She is remarkably insensitive, or stupider than anyone has as yet imagined.

It’s one thing to create historical context as part of a counter-argument about not allowing the campaign to drag on too long. It’s perfectly legitimate to do so, and indeed, older voters with at least two or three brain cells left to rub together, and the three or four dozen students of history left in our country I should think are not particularly concerned about the length of the campaign. As long as it isn’t carried into the convention, where it truly threatens to be divisive for the Democratic Party and corrosive of their chances, a longer campaign is the way it goes sometimes.

However, tacking on the remark about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968, after his victory in the California primary, was gratuitous, no more clarifying of her position, and, like certain other of the ways during the campaign this year that she has elected to express herself on specific sensitive subjects, it suggests that Hillary Clinton is either truly malicious, or that we should have concerns about her judgment and "experience." Clearly the 35 years of public service she flaunts with every opportunity have not been sufficient to learn the lessons of not sticking your foot in your mouth or in a bucket of shit any less often than her opponent. In fact, it seems a habit of expression with her. Barack Obama seems at least able to learn from his infelicities of language, and adapt and correct.

I’m afraid, late in the game as it is, that Hillary Clinton is merely expressing, perhaps despite herself, an alarming level of desperation or an inability to think on her feet, hitherto unremarked, or both.

I don’t think we need a leader whose passions, or even whose innate compassion, or whatever other incapacitating perfectly human traits regularly and predictably lead them to expressive gaffes in public of destructive potentiality. We already have the king (for perpetuity) of linguistic ineptitude in the White House. I don’t think we now want, immediately to follow, a queen.

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One of the few if not only virtues of the diminished frequency with which we are able to visit France these days is that incremental changes, not to mention larger ones, are that much more noticeable. Today I was in Aups early enough to check if one of the two or three International Herald Tribunes they get was still in the rack. It wasn’t.

I can’t be too disappointed. For one, I am obliged to arrive in town earlier than the 9am arrival I managed this morning if I want a shot at the IHT. Second, of course, it’s only in the last six or seven years that I could expect even to see the IHT in the local Maison de la Presse. That they get so few copies is evidence of the  still very small number of Americans in the region, or at least that even smaller minority that manages to bestir itself to buy up one of the non-reserved copies of the paper. Were I here more often, my cadging one of the rare objects might even inspire them to start to reserve, and that would inspire Mme. Maison Presse to order more copies, which in turn, slowly slowly, might inspire a common wisdom that there are, well, more Americans dans le pays (in country). And who knows what butterfly in Szechuan province flapping its wings effects that might engender.

However, back to reality. Today, there were no IHTs and there were the usual suspects of a wide selection of British newspapers (not to mention those of the other major Indo-European languages represented in the original cadre of CE nations, dominated by the Germans, but with papers in Spanish, Italian, etc.). The only temptation ever for me is the good old pink (as in pink newsprint—politically it’s slightly to the right of the Wall Street Journal I think) Financial Times. But it wasn’t tempting enough today. I hadn’t checked any French news, except the local variety, since we arrived a week ago, so I grabbed a Le Monde and got on line for the cash register.

While standing there, minding my own business (which no one around here particularly minds anyway), I noticed something to my horror that I had never seen before in these precincts. Paperback novels in English. This is very bad news.

And I’m not talking Dickens either. Not Trollope, not Eliot (George, that is), not even James or Wharton. No classics, but Barbara Cartland wannabes. Women’s romantic novels. Not that there’s anything wrong with all this. However, what’s wrong, in my not so humble, curmudgeonly opinion, is that the classically canny French shopkeepers of Aups should signify that a market—never before catered to—has reached a critical mass and must be catered to.

This is the latest sign in a series of signs that have emerged over the last 15 years of another British invasion, here in the south, whereas prior to this such incursions have been constrained and kept within the bounds of certain towns, small in number. I had thought all this was under control. Cotignac is for the British. Aups is for the French and, well, me and Linda, and a select group of friends who come and go, talking of Michelangelo, maybe Cézanne, but definitely not the sisterhood of Barbara Cartland. Next I expect to see Oprah Recommends! stickers on certain titles.

And what’s so terrible about the Brits? Well, for one, they’re British. If I want British, there’s London and the rest of Old Blighty to visit. Not to suggest I am feeling any great urgency, now that I think about it, as we haven’t been there since 1993. And frankly, it’s cheaper to get to London than to Nice. And when we want British, our friend Hilary comes to visit. But all Brits aren’t like Hilary, which is the problem.

I don’t want to walk into a café and hear English predominating the general buzz of conversation. For that, I can stay in Cambridge. Well, to be perfectly honest, I can’t stay in Cambridge, because in Cambridge the prevailing dialect is as likely to be Parisian, or Farsi, or Dutch, anything but English. So much for being cosmopolitan.

But Aups is not cosmopolitan. Call me an Anglophobe, a reactionary, a misanthrope… But do it in French. I came here, I bought here, because it’s French, goddamnit. The French government goes to a lot of trouble to keep it that way. Sort of like a whole country of Old Williamsburg brand assurance. Authenticity. Protected land. No building, No developments (well, except for the mayor of the village’s cronies). Winding roads that are just, but only just two cars wide. No allowance for people who have to shift gears with their left hand. If you know what I mean.

I prefer buying packaged goods that have instructions for use in every language BUT English.

It’s a kind of chauvinism by proxy with me. England for the English. France for anyone but the English.

Not coincidentally, the Telegraph (a British newspaper that seems to have found its niche catering to English ex-pats) reports just today that, mirabile dictu, the greatest number of Brits ever, or close to ever, some 2 million of them, now live outside the environs of the UK. Jesus. They must have been swarming all over France (instead of restricting themselves to the Dordogne and Cotignac) for years, and I took no notice.

Why is this so serious? Why my hysteria? I mean, aside from the aforementioned reasons of preserving my calm state of mind (achievable nowhere else but here) by not hearing English diphthongs and other anomalous linguistic propensities?

Well, the chief reason goes by the name of Peter Mayle, who probably single-handedly, more than any other English-speaking (and more importantly, English-writing) person since Tobias Smollett who is, after all, dead these 200+ years, is responsible for causing irredeemably large numbers of people, also English-speaking, to have an overweening interest in Provence. As is generally well-known, he wrote a book, called A Year in Provence, which was unjustifiably popular, and made him obscenely large amounts of money (and also gained him the hatred, and vindictive recompense, from more or less every inhabitant of the previously unknown, unnoticed, and peaceful little village in the Vaucluse which he had the ill wisdom and misfortune to name in said famous book). He has written a great many books since, some allegedly non-fictional, like the first, and some fiction, and all largely indistinguishable as such, because, like most former ad men, he made a lot of things up, and figured his opinion and imagination counted for equal weight with truth. Well, as they say in Lancashire, received wisdom is a penny the pound-weight (they probably say no such thing; I made that up, but see? I admit it; he admits dick, and furthermore he tells a lot of fibs and untruths, and makes it all sound like ice cream, which he makes you think the horses deposit in France right on the streets from their patoots. With spoons. So who wouldn’t, if they were British, want to be in France, mucking everything up, and making the rest of the world think this is a good thing?

It’s a bad thing.

And furthermore, the fact is, as I can assert with certitude after 20 years of study, there really is not all that much difference between us and the French, and it’s really not all worth all the money it costs to be here, not to mention how much it costs to get here just to be here. Not that it costs the Brits all that much with Ryan Air and all, which exacerbates the situation, which is basically this. You get enough Brits (or Yanks, or Poles, or Lithuanians, or Turks or whoever the hell else the French are justifiably frightened out of their wits will clog the streets and roads and take up all the property and jobs and will jolly well screw up what’s been a basically very good thing since Jesus was a pup—the Greeks were here first, you see, then the Romans, and both of which had the good sense to leave it all well enough alone and not try to make it anything but what it is, which is French), and when you get enough Brits (Yanks, Poles, etc. ad nauseam) it might as well jolly well be some shire or woodsy glen you can just pop on over to see like it’s easy as Bob’s your uncle.

All of which is by way of preface to say, I’ve written my own damn book, which is called Same Difference / Life in France: Peter Mayle Got Some of It Right. And well, he got a shit load of it wrong, which is my point, and if I can make my point, despite him (in fact, cleverly leveraging him and his much greater fame and name recognition), I too will make a few bucks, pay off the mortgage on our little house in Provence, and no one will molest me, because I have no cavil with the French. I want them to be them, and me to be me, and we’ll all just get along, like Rodney King.

So here’s the book:

I’m preparing the proofs for final production, and then I’ll have a challenge called, "getting it published." But watch this space for more news, and if you’d like to make sure you’ll get the latest info about the book, how to obtain an advance copy and all other associated subjects, drop me a line, and you’ll go on the mailing list (actually you must do this, or I can’t by rights, by law, and by moral obligation send you anything, not by email) click here and you’ll go to the bertha Website, and scroll down to the "subscribe" box

OK?

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My generation (I was born at, to use the much more recent expression, the bleeding edge of the baby boom) demonstrated its arrogance and hypertrophied sense of its own importance young.

We started, back in the 60s, by occupying the President’s office (of Columbia University), and we will go out, it seems, with the dubious achievement of having occupied the President’s office (by dint of the same blustering, bullying, law-breaking bellicosity), aka the White House. It would appear that Hillary Clinton, so tantalizingly close to fantasy-fulfillment, yet so constrained and thwarted by the forces we have seen so little of in the 40 year interim—the forces of the hopes and enthusiasm and renewing energy of the generations just behind—is determined to effect a similar occupation.

Nevertheless, she seems bent on exercising the same spoiling (and spoiled) defiance that has characterized the administration of her confrère, George Walker Bush. His behavior, of course, has earned him the enmity of a record majority of Americans, across all generations, from the alter kackers who bore us, to the children just preparing to cast their first ballots. It has earned him, and America, the anxiety, antipathy, and contemptuous envy of the whole world.

Here’s what I fear. Even as she eschews the politics of brazen autocracy that colors the Bush tenure, Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to want to occupy the nomination of the Democratic Party in very much the same fashion he attained office—and it is probably not the ironic coincidence the media loves to babble about, that the state of Florida and its raggle-taggle constituency of misinformed, ignorant, racist elderly Jews, plus the politically powerful reactionary Cuban exiles that have had Florida politics in thrall for those 40 years I mentioned, that will play a significant role, if she gets her way.

The result, I predict, will be this, that the rejuvenation of American politics, and of good old-fashioned idealistic self-sacrificing American moral leadership, will be still-born. This is assuming Barack Obama, who seems to have all but attained, by right, and by law, the nomination Hillary Clinton still so desperately seeks, loses that nomination in some backroom arm-twisting swindle—carried out, paradoxically, right in front of our eyes. If she wrests the nomination somehow, despite the now widespread common wisdom, the concessions of the punditry, the professionals, and even the unnamed campaign advisors on her own side speaking in anonymity, that she has lost it, she will lose something else. Worse, it is America, and the world that will lose, and what it will lose is the fervor and idealism of not one, but two generations of America following—possibly, in some respects, the last best hope of the planet, given their potential influence, and given the potentialities their influence represent for righting all the wrongs we have perpetrated on the world, and inspired others in the world to enact, for the last 40 years.

Our generation, my generation, is kaput. William Jefferson Clinton, so full of promise and hope, and so full of compromising amoral self-indulgence, and George Walker Bush, of whom the less said the better—so challenging to the most vivid of sane imaginations is his character and behavior that it threatens one’s emotional stability to consider them—were the best we could do. And sadly, it was hardly close to enough. Hillary Rodham Clinton, using the tired tactics and strategies of politics as usual, of cynicism, and tough talk in the guise of realpolitik, of manipulation, and role-playing, of mask wearing, shape shifting, and playing the fears and anxieties of the public (rather than its hopes and finer aspirations) will, if she does nothing else, alienate those younger generations. Possibly she will assist in the realization of the final dissolution of American moral hegemony. The 20th century, the so-called American Century, will have indeed been our last.

I shudder to think of the implications. Though avowedly liberal, or centrist, or whatever she calls herself, Hillary Clinton, I’m afraid, is as much a pawn, a tool, and a player, in the grand game of American corporatized government. She is as much in the pocket of enterprise as any politician since Abraham Lincoln. And it is not grit, or courage, or stupidity, God knows, that impels her. It is the very same hubris, the curse of Western Civilization that the ancient Greeks dramatized and poeticized by way of warning, that put swaggering punks in the offices of President Grayson Kirk of Columbia University, and much later, in 2000, in the President’s office that belongs, in fact, to the people of the United States of America.

God help us if either Hillary Rodham Clinton or John Sidney McCain ends up sitting in that Oval Office, by whatever means, at the moment unimaginable except in a mood of outrage or abject submission.

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It was January 11, at 5:41pm, CET, which would have made it 11:41 in the morning on a Friday in the United States, that I wrote an email message to the professional chefs forum I belong to, and with whom I exchange, likely, the greatest number of messages online. I’ve long since accepted that my friends have forsaken email for other less taxing (on time, on time) forms of communication. This is a very roundabout way of saying, my friends don’t exactly stay in close touch, except one or two, whom I love like life itself.

Anyway in the course of the message, which was extremely brief, brevity being unusual for me, and in a mock tone of some derisory pose: irony, sarcasm, insincerity in one of its more sophisticated forms, I added at the very end, "Women rule./That’s why John McCain will be our next President."

I make no claim on prescience. More importantly, and this is an immodest source of pride, I don’t spend great amounts of time thinking about political matters. I read nowhere nearly enough I’m sure, but sufficient to have a sense of where people stand and what they represent. I spend no time at all, if I can help it, watching debates. I’ve heard it all before, if not from the same lips, then from other lips, and I don’t accept that it’s all so subtle that I am depriving myself of opportunities to see either displays of above-average wit or the gaffe that will sink a campaign. Indeed, the debates long since have proven, to me at least, that they are contests of avoiding the brink while appearing to come closest to it. Hence nothing of substance gets said, and I could care less how people come across on television. And I don’t care what the true weight of the factor of other Americans perceptions because of a television appearance (I am forbearing the urge to say "performance"). The United States electorate has had ample opportunity to prove during the 41 years, soon to be 42, that I have been eligible to vote, that they are not particularly intelligent, nor particularly stupid.

Just significant fractions of them go one way or the other.

I was in France when I wrote that off-handed remark, which seemed not only obvious, if spontaneous on my part, but more importantly was a good laugh line on which to exit. Though I didn’t mean it as a joke. Except of the rueful variety. We make little enough of the continued power of rue and ruth (as in ruthless… there is certainly a dearth of ruth among certain groups of individuals in the world) in our emotional lives. I suspect it is because it is, in fact, all too painful to deliberately remain conscious of the political state of the world, and the behavior of what we are told incessantly are the world’s leaders. Some are OK, I suppose, but this is the world we’re talking about. Big enough that, even though we’re hurling through space at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour along some vector, and twirling with an angular velocity of over 1000 miles per hour, we’re completely insensate of the motion. Big enough that we’re not extremely anxious that the planet now finds six billion souls inhabiting its surface. Is this the best we can do?

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As in any country of any size (Italy, the United States, China, being the best known examples) the cookery of France is a cuisine that is essentially regional. A "French" restaurant is never a precise designation, unless of course, the restaurateur, especially in a foreign country, and particularly the U.S., where French restaurants abound, is ambitious enough to have a bill of fare that fairly represents the diverse numerous distinctive cuisines that add depth and dimension to the country with which we have had a love-hate affair for well over two hundred years.

As Americans have become more sophisticated—say in the past 40 years or so, dating from the publication of the classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking—they can and do indeed distinguish Provençal specialties from those of, say, Alsace, or the great Southwest, of Lyon (the Bologna of France), of Burgundy, of Nice. That is, Nice as well differentiated from Provence, being some amalgam of dishes native to this independent County—not a part of France as we know it until the very late 19th century, plus ingredients begged borrowed or stolen from neighboring Provence, to the west, and Liguria, to the east and the closest distinguishably unique Italian cuisine.

A tart, to speak of one dish common to many cuisines, is simply a pastry casing which is filled with whatever, and may, of course, be savory or sweet, or something in between; and let’s clear this up right now. A pie can be a tart, in that a tart is always open (no top crust or pastry covering), but a tart is most certainly seldom a pie, in that most pies are covered even if only partially. Although the characteristic tarts of Alsace, the onion tart, larded as it is with bits of pork belly, and the ever popular quiche lorraine—butt of innumerable jokes—are well known to Americans, there are few tarts from Provence that have attracted our attention. This is possibly because there are no indigenous tarts in Provence, or even in Nice, but, as I’m being cute, mainly because of a linguistic anomaly and a soupçon of strict culinary interpretation. Strictly speaking, the dish is a tourte, a Provençal and Niçois term. There is the great, and ubiquitous, tourte aux blettes, which comes in two versions, the savory and the sweet. Blettes is French for chard, and it’s a big vegetable in the south of France, in every sense of the adjective.

The weather is temperate enough (even in the somewhat elevated climes of the village, at 540 meters above sea level, and where the usual temperature around the first of the year is 0° Celsius, or freezing, first thing in the morning). On the other hand, this is about as cold as it gets, and chard is a hardy plant. I noticed just the other day as I walked through the village that the nearest potager, or kitchen garden, had a few robust chard heads growing, without a sign of freezing or wilting.

In the market, healthy chard is sold in bunches, even in mid-winter, as a local product, with leaves as much as half a meter long, and more than a quarter meter across, that is to say, in practical terms, and British measure, more than a foot-and-a-half in length from tip to stalk, and, in some cases, as much as a foot across. A bunch is usually about four or five of these behemoth deep forest-green leaves, with startlingly white stalks tinged with light green.

Also readily available are poireaux (pronounced like the cunning and cunningly named Belgian detective invented by Agatha Christie, that is, Poirot) and is simply the magnificent member of the genus allium, the leek, making it cousin to the onion and garlic, though with some loftier pretensions.

Where I am headed with all this is a recipe, one that has become stock-in-trade for me, as I’ve made it repeatedly while over here, probably at least once on every trip for a few years now, and well-known to our friends and neighbors in the terroir. I’ve made it so many times, I make no reference to a recipe, and in fact, have forgotten where I might have seen the original recipe on which I based the one I prepare now not so much by rote as absently, if not automatically.

It’s a wonderful thing, if I do say so myself, and made in the more-or-less 11" tart pan that I use over here—largish by American standards, and doubly so, because the pan is in one piece and with very high sides, perhaps close to an inch-and-a-half, as opposed to the half-inch standard tart pan, with a removable bottom that has become so familiar as the receptacle for almost any dessert or savory tart made commercially in the U.S. The tart I make, which includes far more than the nominal leeks and chard, is a robust dish, with one slice, a healthy wedge of perhaps one-tenth the whole, and a salad making quite a substantial meal.

The crust is a not-out-of the-ordinary pâte brisée, made from scratch from three ingredients, or four, if you insist on a pinch of salt, though I usually omit it.

From this point on, I’ll write this in recipe format, which, being who I am, may not be entirely standard form, but it’s the form I use, and which regular readers have seen before in this space.

And sorry, but since I usually make this tart over here, in metric Europe, what I can interpolate from my usual ministrations to the ingredients, which does not include much measuring anyway, is in metric units, in those few places along the way where I actually take note of the volume (nothing weighed, so it’s all cubic centimeters or milliliters). Otherwise you need only be able to count, and use a very sharp knife without injuring yourself, and a rolling pin (I prefer a French pin, which is a healthy length of hardwood, rounded on the ends and of uniform circumference, about the size of a very fat broom handle, but shorter, maybe two feet).

Leek and Chard Tart (with optional goat cheese)

For the crust (pâte brisée)

350 grams All-purpose flour (yes, I know I said I didn’t weigh anything, but I use a liter graduate that’s marked variously for the actual ingredient being measured, so there’s a scaled line for flour, for sugar, for water, etc., with the volume being measured indicated in grams if it is a dry ingredient—I’ve never seen such a graduate in the ‘States, so you may, indeed, have to get out the kitchen scale). On another note: the flour in French supermarkets is softer than American all-purpose flour—less gluten—and you might want to consider adding a small amount of cake flour to replace and equal amount of the all-purpose; all in all, however, the flour from King Arthur (Sands & Taylor’s venerable brand from Vermont) should work fine without any tampering or tinkering;

175 grams 82+ (or higher)-butter-fat unsalted butter (butter is sold by weight, so I guesstimate from the total full packet—usually 250 or 500 grams—approximately what fraction is the amount I need)
several tablespoons of iced water

Optional: granulated sea salt

In a food processor, add the butter cut into medium-size bits (about a teaspoon apiece) to the flour in the bowl, using the conventional metal-blade. Add a pinch or two of salt if you like.

In bursts, combine the butter and flour until all of it is about the consistency of coarse meal.

While operating the processor in bursts, add the iced water (keep the ice out of the processor) in tiny amounts, until the mixture forms clumps that adhere naturally to one another. Do NOT allow the mixture to form a single mass, usually taking the form of a rough ball trying to whir around the angular force of the spinning blade.

Dump out the dough onto a sheet of wax paper or plastic wrap. Trying to handle the dough as little as possible (keeping the heat from your fingers and hands away from it), work the dough into a single rough ball. Dust your hands in flour if necessary and work it only until it doesn’t stick to your skin and the surface is relatively smooth. It should end up about the size of an American softball. Wrap it in plastic wrap. Place it in the refrigerator for about an hour.

For the filling

A bunch of very large leaves, with stalks intact, maybe four or five in all, of Swiss Chard, the all-green kind

Four medium sized leeks

Five large eggs

One cup whole milk

30-35 cc crême fraîche

3/4-1 cup grated Emmental cheese

3/4-1 cup grated Cantal cheese (actually you can use almost any combination of semi-hard cheeses: Gruyere or Comté keeps it in the European family, or Gouda, Leerdammer, Jarlsberg, or even cheddar)

Extra-virgin olive oil, sufficient to sauté the chard and the leeks

3-4 Tablespoons of nigella (also called black cumin), an interesting mild spice that will actually help dispel some of the natural bitterness of the leeks, while adding a certain sweetness that goes well with the custard that encases the vegetables

Whole nutmeg, with grater

2-3 teaspoons of dried thyme

Optional A log of fresh chevre, about 7-8 inches long and about 1-1/2 inches in diameter, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices

Cooking instruments

11" fluted tart pan, one piece, preferably Teflon® coated inside and out (the type I described with very high sides, about 1-1/2 inches); if you can’t, improbably, find a non-stick coated tart pan of these dimensions, use any tart pan that fills the bill, and butter the inside generously before inserting the dough as described below

Large sauté pan

Three non-reactive bowls (stainless or ceramic)

Two plates larger than 11" in diameter

Heat the oven to around 375-400 degrees Fahrenheit (it’s really not critical, and don’t be a baby about this; I cook in France on a French stove, whose oven control, like all French oven controls, has a dial numbered one to ten—actually in numerals, 1-10—and I cook in a medium-hot oven, around 6, and believe me, it’s a really good oven, or at least it’s a very expensive one, and I know it never delivers the same temperature twice; remember cooking may seem like science, and this is the bullshit a lot of recent books tell you, but it’s all art, and heart, and instinct… Just pay attention, that’s the main thing). Put the rack you will use in the middle of the oven.

While the pâte brisée dough is chilling,  clean the leeks in your usual method after cutting off the dark green portion of the heads, and cutting off the soft curly roots, well into the white stalk. Slice into "roundels" about 1/8-inch thick. Set aside in a bowl.

With a very sharp knife, cutting as close to the white stalk as possible, separate the green leaf of the chard from its stalk. Cut off the wide end of the stalk, to remove any dried-out portion. Set aside the stalks. Stack the leaves, minus the stalks, on top of one another. Fold in half length-wise, and loosely roll the leaves into a huge "cigar" of chard. Cut the chard crosswise, through all the leaves at once, into slices about 1/4-inch wide. Set aside in a separate bowl.

Stack the chard stalks, and from the thin pointy end, cut into 1/4-inch thick slices toward the wide-end, until you have about a cup of sliced stalks, and add to the bowl with the chard leaf slices.

In a large sauté pan, heat EVOO, at least three tablespoons, and no more than 1/4 cup, over medium heat. Throw in the chard and stir with tongs or a wooden mixing blade (or silicone rubber spatula… let’s not get too technical here), until it is all coated with oil and cooking well, but not too quickly. Throw in a few pinches of sea salt, and grind a few grinds of fresh ground black pepper into the pan. The chard leaves will wilt immediately. Stir a few times. Cover lightly, but keep watching it. The stalk slices will ultimately turn translucent and get limp. The whole concoction will reduce significantly in volume. Without burning anything, cook until you are satisfied it is well-cooked. Transfer back to the bowl, and remove all of the chard with a slotted spoon or skimmer, leaving as much oil behind in the pan as possible.

Top up the oil a bit with more EVOO. You’ll need a bit more for the leeks than the chard, as the volume of leeks is greater. Heat the oil, and add the leek roundels. Add salt and pepper to your preference. Stir well with your instrument of choice, and let the leeks cook covered until they are quite limp. They will also reduce in volume, though not as significantly as the chard. The leeks will give off a lot of liquid. Uncover, and stirring, turn up the heat a tad, to drive off the liquid (mainly water) from the leeks. Do not burn, and try not to brown the leeks significantly if at all. No tragedy if you do brown them a little. When done, again using the slotted spoon or skimmer, remove the leeks, leaving as much oil behind as possible, and put the leeks into the bowl with the cooked chard. Set aside to cool.

Crack all the eggs whole into a bowl, suitable for whisking. Whisk the eggs well, until beaten into a froth of a uniform color. Add the milk, the ctême fraîche, the nigella, and the thyme, in no particular order. Grate maybe a 1/2-3/4 of a teaspoon of the nutmeg into the bowl as well. Don’t go nuts with the nutmeg. It takes an experienced hand to add enough for nuance, without adding so much that you actually taste the nutmeg in the finished dish. It should help lend an indefinable nuttiness to the flavor overall. Under-grate if you’re not sure or just plain nervous about these things.

Mix all the ingredients in the bowl until uniform, and then dump in the grated cheeses and mix some more. Set aside.

Remove the ball of chilled dough from the fridge, and place on a floured rolling cloth (get one; I know you probably don’t have one, because none but the fatally serious cooks do, so get one; a light canvas is best, because most durable; probably the on-line shop that King Arthur has on its site will have one available). Gently beat the top of the ball all over with the rolling pin ("gently" is the key word here) until it begins to flatten. Turn the flattened ball over and continue gently to tap it all over uniformly, until it has become a very fat disc.

Now begin to roll with the pin. Roll a few times in one compass direction, and then roll a few times in a compass direction 90° (you know, right angles) to the first direction you used. Then at 45° to that direction, and then at right angles again to this last direction. In short, roll it out uniformly, switching directions every half-minute or so, so it retains a more or less circular (as opposed to oval) shape. Keep rolling until it’s about 1/4-inch thick. Then roll some more so that it’s incrementally thinner (don’t get obsessive; incrementally means noticeably, but that’s all; just get it a little less than 1/4-inch thick).

You should have a more or less round piece of flattened dough significantly and hence comfortably larger than the diameter of the tart pan.

If you did this right, you should be able to lift the edge of the dough and simply fold it in half over itself. Keep right on going if there were no hitches (if you used a floured rolling cloth, nothing will be sticking to anything else), and lift the dough folded in half and place it on top of the tart pan, so the straight edge of the dough is right on the diameter of the pan. Carefully, if not gingerly, unfold the dough so it covers the entire tart pan, and gently, gently (gently!) lift the edges of the dough and let the dough drop down the fluted sides of the pan. The idea is to get as much dough of a single layer into the pan, covering the bottom and the sides.

Gently push the dough into the flutes of the sides of the pan. Be careful that the dough fits into the inner circumference of the pan where the sides join the bottom. In short, the dough should conform, like a skin, to the inside surfaces of the pan. Keep the extraneous dough draped on the outside over the edges of the pan. Once you’re satisfied that as well as possibly can be, the dough is touching all surfaces of the inside of the pan, take the rolling pin and roll it over the pan, thereby "slicing" off the extraneous dough like a big ring, using the edge of the pan as the slicer. Dispose of the extra dough. Set the pan and the dough aside.

Add the cooked vegetables in the bowl where they’ve been cooling to the egg-dairy-spice-herb mixture, and stir thoroughly until uniform.

(Optional step) Take the rounds of chévre and symmetrically place in the bottom of the tart pan, more or less covering as much of the area of the dough in the bottom as you can. You should be able pretty much to cover most of the bottom with goat cheese rounds.

Carefully and slowly pour the contents of the filling from the bowl into the tart pan, with the aid of a silicone rubber spatula to spread the filling evenly. If you did this right, and if I am not a complete nincompoop, it will miraculously just fill the tart pan. It’s also a miracle to me, and it always just fills the tart pan. And I swear, I measure nothing but the flour.

(Special bonus, secret optional step: I’ve only done one or the other of these, but once) Sprinkle the top with freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese uniformly. Just a little all over. Or take bits of butter and dot the top evenly. Not a lot of butter either. You could go crazy and do both. But like I said, I usually do neither.

Place in the middle of a medium-hot oven and watch it once you get past about a half-hour of cooking. It will have started to puff up by then. It should take no longer than 50-55 minutes to brown to the degree in the photo. In any event, it should be a nice uniform medium brown. Not light, not dark, but medium.

Remove the pan with the finished tart to a rack, or just put it on top of an unlit burner on the stove, just so air can circulate underneath. After at least a half-hour, but more like an hour, take one of those really big plates and put it upside down on the top of the pan. Turn the whole shebang over. Don’t be nervous. Lift the tart pan from the tart. Place the other dish upside down on the tart’s bottom, and turn the whole shebang one more time. You’re done. You can eat it hot, but it’s better warm, and it’s great at room temperature.

Serve with a very fresh salad of lettuce, tomato, and sweet onion sliced very thin, with a home-made vinaigrette.

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I was born and raised for a while in New York City. Not quite to the age of consent, but long enough still to remember. I pride myself with a perverse pride in that I have yet to visit in almost 62 years any of the iconic attractions—dare I say tourist in proximity to that last noun?—of that city. The only destination of note I ever did visit was the World Trade Center, and indeed traveled to the roof of which tower they permitted such a thing. The rest is silence.

Pretty much the same pattern manifests itself in me here in France. Dodging the greatest attractions of Paris is easy. So far, no Eiffel Tower, not Pantheon, no Montmartre, no Montparnasse, etc. Why play with the destiny of these august destinations. Here in Provence, it’s a little more difficult.

You drive around, even aimlessly, and the next thing you know, you’re smack dab next to some ruin or some well-preserved monument that’s been there for a couple thousand years and untold millions have gaped at after traveling kilometers untold out of their way just to see it. My own little village continually surprises me, embarrasses me with its unknown treasures. Indeed, hidden in the very word "embarrass" is the source of one major surprise. In this tiny out-of-the-way unpronounceable village was born the guy, Count Barras, who, essentially, arranged for Napoleon to be Emperor. Thanks a lot Count.

But even I will allow myself a grudging pride in every lichen covered stone that probably graced a wall several millennia ago, built to defend a Roman encampment. I’ll even allow myself the fantasy of seeing well-muscled centurions, having spent a refreshing day beating a bunch of Gauls into submission, doffing their leather armor, watering their horses, kicking back for a well deserved snooze and a snootful from that skin of wine.

But what I won’t allow myself is a visit, especially now that I can entertain the more sustaining and satisfying fantasy of being a genuine tax-paying, mortgage-holding French landowner, to any of the myriad sites and sights for which the French themselves scrupulously, if not sedulously, plan for months prior to the skimpy four weeks (out of a total of six, not to mention all the three-day weekends, and other jours feriés (bank holidays) of summer they get to go anywhere they please. They are hardly to be blamed that the whole damn country is chockablock full of tourist attractions. They’ve been collecting them, hoarding them, building more, year after year for centuries, millennia.

But you won’t catch me going. No sirree. No Mont St. Michel for this homey. No Carcassone. OK, OK, so I and the wife did go to this ridiculous pile, restored to an inch of its life, with only about two or three million anachronistic errors by a narcissist with the laughable name of Violette LeDuc (and this is a guy we’re talking about), but I plead "tourist;" I was a tourist, honest. Owning a house here wasn’t even a fantasy at the time. Same with a few other medieval rattletraps, mammoth stones picturesquely strewn about, the now eternally silent cloisters of a clutch of monasteries, now bereft of monastics. But I swear, I’ve never set my baby blues on one field of lavender. Never haunted a trail in the Luberon. Never dipped a pinkie, or a baby toe, in the miraculous fonts of Lourdes.

Most important of all, though it’s practically right up the road a piece, never ogled the vaunted Gorges du Verdon, the so-called "Grand Canyon of France." Ha! I say. I say it to your face. Never ogled, boggled, or blanched at the (testimony abounds) splendors of the natural marvels of what, after all, I ask you, is anything more than some river meandering, do-se-doing its way like some whacked out switch-back mountain road, wearing the rocks away for what, like, thousands, maybe it’s millions, of years? I mean it’s nature doing its thing.

I do my thing. And my thing is not natural wonders.

But then there’s the problem of house guests. Essentially a special variety of tourist, on whom I lavish affection, love, and not even grudging them gobbets of time, driving, shopping, cooking, whatever, and all for their pleasure. And all I need do is silently chew the insides of my cheeks to raw flesh in mortal anxiety that they might take it into their heads to go and see. Yup. The freakin’ Gorges du Verdon.

Incidentally, let me disabuse you right now, should you ever head this way and are thinking, Verdon? Wasn’t that some really famous battlefield qua slaughtering ground of the First World War? Like did they throw themselves over the cliffs or something. But no, that was Verdun, which is way away that way (gesturing north). The Verdon is a river. Just another river down here. Like the Tarn and the Loup (which also have gorges—almost accidentally saw some of them a few years ago, I think it was the Loup, but I barely escaped, taking that fortuitous left turn out of a rond point to Vence), but mightier and more majestic and God knows more famous. In the summer the roads are literally clogged here, people can’t crawl slow enough to get to the Gorges du Verdon.

I’ll admit to seeing the Verdon, at the very very end of it, because I’ve been many times to a little town called Moustiers Sainte Marie, a truly god-forsaken place, which I visited regularly before I wised up. I have a fondness and hence a weakness for my wife, and she likes it there, for the there. She certainly doesn’t like it any more than I do for what’s most famous about the place (aside from a chapel built halfway up a mountainside, which you access via steep stone steps cut into the same mountainside, the climbing of which is very much akin to being given a stress test by a sadistic cardiologist, or the strange ten pointed star—similar to a regulation normal five pointed star, except for some reason it has tiny little points between the usual large points—that some maniac prince in the famous medieval bygone era ordered strung across a, well there’s no other word for it, gorge that runs smack through the center of this essentially kitschy little burg, and there’s a legend about how the chain that holds up the star broke, so they had to string the damn thing back across the gorge, because the prince was sentimental and made a pledge—it’s still there so you can tell I’m not making this up; I’d show you a picture, but it would be too shameful and embarrassing for a serious photographer like myself, even though I have a very nice snap that takes care of the whole nauseating touristic thing: the chapel, the star, even the chain, and the gorge of course). But what Moustiers Sainte Marie is famous for is its faience, which is a fancy French word for dinnerware. Which is all like white with tiny hand-painted figurines wearing cute Fragonard type outfits from the eighteenth century doing quaint homey eighteenth century type stuff, like hanging out, or hunting grouse or pheasants, or butchering pigs. Stuff like that. Anyway, it’s the kind of stuff my mother, may her soul be at peace in heaven—next year is her centennial by the way—would like. They still make it the same way. Big euros. And the old stuff looks exactly like the new stuff, only it’s even bigger euros because it’s old.

But the town is nice, in a patently cute, old-fashioned kind of way, and you can manage to squeeze off a few good shots along the way, what with all the rocks and rills, and little runlets and rapids, and really tall stone walls, which are about as troublesome and puzzling as that star on a chain—like, why did they build them?

And I do have house guests, and, it being past the winter solstice, the days do grow longer, and you gotta’ find things for people to do. We had a reprieve for a couple days, because we had a friend of theirs, guest of a guest, which may mean something, but in this case, what it meant was good, because he was and is a good guy, and we had to piss away a whole two days just picking Jean up and eating big time in Aix-en-Provence when we did, and shopping, and doing good solid American stuff like that. So the Gorges du Verdon went way to the back of my mind. But all good diversions must end. And Jean had to go back to Paris, and I’m sorry to say, Bob and Naomi didn’t forget the Gorges. Not for one second as it turned out.

Then the weather bailed me out. It rained for three days, which it almost never does, certainly not in January. But all bad things must end, and soft-hearted basically masochistic fool that I am, the next thing I knew, sun playing tag with clouds in the legendary blue skies of Provence, I was driving north toward Moustiers. And then en route, Bob being Bob, and me being me who can refuse my friends nothing, Bob, Gee How, if you don’t mind (I hear this particular combination of words and my brains turn to a frigid gel), maybe we could take this road and take a look directly at the [loud minor chord] Gorges du Verdon.

So I took the right with the sign to a town I never noticed before and had my own stars been set right, and had I lived a more righteous existence, I would never have had to notice, Aiguine. But we plowed right on through that sucker and kept going. Gorges du Verdon, and destiny, right this way. There was one more precipitous turn onto the corniche above Aiguine and a road sign smiled at me, a sign I had never seen before. It was entirely pictorial, as no words were needed. It showed a tire with chains on it. I don’t know the French for tire chains anyway. But with a song in my heart, and knowing I had remembered to take my anxiety meds that morning, we plunged ahead. I shouldn’t use the word "plunge" of course, because I know what a corniche is (Alfred Hitchcock made good use of them in several films, including "To Catch a Thief," because driving along a corniche is like instant cinematic suspense and terror). And we drove and drove and switched back and forth, with increasingly more thrilling views, until it was clear we need not actually drive up as high as the clouds, which were, in fact, literally enveloping the tops of the cliffs overlooking the Gorges. So we stopped at a turn-out, facing a sign that said 967 meters, referring to the elevation.

And, well, what’s the use? It’s time for the words to stop, because they do, indeed, literally fail.

But here’s what we saw, along with a few glimpses of Aiguine (and its charming castle, semi-charming soccer field, and views of the town perched high above the Lac de Sainte Croix, into which the Verdon River now debouches (the very very end of the river that I referred to above), easily visible, as are the high walls of the Gorge, as you cross the bridge that separates the Var, the département my house is in, from the Alpes de Haute Provence, the département that Moustiers is in, because, try as I might to avoid it, we ended up there for lunch. So there’s a few of the more palatable pictures I shot in Moustiers to end this little Web gallery.

I will say in closing that I’m not sure of which I am more proud, losing at last my Gorges du Verdon virginity, or taking these pretty interesting shots with a tiny little Canon camera that costs less than two hundred bucks, is much smaller than a pack of cigarettes, and really hardly deserves to be called a camera at all.

http://bertha.com/Gorges_Aiguine_Moustiers

As usual, enjoy.

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On January 3, 2008 a friend forwarded a bit of Internet fodder, with the Subject header line supplication, "Please Read." I did. It was a bit of correspondence/essay attributed to a Dr. Vernon Chong, a USAF Major General (Retired). It turns out it has been kicking around since 2004. It is not uncommon for these things to spring up from time to time, sometimes redundantly, if not repeatedly, among the small motley circle of my friends who exchange items of interest. Or at least they are of ostensible interest. We are motley for our wide spectrum of political views, which range from Libertarian to Liberal (if not quasi-anarchistic) to those of one of us—an eternal trickster, if not provocateur, who gets a clearly perverse, if benign, delight in offering up bits of casuistry such as Dr. Chong’s. This last is simply to stir up the pot, and see what happens, especially if one of us makes the mistake of taking seriously the intent of the sender (or his credulity). This last go round for the maundering of the alleged Dr. Chong was passed along by one among us, who espouses a strange mix of middling liberality and staunch chauvinism (he is one of the few, if not the only one, among us, who served in the armed forces, albeit in the Medical Corps—during the late unfortunate hostilities known by our enemy at the time as The American War.

I won’t dignify or substantiate Dr. Chong’s remarks either by repeating them here (never mind the absorption of bandwidth) or even by providing a URL of the various sites on which they might be found on the World Wide Web. If you must waste your time by first reading them, I’d suggest entering some combination of Dr. Vernon Chong (or even include his rank) in Google, or your favorite search engine.

I do think it’s remarkably telling that, in the midst of what has become a surprising, if not exciting start out of the gate of the 2008 Presidential Nomination Follies, with newspaper headlines trumpeting the decreasing lack of importance of the war in Iraq that this should appear among a group of us comfortable, late middle-aged (some of us are, in fact, still working actively for a living) bourgeois Northeasterners of various political stripes. For some, indeed, the continuing bellicosity of various Muslim factions in Iraq, and the continued presence of well over 100,000 American troopers in that nation is not only an issue, front and center, but even if it settles somewhere into the middle or rearward  reaches of our consciousness, we are well aware that the more pertinent, or seemingly more salient issues—and in particular the economy, which worsens by the moment—are intimately tied to the effects (and costs) of the five years and counting that our military forces continue to be deployed in the former biblical kingdom of Assyria.

What follows is my response to this innocent attempt to evoke some interesting intellectual discourse among our stalwart little group of citizens, bound more by affection and friendship if truth be told than by any real desire to debate (which seems only to get us into trouble, especially as we each of us seem to lapse into emotional conflict rather than the desired dispassionate reasoned debate). I’ve cleaned up and edited a bit the spontaneous effusion I sent immediately back to the entire list of recipients.
Whether or not you read Dr. Chong’s "essay" is not important. Its argument, if it can be elevated so precipitously as to be called that, is contingent on one quasi patriotic, hyper-emotional assertion, about which the author goes on at such length as to permit saying that it is attenuated to the point of etiolation, if not beyond.

There is only one fault with this argument. However, it is a fault that is fundamental, if not elemental, and hence makes the rest of this argument, which I’m loathe to call it, as it is so badly articulated, built as it is on a false premise, not only dubious, but time ill spent in the reading. Perhaps this rhetoric is deliberate, blatantly bent on appearing persuasive, as opposed to expressing a truth, any truth.

The fault is the unsubstantiated assertion that we are at war.

We are, I would assert, not at war, not at the moment. And no more so than we were at the time of this essay of Dr. Chong’s, that is, some time in 2004.

However, we are at this time (January 2008) policing an insurgency among a people who only half want us to be there for any purpose whatsoever.

In precipately, and pre-emptively, engaging in war with a sovereign nation, however disreputable and odious its government and leaders, and irrespective of the relevancy, applicabicability, or the verifiable condition of the stated causes we had for engaging this enemy at the time, we did unleash all the pernicious forces disposed throughout the unfortunate country known as Iraq.We removed the government and nominally disarmed, and certainly disbanded, the military forces of that nation, along with the entire organizational structure of those armed forces and all bodies of police and other keepers of the peace. As a consequence of our ill-considered (if they were thought about at all) policies as victors, the forces we unleashed have been free to wage terrorist acts upon one another, enter into internecine deadly conflict with one another, not to mention the repeated assaults on the U.S. troops we stubbornly keep in place on the proviso that were we to withdraw, just as precipately (and we now hope rapidly, so as to minimize further losses to our own forces), we would leave the countervailing factions to enter what is likely to be catastrophically bloody and chaotic civil war amongst themselves.

Whatever actual war we began and fought ended very soon after we started it, certainly within a month or two, or perhaps three.

Since then all acts of violence perpetrated on our troops, as well as on the opposing elements of the internecine forces that have always been resident in Iraq, plus those elements that have entered the fray from third party nations—with or without the sanction and support of those nations—since we neutralized the legitimate military and police organizations of Iraq immediately after defeating them in war, I would suggest are not acts of war. They are acts of violence that, in any other "civilized" nation, operating under any reasonable body of laws, whatever their basis: British Common Law, Napoleonic Code, or even laws formulated and legitimized by political bodies in governments adhering to certain religious codes, like the Koran), would be considered criminal acts. The perpetrators of these acts, these criminals, would be sought, neutralized, imprisoned, indicted and tried under those laws.

I would submit further that the litany of acts proffered as acts of war by this alleged Maj. General Chong (retired) against the United States since 1979 are, in the main criminal acts. Furthermore, one may go back, to earlier dates than these, if one must, as I would include other acts of terrorism — some political, some strictly criminal — performed mainly against military U.S. forces deployed in foreign countries, or U.S. citizens both at home or abroad.

Even acts, like the attack on the U.S. Panay, readily put at the feet of the military forces then under the government of the Emperor of Japan, that were meant to provoke our country, if not precipate engagement, were not sufficient to escalate our diplomatic or military posture such that we would, as a matter of policy, engage in war with an enemy that had a recognizable and coherent body of government formulating and implementing military engagement as an intentional act of war. Otherwise, the preponderance, if not the entirety, of these acts remain as they so patently and clearly are, as I said, criminal acts. All of which should have been, if they were not, prosecuted as such.

Every sovereign nation, whatever the prevailing religious beliefs of its citizenry, embraces a code of conduct and a body of laws that is meant to deal with criminal behavior. The maintaining of the social fabric demands of humans that they formulate codes for such a purpose. Crimes against individuals, or against a people, against institutions or corporations, are disruptive and potentially threaten the stability of any political entity, even a whole nation.

I submit that were all nations, in the interests of peace, and the maintenance of domestic tranquility (as I believe the phrase goes) were to concentrate on containing such acts of criminality, and indeed were to cooperate on whatever necessary basis to act in concert and to share intelligence, mainly of a forensic or probative nature, all such acts of criminality, widespread, and with the great frequency we have experienced them over whatever arbitrary span of time Maj. General Chong (or whomever) cares to define, would ultimately be contained to the point of manageability.

Terrorist acts are criminal acts pure and simple, and they should be dealt with as such, even if the dealing requires extensive applications of force and the resources to apply them. Widespread rioting, looting, and hooliganism in the modern history of all countries, including our own, have sometimes required to mobilization of national defense forces. These circumstances have never defined a state of war, even internally. And arguments prevail for calling our great Civil War as being, in actuality, a War Between the States.

We should be loathe to find wars where they do not exist. Even to a rhetorical abhorrence for application of the soubriquet of war (so enamored by our government, with various "wars" on poverty, drugs, even crime itself). War may be, Clausewitz cleverly defined it, a continuation of diplomacy (or politics) "by other means," but it is tantamount to mass murder, and the surest unequivocal sign of the failure of civilization, per se. It is, in short, not some manifestation of civilization, but its denial.

I don’t swallow a word this semi-literate, manipulative individual has offered up for purposes that can only be called inflammatory and ill-considered, never mind poorly reasoned and poorly argued.

Incidentally, Chong is, indeed, a real person, though he did not, apparently, write this letter, but passed it along to an email correspondent. The original letter, with a different original opening set of paragraphs, was allegedly written by an attorney and sent to his sons.

When, Oh!, when will we stop sending this crap to one another? It’s not worthy of lengthy discourse, never mind intelligent debate, if such were to be what it inspired.

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Down on the plain of our village, right at the crossroads, with a road north to Manosque on the verge of the Alps, the road east to Aups and beyond to the Gorges de Verdon, and the road south to Barjols and Tavernes, stand several small buildings. At the very crux of these is the home and the establishment of Jean and Chantal, owners of Chez Jean. It’s a small bar-tabac, which shares the building with their living quarters, plus a tiny alimentation, or grocery store, more accurately a bodega I suppose. Or perhaps, it’s an épicerie, but smaller. This is Chez Jo, run by the sister-in-law (of which of the couple I cannot say) where you can pick up very fresh chèvre or local farm eggs, butter, milk, various canned goods, a tiny selection of wines, the local paper, and a limited selection of produce that, depending on the time of day, looks often like it is on the point of expiration, whether a pear or a peach, a squash or an eggplant. But sometimes, you run out of something, and it’s good to know Chez Jo is there.

Across the way is the post office, which was almost closed by the authorities for lack of justification. We share a postal code with at least four other towns, and as our town has a permanent population of no more than 380 people on the rolls, the powers that be figured we could do without the convenience of having a local branch, which was only open at whimsical hours anyway. The whimsy being that of the local postmistress (a woman spoken of with awe, wonder, and not a small touch of fear, if not horror).

The mayor, who exerts himself mightily on behalf of the village in many ways, apparently lobbied strenuously to keep this branch of La Poste open. Not the least of the reasons being that there is apparently some familial connection between the mayor and the post mistress, or somehow, in some convoluted way between members of each of their respective families. I say "apparently," because it is one of those stories explained to me in rapid French, and I can never be sure of what I have construed properly, and what I have filled in with my own subconscious prejudices and assumptions.

On the other side of the crossroads, facing the post office, is the hulking shell of the former local wine cooperative. When we first began coming here, in the late 80s, the cooperative was active and in operation, pressing grapes, and doing what vintners do to make the juice of pressed grapes into wine. You could buy the local plonk (which is unfair, it was better than that, perhaps of vin de table grade—though to be fair, linguistically and strictly speaking, "plonk" is merely "cheap wine") at the co-op at appointed hours for very reasonable prices. Certainly it was certifiably a decent, cheap vin ordinaire and it served the local folk, farmers, gentry, bourgeoisie, and tourists well, especially at about $1.50 a bottle (this back in the days when the local currency was still the franc).

In the interim, the cooperative has devolved. First the pressed juices were merely shipped by common carrier to a local repository (pumped through thick pipes from the bowels of the co-op into waiting tanker trucks) to be collected with the must of of several other small towns, to be sent from that collection point to an actual domain, which produced the wine all under one label, bottled, or in casks, to be tapped into a customer’s own containers, once transported back to the contributory cooperatives. This transformation of the basic business has ceased altogether, and the cooperative does not even open any longer for brief hours on a Saturday morning—the last regular mercantile trade associated directly with the products of the local grape farmers. Some of the vineyards hereabouts apparently qualify for the A.O.C. designation of Côteaux Varois or Côtes-de-Provence, and some do not. The remnants that fall short, which seem to cluster very near the center of town, have been allowed to go fallow, and instead of vines of various stages of robustness, depending on the diligence of the farmer, there are now weeds and vast fields of disheveled useless flora.

Behind the cooperative, which is the size of a large barn, is an open area, whose expanse is blocked from view of the road by the vast building. This space is used for outings, weddings, and other sorts of colloquies involving large aggregations of the village residents and their guests and relatives, that is, when it is not raining (which is seldom in any event). The open area is surrounded by official buildings, belonging to the village: the small primary school, the library, a salle polyvalent (a utility hall, where gatherings take place, dances are danced, movies are shown, and so forth), and, of course, the mairie, or mayor’s offices, where all official business is conducted, and where the mayor’s council meets on a regular basis, and issues policy, dicta, rules, etc. These all are posted in regular locations, within well-known bulletin boards, maintained by the village, and covered in framed glass protective enclosures.

Having set the immediate scene, I shall return your attention and my own to the focus of culinary matters in the village. I am sorry to say, as I may have suggested in the past, that it is not the Inn just opposite our little house in the medieval village perched on top of the hill overlooking the scene just described about 100 meters below us and away at a distance of about 3/4 to a full kilometer (but easily visible from several vantages, including the Inn). The Inn has a menu which is good enough with a bill of fare, and a number of choices, of some varied dishes featuring more or less the local cuisine, and including the usual suspects, such as steak, because so much of the Inn’s business derives from tourists, who expect meat, but the locals, who are always glad to know there is a local venue for this perennial favorite, if not a number of others. However, it is not plain fare, but aspires to a status somewhat more soigné. Certainly it is fare that must justify a menu price of 32 euros for a three course meal. The food is good, very good at times, and I am not doing our friends, the innkeepers, a disservice, by saying this, and not very much more. The ingredients are always fresh, well-cooked, and in abundance on the plate.

Rather the focus of gastronomic attention belongs down below, at le carrefour, the crossroads, in that humble establishment called Chez Jean. The road signs leading to the village, directing travelers to the café, say "casse-croûte," which is  French for "snack." But the literal meaning of the word is, of course, "break crust" or as we say in English, "break bread."

The "casse-croûte" is an unintentional misdirection. It’s true they have snacks, including home made sandwiches of the usual suspects in France: boiled ham, with and without cheese, and charcuterie, and perhaps even a pan bagnat, more or less a salade niçoise squeezed between halves of a baguette, but I am not sure of that. There are also the usual ice cream novelties, featured in a colorful poster provided by the manufacturer of cones pre-packed and covered with lurid-colored glop, and ice cream rockets and bars, and the like.

Also, this is, strictly speaking, a bar-tabac, as the ancient rusting wrought iron lettering on the facade tells you, barely visible against the ochre stucco of the walls, partially covered by vines of some sort. The most regular trade, though hardly the most lucrative, comes from regulars (and peregrinating stragglers) who come from practically dawn until close, which is more or less at sunset, for, ahem, liquid refreshment.

The farmers of the region, stop here early of a morning on their way to the remaining vineyards, the greater amount of acreage in wheat, the declining acreage in sunflowers, plus a range of other crops, including olives, and a variety of produce that you can buy on market day in various towns as Patrick, the most enterprising and amiable of the local producers, makes his rounds with his sons and helpers of the circuit of five or six towns that occupy his week. He also has a store-front in Aups—the market town we have always preferred—that he keeps open on weekday mornings, and is always a sure bet for the freshest produce, especially in summer when it is all local… starting with the very local tomatoes, artichokes, zucchini, lettuce of various varieties, plus some stone fruits, like peaches and nectarines, which sell on market day at least until the end of September, and sometimes into October. After these dates the venues for sourcing produce spread in ever widening circles to all of Provence, moving southward with the sun, as the season wanes and even the weather goes south, so to speak.

When they stop at Chez Jean, the farmers imbibe perhaps a ballon de rouge, a fat round brandy snifter of a glass of red wine, or a beer, or perhaps a truly fortifying marc de Provence. Marc (the "c" at the end, properly, is not a hard "k" sound, but the sound of the French "r" disappearing completely down your throat, without a stop, not even a glottal stop, to signify the consonantal presence of this last letter) is an eau de vie, fiery and instantly warming, invigorating—perhaps even a natural energy drink in a tiny amount, which is what they are served—and certainly fortifying. It’s what I would drink if about to haul my ass onto a tractor for several hours of hard work in the fields.

There is a regular flow of bar customers, many of whom stop to kibitz for extended periods with Jean, the patron and chief barkeeper. He is a man of the slightly diminutive stature of Frenchmen of a certain generation, bespectacled and what remains of his hair, of a significant if diminished quantity, straight long hair, still quite dark in color, is slicked back from his hairline still well forward on his brow, to the back of his head. One’s first impression, as a stranger, is that he is perhaps a tad grumpy and uncooperative, but he is a mild fellow, friendly, slightly harassed, I think, by the unceasing flow of business throughout the day, which finds its apogee or apex in the middle of the day, when the only full meal is served.

I have finally brought this narrative to the most important business at hand. Lunch at Chez Jean, in the tiny, almost imperceptible village of Fox-Amphoux, at the crossroads of the roads from nowhere to somewhere or other. So popular has this meal become, and so widespread the reputation of this homely repast, a masterpiece of country cooking—let the magazines speak of food of the terroir; this is all mainly editorial bullshit, foisted on them by the flacks of major league chefs, with international reputations, indeed, who are brands, and who have "rediscovered their roots" and opened restaurants somewhere or other among the hilly landscape that is the Haut Var. This part of France is more appropriately the domain of the people who work this land, and the animals that still populate it. You are reminded of this at least once or twice of every two- or three-week sojourn, when you must stop on the country road on your way to market, to allow a local herd of sheep, with a mystical leading squadron of beautifully horned goats, and hectored by a small band of beautifully trained, earnest, honest scruffy dogs, to proceed across a road from their pasturage to their overnight accommodations in a bergerie well up in the hills above the plain.

We are intruders, and we are privileged to sit indeed to break bread, but only if we have made a reservation. In the summer, which is high season, reservations are often not to be had at all. This is, I mean, high season for hordes of tourists and high season for the likelihood of the canicule, the dog days, when temperatures rise in to the 100s, and the natives disappear entirely behind their shutters. And all you see are mad dogs and Englishmen, and occasionally us as well, on our perpetual quest for decent brocante (used furniture and stuff). We don’t do this often enough for some members of the household, dog days or no, but a man can stand only so much tooling around to misbegotten little towns that happen to be having an expo de brocante or, worse, an expo des antiquités, which means the merchandise are genuine, authentically old, no more attractive and significantly more expensive.

This, our modest little bar-tabac, with its stalwart patron, his doughty wife and boon companion Chantal, who helps run the place and is chief cook of the miracles of country dishes that come out of her kitchen, offers one meal a day for as many people as are lucky to have made a reservation before Jean and Chantal have computed there is not enough food to serve.

The menu is a menu fixe, four set courses, with few, if any, variant choices in any single course. The first of the miracles wrought in this unassuming establishment is that the menu is served at a very unassuming price. Currently, it is 12 euros 50 cents. At the current confiscatory American bank rates, this is about 18 bucks. However for proper perspective you should think of those euros as dollars, as the buying power is probably about the same for the locals as it is for us, if not worse… The Bush dollar may be in the toilet, but in the U.S. there’s pretty well loads to go around for the gentry and even for the middle class. In short, you can’t judge the cost of a meal here in France by the value according to an inflated exchange rate.

For $12.50 in the states you can get a "gourmet sandwich," an individual portion of artisanal chips, and bottled spring water. For 18 bucks, you can get an 8-ounce Black Angus Burger and fries, a non-alcoholic beverage, and the tax thrown in, but not the tip.

For 12 euros, fifty cents, here, in Chez Jean, in Godot-ville, where there is a very pleasant, luxe, calme, et tranquille wait for the mythical fellow, you get a four-course meal, a carafe of clear cold local water, all the bread you want (fresh French baguettes, of indisputable authenticity), the attentive service of your host or hostess, who serve you themselves, with a dose of bonhomie and cheeriness thrown in among the bustle, with tax (which is a 19+% value added tax) and service included… Beverages are extra. A pastis or kir, as an aperitif, are 1.50 euros apiece. A beer is 2.50, and a carafe of wine (25 centiliters — or about 3.5 ounces) enough for the meal, or refilling your glass a couple of times—small glasses—is a mere 2.50 euros as well.

We had lunch there the other day, came to 33 euros for the two of us (plus a small pourboire, a few pieces of change—my current rule of thumb is about 3%). Here’s what we had.

Things started off with a choice of appetizer of the omnipresent plate of charcuterie—an ample serving of slices of local cured hams, and various kinds of saucisson (the literal translation of which is "sausage," but which is, at best, a hard sausage, and really much closer to what we and the Italians call salami). The local saucisson is invariably pure pork, with various flavorings, starting with garlic, and including such varieties of flavoring as the local herbs (thyme, sage, etc.), wine, perhaps a bit of cheese, tidbits of what are called variety meats—that is, your garden-variety organ meats. However, the saucisson may also include or predominantly consist of other animal flesh: cow or steer meats, lapin (rabbit), venison, sanglier (wild boar) and, despite the rumors, rarely these days the traditional horse. The famous and fabled saucisson of Arles, commonly understood to be manufactured of the flesh of the lowly, if still noble, little âne (ass or donkey, particularly well suited for making one’s way in the hills of Provence, and Provence is hilly if nothing), is in fact fabricated in a ratio of about 6:1 of beef and pork, plus various seasonings, spices, herbs, etc. Maybe they used to make it of donkey meat, but no longer. Rather the designation d’Arles refers to a specific flavor of saucisson.

In all events, we skipped the charcuterie (which I have had in the past, and I can vouch for as meeting any expectation for flavor and is especially recommended on those days when you simply have a jones for eating a lot of savory, fatty, highly salinated food that is bad for your heart). Instead we both opted for the tarte aux ratatouille. Speaking of savory. This turned out to be two generous wedges of home-made tarte, on a crust of pâte brisée, it consisted of a ratatouille spread in a thin layer of mainly eggplant and courgettes, with just enough tomato and tomato paste to impart a ruddy, almost terra cotta hue (something like the color of the native soil in this terroir). It was lovely, bursting with flavor in just the right portion, with a nice unctuous texture, broken by the still substantive bits of vegetable in this characteristic Provençal ragout (see my attempt at the canonical recipe for the ratatouille itself: http://perdiem.bertha.com/2006/08/2006august02_th.html —you will note please the date of my recipe, well in advance of the ridiculously successful Disney/Pixar full-length cartoon eponymously titled after this now world-famous dish; I haven’t seen the movie, despite the urging of many… I am a little afraid lest I see some pilferage of my ideas; I know no check from Disney or Pixar has appeared as yet in my mailbox).

The main dish was a veal roast, served in thick slices on a platter, with its own mushroom sauce. That is, the sauce, of pan juices, fortified with wine and, I’d guess, the fluid version of crême fraîche that is the alternative to the thicker version with which we are all familiar in the ‘States. The thinner version is a preferred substitute for heavy cream, which is, in fact, hard to come by. Though it does seem to be appearing slowly and surely in the supermarkets (the heavy cream that is; crême fraîche is always available in a variety of weights, measures, and from at least a half-dozen different sources).

This is a boneless roast I speak of, likely a rump roast, though it may have been what we call eye of round. Bits of the twine that had bound up the roast after boning were on the serving platter. I’m of the school that sees this as a good thing, and we are certainly too far into the country to imagine that the strings were added, cynically, to add some sort of air of authenticity. Jean had made too much of a fuss when I showed up at 11:40 that morning in person to make the reservation. He fussed a bit, and looked at what was, indeed, a long list of parties already with reservations. The two hangers-on at the bar good-naturedly gave him a raft of shit, both before and after he disappeared into the kitchen. No doubt he was simply checking to see if there would be enough food. He finally appeared and asked if I wanted to sit inside or out. And I told him, oh in the shade outside, for sure. So he dragged out a paper tablecloth to clip to one of the tables out there, presumably to be our table. He asked what time we wanted to eat, and I said 12:30, and he said "and not a minute later…" Somehow I knew he was kidding. Just wanted the last word.

Anyway, the veal roast was ample, and heavenly. I ate my portion, and Linda hers, sopping up the sauce with bread, and then she had no room for the last slice, but I did. It was served with what they called "sautée de pommes de terre" cuboids of potato, done to a turn, that looked, and tasted more like they had been somehow both pan roasted and fried. The French verb, rissoler [meaning to brown, as in a poêle, or frying pan] is a favorite way to cook potatoes here, and usually in the shape they were brought to the table. It’s only a technical point, as they were delicious, and nice counterpoint to the lamb so tender it didn’t need a knife. But if it was pommes de terre rissolées, why didn’t they just call them that. You ask Jean. I didn’t and I won’t.

Then, the cheese course. A medium-sized plate of four significant portions of cheese: a local chèvre, two cow cheeses, one of them possibly a cousin to reblochon, and cheese with mold, all delicious, even in the delicate samples we allowed ourselves. The platter was more than generous and clearly intended not to be consumed by us (way too much cheese), though I’ve seen some Americans do exactly that in other restaurants, with similar sized portions. And we wonder how the French stay slim.

Dessert was a choice of flan (which we’ve had in the past, and we know is home-made), a tarte à poire, and ice cream. No contest. We both had the tarte. Again, homemade, though it sat in the fridge a bit too long, I fear, and was very very slightly desiccated, especially the custard (or the crême n’importe quoi [whatever] holding the fruit in place, and the crust had gotten a little too biscuity (crumbly, rather than flaky, and a little on the harder vs. softer side), but a good finish to the meal. If the dessert had been perfect, we would just have to cancel our return tickets and stay here. It would a lot cheaper eating one meal a day down at Chez Jean, than to return home and go back to that boring three squares a day routine.

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Once again, to celebrate Linda’s birthday, we have arrived in Montréal, the closest we can get to France without flying over the North Atlantic. It does seem like only weeks ago I was describing the lobby of the W Hotel in Square Victoria (where we stayed for last year’s birthday extravaganza), just a few blocks east of us here in the Marriott Château-Champlain—no, we’re not following the sun, we’re following the room rates. The hotel gods, with the assistance of some of Linda’s terrestrial admirers, whom we know number in the hundreds, if not thousands, have smiled again. Not quite as luxe (or weird) as the W, but what the hell, the dollar is also worth about 20 cents less against the Canadian dollar (talk about loony) than a year ago, at which time the dollar was slowly circling the global currency exchange rate drain.

One thing I must note. We took a slightly different route this time, traveling on US Route 93 North almost all the way to the border (it never actually makes it to Canada, peeling off into 91N just after St. Johnsbury). The border is not much farther away.

This route keeps you on multi-lane superhighway practically to the perpetual bottle neck on the Champlain Bridge into Montreal, but it’s also about 50 miles longer than the leisurely sojourn from 89N about 30 miles north of Burlington, through the cornfields of southern Quebec with its parade of one-horse towns (the towns that can afford the horse) and the battlefield conditions of the secondary roads.

Nevertheless, coming by either route, the last 20 miles or so into the city of Montreal are on Canada Route 10 West. The difference was, by today’s route we drove that much longer on 10.

I am positive that for the entire route, once we braved the weapons quiz from the stalwart young woman in her Canadian customs officer’s get-up, "This is the only important question, really, I have for you: any weapons, mace, firearms… you ma’am? any mace or firearms?"… there was not another American car to be seen on the highway, as we passed and were passed innumerable times on the 72 mile trek to the city. Now we did take a "rest" stop at the Customs and Immigrations shed before actually entering Canada, and maybe some Massachusetts or New Hampshire vehicles slipped past us as we relieved ourselves.

But I’m pretty sure we’re the only Americans at present in Quebec province.

I have to think about this. What could possibly explain it? The profoundly reduced buying power of the dollar, especially since the Canadians haven’t lowered their price tags? Has national shame finally reached a critical delimiter? Dare we show our faces outside our borders ever again? Even in "friendly" Canada? Well, this part is practically France, it’s true, but still. A year ago, we sometimes were one of a virtual phalanx of Massachusetts cars tooling down the pock-ridden byways of Quebec province. Forcing the notorious speed demons of lower Canada into the right lane as we roared past.

I mean, Karl Rove did quit. No matter. Even the stock market has gotten timid.

Skype blamed a massive network failure last week (leaving millions of subscribers doomed actually to pay for their long distance phone calls for a couple of days, using a real telephone) on a sudden surge in Windows PC re-boots, as millions of Windows users installed a much needed service patch for the decrepit Vista operating system (on a re-boot Skype automatically logs in, and all those log-ins into the Skype servers were not unlike all those toilets flushing at the first commercial break during the Super Bowl broadcast). Maybe, similarly, millions of U.S. passports expired at once. Neglect, you know? The anticipation of disuse.

I don’t blame you my fellow citizens. Not one bit.

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The above entitled essay was posted in error, as it was incomplete (how do you tell…?), but keep watching, it will re-appear complete and whole… Sorry for any inconvenience…

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