More ancient history is visible in Arles, home of a famous amphitheater, and in Avignon, once the home of popes, where you can stay in the former residences of cardinals, and learn about a pope who died from eating too many emeralds. (Personally, I try to keep my emerald intake to a sensible amount, and I would advise you to do likewise.) Final stops are in Orange, Rochegude, and Montelimar (a.k.a. "The Nougat Capital").

(P.S. The emerald-eating pope was Clement V, who had a very eventful -- and many say disastrous -- reign. Emerald powder supposedly helped with stomach pain, and Clement, who had cancer, ingested mass quantities to combat his malady.)