Village life during the year centers around major holidays, tourist season, the wine festival and annual fires.

If the village’s mairie budget allows, we have fireworks for Fete de St. Jean (June 24), Fete Nationale (July 14) and Fete de Banyuls (August 15).   Luckily all of these holidays are during the summer tourist season, which is primarily June, July and August. If the budget is low, we get only one fireworks display during the summer, which is always a disappointment for the tourists.   This will then affect the amount of trade in the village. Since the village relies on tourist trade from March to October, most mayors try to attract as many tourists as possible during the season.

We have been in our apartment for many Fete de St. Jean holidays and always enjoy watching the torch come down from Canigou (the major mountain peak in the Alberes mountains, which overlooks the Perpignan plain). From the torch, the lanterns of the school children are lit, and then the children throw their lanterns on a huge pile of wood to make the traditional St. John’s Day bonfire on the beach.   Tradition states that lovers who hold hands and jump over the coals from the bonfire on St. Jean night will be in love forever (or some such belief).

Some years there are the “fire walkers” (pyrotechniques) who spin long rods of fire around as they parade through town. Sparks fly everywhere and the fire engines are always nearby. We just enjoy sitting at our big window overlooking the beach and watching all the frivolity from there.

As the fireworks begin, we have a family tradition of eating chocolate bread pudding and having a cup of coffee. I don’t remember how this got started, but our daughter insists that, as a family tradition, it is now de rigueur.

The national holiday is, of course, Bastille Day, or 14 juillet. On this day there is always a parade through town with the laying of flower wreaths on all of the war memorials in the village.

There’s the revolutionary war memorial on the main square, the DeGaulle memorial on the way out of town towards the Col de Banyuls, and the Maillol war memorial behind the mairie, where speeches are made. This is also where other war memorial ceremonies take place, such as the June holiday that commemorates DeGaulle’s call to arms from London during WWII and the November 11 holiday, Armistice Day, when more speeches are made and the national anthem is sung.   Fireworks are scheduled either July 14 or the night before and the quality varies depending upon that year’s budget. We have seen some tremendously wonderful displays some years and pitiful ones on other years.

In addition to the French national independence day, there are also ceremonies at the war memorial in nearby Port Vendres on AMERICAN Independence Day, as the memorial there is also in honor of those Frenchmen who fought for our independence in 1776! Since Port Vendres is twinned with Yorktown, VA, we have attended several ceremonies and walked in parades in Port Vendres on the 4^th of July, including the festivities for the visit of the USS Avenger.

The Fete de Banyuls is a village celebration with local produce and crafts markets during the day. A parade with floats (very homemade) that carry some of the children (we cheered one year for our daughter’s Centre Aere friends on a float) is also part of the day’s festivities.

Two other major festivals occur during the year. One is the Fete Catalane, when sardana dancing groups come to Banyuls from both French Catalan and Spanish Catalan villages and dance on the square to the very unusual Cobla, a group of musicians playing Catalan instruments.

 

Several locals dress in Catalan costumes, there is a parade, with Castellars, and Geants, and lots of rifles being fired in the air. The Castellars are a troupe of tumblers that builds a tower by standing on each others’ shoulders, with a small child on top. They do this in the street—no mats or safety ropes. The Geants are huge giant papier- mache people, a king and a queen, etc. that are “danced” down the street, probably by someone inside on stilts. They cause a lot of excitement with the children.

The other really major festival in our village is the Fete de Vendange, which is the wine festival for our local wine and occurs the second week-end in October. October is a wonderful month to visit any wine district, as the air is full of the musk of the grapes that arrive throughout the day at the wineries in town.

We have about twelve wineries in Banyuls, so making wine is an important industry of our village. Banyuls wine is aged in large barrels painted red on the ends and set out in the sun. It is drunk as an aperatif or as a degustif.   White Banyuls goes well with fruit desserts and custards. Red Banyuls wine marries perfectly with chocolate and cigars!

During the Fete de Vendanges, about 10,000 visitors descend upon our tiny village, all on that Sunday to taste the many Banyuls wines available through the morning and afternoon. A barrel of wine is blessed by the bishop after Sunday mass, and then the fun begins.

Small musical combos play at various locations throughout the town as the visitors purchase a glass and then walk up and down the street near the church, pushing through the crowds, and tasting all the different wines there are to sample. My favorite musical group is called “Les Enjoliveurs”—the hubcaps!

The rest of the summer is filled with Kermesses, which are fun fairs for children to support the Red Cross, traveling circuses and Guignol (Punch and Judy) shows. At the kermesses, children play games like fishing for plastic ducks or fish, walking on stilts around a little course, etc. They win tickets, which are then exchanged for prizes. The prizes are, I believe, donations from people and are sometimes chipped or broken, but we have quite a few of these dog figurines, glass fish ornaments, and other such knickknacks that were highly prized by our little girl.

Grillades, which usually include fried sardines or mussels and sausage cooked on large grills on the beach and pan o tomate with anchovies are also scheduled throughout the summer.

Often they make giant paellas, made in huge paella pans on open fires on the beach.  Some people take large plastic containers with them to have them filled with paella, then take their dinner home to eat.

The “discos” at night often keep us awake with their loud rock music, but after a week or so, we barely hear the noise and it always ends by 2 a.m. when the bars close. Then every Thursday evening there is a Sardana, when the village people and visitors dance the sardana, the traditional Catalan circle dance to the music of a cobla.

Weather also plays an important part of village life. The main concern throughout the year is always the tramontane, a strong wind that whips across the Pyrenees mountains and hits the coast with gale-force winds. There is a Catalan saying that tells how long a tramontane will last—1, 3, or 7 days and another that says if the tramontane arrives at night, then rain will follow. During the summer, the wind is a wonderful friend, keeping our un-air conditioned apartment nice and cool.  Whether it’s playing with the blowing curtains,

or just standing on the balcony, the tramontane during the summer is a welcome ally. But we learned to never go to the beautiful sand beach in Canet on a day when the tramontane is blowing as you will end up with sand-blasted legs! And full skirts are not a very good choice of clothing to wear when that lovely wind is blowing.

But in the winter it can be treacherous, bringing snow and ice down from the mountains, all of which paralyze our little tropical paradise.

One night, when our daughter was about 10 years old, she came into our bedroom at 3:45 a.m., frightened from a nightmare. I talked with her a few minutes to calm her down and then suddenly I noticed that the wind was blowing all sorts of leaves and debris into our bedroom. We quickly closed the window and went out to the living room to see what was happening. Rain was blowing around so hard that we had white-out conditions! The storm was fierce and we soon discovered that a mini-tornado had descended upon the village. We sat on the sofa bed with our daughter, sipping tea, watching the storm develop and the sea turn quite ugly. Then CRASH! The lightening hit something big very near to us and we lost our electricity! An hour later we heard the chain saws busy at work. Apparently, a huge tree had been struck in the street below us, uprooting it and landing on the electric lines. We saw the results the next day. We also saw that a catamaran had sunk in the bay; it was recovered, but the mast was bent. Then we found that a downspout had been blown down off our building and the new balustrade along the fourth floor of our building had been blown in! The streets and walks were littered with branches, leaves and flowers, so the clean-up process went on all day long. Villagers still talk about that “mini-tornado” of ’97.

Winter storms along the coast are pretty frequent. The tramontane blows so fiercely that it is often difficult to stand or walk.   The sea swells up and enters the village streets, looking at first like huge soap suds, until all is flooded up to four feet or more.

 

Boats from the harbor sometimes end up either on top of each other or floating up and down the village streets. Our friends’ hotel in Cerbere has been flooded more times than we can count, necessitating a lot of mud shoveling and washing up. Hopefully the new breakwater they built in Cerbere a few years ago is protecting the village now.

Almost every year, there is a fire in the vineyards up and down our coast.   Sometimes it stays north of us, sometimes it devastates the vineyards just over the border in Spain, and sometimes it rages through the local vineyards, blackening the hills around the village. One summer many years ago, I rented our apartment to a professor and his family for five weeks.   It was a summer of such a fire, so I got a phone call at my office one morning, asking me what they should save from the apartment if the fire came down into the village! Having had no news of France, I had had no idea that there was any danger to our village. The campgrounds on the edge of the village were burning and Canadairs (fire-fighting planes) were dipping into the bay then swooping up just above our balcony as they hurriedly dumped their load of seawater onto the fires in the hills behind our building.

Several years ago there was a huge fire on the Spanish border. When we arrived that year, the hills were all black. It was a stunning picture.

But actually I need to tell you about the “fruit sellers” first. In our many trips over the border to shop in Spain, we often noticed around the La Jonquera area, that there were often young ladies standing along the side of the road, sometimes with a small table. I always assumed they were manning small fruit stands, until one day my best friend was bemoaning increase of the prostitute rings in Spain. “What prostitutes?” I asked.   “Didn’t you ever see the young girls standing on the side of the road down around La Junquera?” she asked me. “Oh!” The penny dropped! She had quite a laugh at me when I exclaimed, “But I thought they were fruit sellers!” Apparently young girls come from Eastern Europe and then work several years in order to get their legal papers and a passport for Spain. Their work entails standing in skimpy clothing along the side of the roads frequented by truckers, then going off into the fields for a “quick transaction.”   So the day we arrived after the devastating fire that year, the hills were absolutely black, but standing on the road in the foreground, against the absolute black hills, was a prostitute with long black hair and a bright red outfit. It was, indeed, a very striking picture!

During the summer there are always lots of activities going on in the village and we try to make sure we have a monthly schedule on hand for our guests when they arrive. Friday mornings are flea markets/antique markets next to the harbor, Thursday and Sunday mornings are market days at Place de marche. Evenings are often what we call “night market” when there are stands of Indian and African wares, jewelry, and, at one time, garnet jewelry from local artisans, paintings, and other artisanal crafts. There are concerts scheduled throughout the summer by visiting artists or local musical groups. Some are better than others.

One summer quite a few years ago, we attended a concert given in our village by the summer festival orchestra of North Carolina School of the Arts. It was made up of students from music schools and conservatories all over the US and we were pleased to find a few familiar faces from our daughter’s music institute. So when they turned up a year or so later for a concert in Collioure, we decided to go see them again. This was, of course, a different group of students, but we still found a cellist who studied with a professor we knew quite well. I proceeded to tell him about my father’s gold frog bow, which I had sold to the professor and suggested that the student ask to see it when he got home.   He brought out his hand from behind his back, and there was my father’s bow! He’d bought it from his professor and was using it for the concert that night. I was so stunned that I could hardly speak the rest of the evening. I still get chills down my back remembering that sensation, knowing that the cello bow had made it to the Roussillon even though my father did not live long enough to come visit himself.

And so the summers are filled with swimming in the sea, riding on the merry-go-round, visiting the various markets and fairs, watching the men (and women, now!) play petanque every evening, going for long walks up the hill and through all the narrow, twisting streets of our village, and spending long evenings of reading through our private, and by now, very extensive library.   Not having a TV in France for the first 15 years, was a wonderful thing! But now we say our new TV is a great excuse for learning more French. And the cooking shows are quite fantastic, too!

Our daughter kept busy during those summers of her youth, reading or practicing her music lessons, going to the beach for churros

or huge croque-monsieurs

or just blowing bubbles on the balcony.

We played Checkers and Uno and Chess and invented new recipes. Every day was a new adventure.

As the summer winds down and the tourists go home, the village settles down to its winter pace, knowing that the stores will close for two weeks at Tous-Saints (All Saints’ Day), then gear up for the Christmas season. Shops will be filled with santons and lots of chocolates. We will load up on fresh foie gras and nuts and pears and Roquefort cheese, as the Fall and winter season arrives. People will begin to bundle up against the tramontane and the plane trees will be trimmed of their branches (this always reminds me of how we “murder” crepe myrtle trees in the South). Most hotels close on October 1 and the owners will plan their winter vacations in warmer climes. But on Christmas Eve, the children of the village will don their Catalan dress and dance during midnight mass and Catalan music will continue to sound through the winter season, waiting for spring flowers to arrive and the busy tourist season to once again bring in the much needed annual revenue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time our daughter turned 12, we had decided that it was time to purchase a larger apartment, so she could move out of the living room and into a bedroom of her own. We wanted to stay in the same residence, although the local realtor tried to get us to purchase a new two-story condo at the edge of town. In time this new complex would become known as the Danish Ghetto, as that is where most of the Danes settled when they came to our area of France. Now it is a mixture of Brits and French and other nationalities. They are very nice apartments, but we knew that as we grew older, we would not be able to climb the steps from the garage to the kitchen with bags of groceries, nor be able to navigate the staircase for the middle of the night bathroom visits. So we were determined to stay in our building.

The only two-bedroom apartments were on the corner of the building, with a picture window overlooking the sea, like our current balcony, and a long balcony overlooking the boat harbor and aquarium. So at the annual property owners’ meeting I timidly stood up and announced that we were looking for a 2-bedroom apartment and asked the four owners of these apartments to contact me. As I left the meeting, an elderly woman approached me and said that they had decided to sell their apartment as her husband could no longer manage to come down for vacations. This was a Godsend! We once again went through all the legal machinations, this time with the help of my best friend. To sign the sous-signe prive, we met the couple in their home in Perpignan, discussed the price (no negotiation), then signed the papers. As soon as all was accomplished, Madame walked into her kitchen and returned with a tray holding a bottle of champagne and five glasses. This sealed the bargain!

When all the final papers were signed at the notaire’s office, we picked up the previous owners and took them to the apartment so that they could explain some things to us. Among other information was the announcement that they would leave us the twin beds, a double bed, lots of dishes and pans and glasses, two living room chairs, two wicker chairs and a heavy balcony table. Eventually we would give the beds to our friend who was starting up a B&B, but we are still using the chairs and table and kitchenware. It took another year to sell the small apartment, but in the meanwhile, we used it for guests, putting mattresses on the floor.

So now I had a larger kitchen and it had a window over the sink with a view of the sea!

Of course it had only 3 cabinets, so a trip back up to Ikea was put quickly on the agenda. By adding four base cabinets with a wooden countertop and four wall cabinets along one side and adding two wall cabinets and a set of drawers along the other wall, I felt a little better about this new kitchen. Over the years, we have replaced the electric oven and the clothes washer. Next on the schedule is to replace the window so it opens in two directions and the gas cooktop, so that all burners actually work for me!

Once again, the little fridge was located under the oven. No room for a tall fridge, so that went into the hallway. Then we had to have four outlets installed, as there were NO outlets except one at the door into the kitchen. We Americans do love our electric gadgets! And that meant the electric company had to come and increase our power again. Once again my husband told the electrician that it was an “American kitchen,” and the response was rapid: increase the power!

There are always ingredients that are not available in one country or the other, and that is where we try to “fill the gaps.”

Over the years, we have made our own relish, as that is still not available in France, using my mother’s recipe for green tomato relish.

We would each take turns grinding the tomatoes and onions, cranking the handle of the meat grinder that I screwed onto the table in the living room.   We found that we have to go into Spain to find green tomatoes in the markets. I remembered to do this when, several years ago, I began to share southern cuisine by making fried green tomatoes for my friends in France.

The only time I was able to purchase green tomatoes in France was when I did so directly from the uncle of a friend who had a garden and agreed to sell me some green tomatoes from his vines.

I have also made quite a few jars of bread and butter pickles and dill pickles, as the only pickles available in France are the tiny cornichons, traditionally served with pate. I like real dill pickles with my wienerschnitzel!

One year my French friend gave me a huge bag of kumquats! I had to research that fruit quickly and made a kumquat compote, then kumquat and orange marmalade. Kumquats are not a fruit I find often in my American supermarkets!

Making French recipes in the US and making American recipes in France often present challenges, which I relish!   Last year I wanted to make sorrel sauce when I was in the US. The only sorrel I found was at Fresh Market in a tiny “herb-sized” packet, at quite a high price. I needed a pound! I’ll wait until I’m back in France to make that recipe.

Looking for peanut butter in France for our young toddler, was impossible, so we ended up importing a fresh jar each year. Now they have a sort of peanut butter that tastes quite awful, so Jif is still on the packing list. Decent cinnamon was also difficult to find when we first arrived in France, as was vanilla extract, so they have remained on the packing list.   I thought a few years ago that France had finally discovered shortening, as a product called “Vegeline“ appeared in the supermarches. Sadly, it’s just solid oil for frying purposes and doesn’t replace my Crisco.

When we return to the US, we miss the fresh sardines and the fresh white anchovies from Collioure. If you’ve never tasted a white anchovy, then you really do not know what anchovies taste like. We miss the thon catalan, but I’ve made my own from fresh tuna steaks.

We miss the numerous pates and cheeses; we miss the veal and Catalan chicken on Sundays. But mostly, we miss the fresh fish.   And when we are in France, we miss the good beef and wonderful lobster that we have in the US.   In France we use crème fraiche and I make my own sour cream. In the US we use sour cream and I make my own crème faiche.

Shopping for meals on a daily basis has long been part of the French culture, so those tiny refrigerators that are so common in French kitchens are just the right size.   I learned early on that, as an American, I would need a much larger fridge! But then, of course, it did not fit into the tiny kitchen, so it stood in the living room.

When in France, we have learned to shop by the season. In the US, we are used to obtaining produce year-round, but in the villages of France, this is not the case. Fresh cherries come from Ceret in the spring. Strawberries appear in June, with peaches and apricots throughout the summer. I quickly learned not to ask for walnuts or hazelnuts in the summer—nuts come in the Fall. So if I want to make something with walnuts when I am there in the summer, I must remember to bring them from the US. Lately that has meant taking along pecans, so I can make Southern pecan pie for our French friends. Pecans have just begun to appear in the French markets in recent years, but only in the Fall. Pears and packages of fresh foie gras appear in the Fall. And, of course, Roquefort cheese is best in October with a glass of sauterne.

In the Fall, we also see piles of dried cod in the markets.

I have made morue several times. The trick is to soak the fish at least 3 or 4 days and change the soaking water several times each day. I don’t think I will ever get to the point of making Swedish lutfisk, but I don’t mind the French recipes for morue!

Every day in France, we purchase the local paper for our daily French lesson, and every day there is a new recipe on the back page. From time to time there is something interesting to try and then the fun begins translating not only the ingredients but also the directions. The Sunday paper also includes a magazine and TV guide, both with additional recipes. One recipe for scallops required that I “snacker” the scallops. Well, what the heck is THAT? I asked both of my friends, and they put their heads together and puzzled over this obviously English word turned into a French word. I was confident that the author did not want me to take tiny bites out of the raw scallops before sautéing them! We finally decided that they simply meant that the scallops were to be sautéed very quickly “hwtt, hwtt,” as my friend says while turning her hand over quickly.

When our British friends visited for a meal a few years ago, I made a new recipe that I seem to remember was presented in a stack, with magret de canard (duck breast) and foie gras. While I was cooking the foie gras, I remember thinking that it didn’t seem the right consistency, but it wasn’t until I took my first bite at the table that I realized I had purchased magret de foie gras, not foie gras de canard. It was a duck breast from a duck raised for its foie gras, but it was not the foie gras! So I ended up with duck breast topped with duck breast! We learn from our mistakes!

Another foie (liver) that I had for the first time two years ago, was foie de lotte (monkfish liver). This was served at a wonderful seafood restaurant 7ieme Vague on the outskirts of Perpignan. It was served as an entrée and was delicious.

It has now been added to my list of things I would like to learn how to prepare. When I ordered monkfish in my local US supermarket this past year, the clerk looked at me like I was nuts when I asked if it would come with the liver. Guess I will have to wait until we are back in France to explore this recipe.

Last week I received the Valentine Menu from our favorite chef at L’Auberge du Cellier in Montner. Since we cannot be there to eat the meal prepared by Pierre-Louis Morin, I decided to try to make it here in the US, just for the two of us. The ingredients include Thai bouillon, coriander, eggs, mussels, saffron, monkfish, fresh pasta, thyme, parmesan, pigeon, spice bread, fresh foie gras, Jerusalem artichokes, macarroons, and raspberries. I decided I could find something close to the Thai bouillon; there are several oriental restaurants near us and surely one of them would have something similar, so that’s one thing I wouldn’t even have to prepare. Monkfish would be a problem; I ordered some last summer from Publix and it cost “an arm and a leg,” but we ate the last pound two weeks ago, so I decided to substitute lobster (a backwards substitution!). Pigeon….hmm…I thought a substitution of quail, which is very prevalent in this area, would be a good choice. I know the area restaurants serve fresh foie gras from Hudson Valley, but was not sure if I could purchase a small piece in a supermarket. And Jerusalem artichokes are probably unheard of in this area. But, joy of joy, I know I saw French macarons at Sam’s Club! But the puzzling part was that the eggs are served “embeurre de chou.” According to my French friend, embeurre de chou is simply cabbage that is parboiled, then chiffonnee (sliced in shreds with a knife) and quickly sautéed in butter. Then do I put the egg on top, or will I do something different, like bake the egg in a puff pastry shell? Decisions, decisions, decisions! Then there were to be mussels on the same plate!   I know Pierre-Louis will be very innovative in designing the plate to look fabulous, but could I come up with something equally exciting?

A search through our supermarkets turned up very small and mushy Jerusalem artichokes (called “sunchokes” in this area) in one store, so they stayed in the store. Sam’s Club no longer had macarons; apparently they are a “seasonal item.” No foie gras available at any store and the Publix was even out of quail. So here’s the menu I ended up with:

St. Valentin, 14 Fevrier 2015 (chez nous)

Pate Feuillete a la tapenade

…………………

Bouillon Thai aux shiitakes et coriander fraiche

……………………

Un oeuf au four dans un vol au vent sur

un lit de l’embeuree de chou et les moules saffranees

……………………

L’homard et crevettes en raviole, jus de cuisson au thym et au parmesan

…………………..

Pintadeau saupoudre de Speculoos, puree de pommes de terre

…………………..

Crème Catalane aux framboises et Macarons aux framboises et Chantilly

 

Using Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets, I cut strips and covered one side with homemade tapenade. This is a common appetizer at L’Auberge du Cellier. Since I didn’t find a jar of tapenade in my local supermarket, I made my own, using a David Lebovitz recipe. The result was delicious, but I think next time I will not triple the thickness of the dough.

The bouillon was an instant Thai soup, “Tom Yum,” from which I removed the noodles and the tofu before mixing it; it was quite spicy, but easy to make.

The raviolis were frozen and I boiled them in seafood broth, adding fresh thyme, scallions, and grated parmesan at the end.

The two original courses were created after much thought and consideration. Although it was Pierre-Louis who created the combination of flavors for the egg course, I was in a complete puzzlement as to how he planned to accomplish this. All I knew for sure was that there would be an egg, some mussels, and embeuree de chou. So after much thought, I decided to bake the egg in puff pastry. I baked the puff pastry shells for about 15 minutes, until almost completely cooked, then removed the center “lid” and carefully poured an egg into each pastry shell. They were then returned to the oven and baked for about 10 minutes, melted butter added, and baked for another 5 minutes. I then added ground pink pepper on top. L’embeuree de chou is simply parboiled cabbage leaves which are then thinly sliced and sautéed in butter.  Then I used my usual recipe for the mussels in saffron sauce and added some chopped red bell peppers for color.

Morin’s next course combined pidgeon and spice cake, foie gras and sunchoke puree. I had to forgo the foie gras and sunchokes, as they were unavailable. So then I decided to use ground-up ginger cookies with a small Cornish hen. I combined a recipe of Jacques Pepin, my fried chicken recipe, and Pierre-Louis’ idea of using spice cake with his pidgeon. After dredging each half hen in flour, egg and ground pepparkakor (ginger cookies), I fried the inside of each hen in butter, then turned them over and added a heavy iron skillet to weigh the hen down. Pepin uses foiled-wrapped bricks as weights, but I opted for my iron skillet and a hamburger press for good measure. The meat cooked in about 30 minutes and was tender and delicious. Adding a wine sauce made from the drippings was simple.

For dessert, I ended up trying to make my own macarons, and that was a bit of a disaster. But they were tasty anyway. The idea for the “macaron sandwiches” is from Pierre-Louis’ original Valentine menu. They are stuffed with whipped cream and fresh raspberries and very delicious.   Crème Catalan is always a treat to make and common in our area of France, so I added that second dessert.

And so we learn to combine and adapt and use the ingredients available wherever we are residing. We learn new recipes from our friends and the chefs around us. We pick up ideas in magazines and newspapers and just sitting down with a new cookbook on our laps. I am always ecstatic when my daughter calls to say she has tried a new recipe. She is exploring the art of food science in her kitchen much earlier in life than I ever did. My mother taught me how to make mashed potatoes, meatloaf and jello. My father taught me how to make Swedish gravy and bif a la Lindstrom. The rest I have had to learn on my own, and I will never stop learning!

 

 

 

 

Our daughter’s first visit to her home in France was at the age of 6 months. For the first few years, my husband would accompany us over to Banyuls and stay a week or so, then return to the US to work for a month, then return for us. So she and I had some interesting adventures together during those early years. The first year we took powered formula and cereal, then let her teethe on the ends of French bread.

 

Baby food and diapers were definitely very different in France. I found the most wonderful food in little jars for babies! Fish! And all kinds of vegetables that are unheard of in American baby food. We tried several kinds of diapers until we found one that would not give her diaper rash. Most, like their toilet paper, were very rough textured. She learned to stand in her portable crib that first summer and she learned to crawl on that horrible burnt orange carpet.

Pushing her around the village in her stroller always seemed to bring out all the kind-hearted “grandmas” and “grandpas.” “Quelle sage!,” they would say and then touch her very white skin, as if they had never seen such a color. Eventually the Danes would invade our village and light-skinned blonds became not so much of a novelty.

I asked my best friend why the French seemed to think our daughter was so “sage,” as soon as they saw her. She said it’s because she’s so wide awake and active, always moving. At my questioning look, she explained. French babies, she said, were fed starches in their milk and kept full and rotund, so they tended to seem always so sleepy.   Hmmmm.

Our good friends in the village and in Cerbere became her tantes and oncles, and so our family grew.

She still remembers playing with my best friend, making pretend omelets out of a set of plastic eggs. Now they share recipes of omelets, including one particular one we made a few years ago which involves serving a tiny omelet in an egg shell on a bed of coarse salt!

Raising a child, partly in France, meant having experiences with her that we could not have had in the US.   As our daughter grew, we involved her more and more in the life of the village, enrolling her into the village summer camp, Centre Aere, every summer for several years and then a sailing course. We took her to as many concerts and movies as possible and always involved her in our shopping at the marche, where she became a favorite of our “roast chicken man.”

Along the way, we met some other children, at least enough for me to make a few play dates for her. One of the children came to our apartment for lunch one day. We said our usual blessing before eating and that was an entirely new experience for her. As the girls played some card games and Dames (Checkers), I listened in to help, if needed, with the language. I soon discovered that French children don’t always play by the rules—cheating seemed to be an accepted way of winning a game, for this little girl.   Nothing I said made any difference to her.  Another of her childhood friends had a German mother and French father, so was brought up speaking both languages equally well. We attended her 5^th or 6^th birthday party and I remember being impressed how carefully she unwrapped each package, saving every piece of tape and wrapping paper carefully, and of being surprised that this little girl was receiving bottles of perfume! Her mother told me that the French children were not receiving any music education in the schools, so she was teaching her daughter’s friends little songs whenever they all got together.

One of her earliest visits to the village doctor was for hives, a reaction to a medication her American doctor had prescribed for a cold. The doctor took one look at her very white skin and proclaimed that she would be plagued with allergies all her life. I thought that was ridiculous and still do not understand the correlation, but he was 100% spot on!

We still laugh when we remember the adventures our daughter had at our village’s Centre Aere. She was the only English-speaking child in the group, so most of the children thought she was, perhaps, deaf, as she did not speak all day long. And these were long days! The day began at 9 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. So this was 9 hours a day of total immersion in French! By the time she got home to us, the words for just pouring out of her, telling us all about her adventures and what she had observed. It was perhaps the first words she had uttered all day long.

Every day they ate lunch in the Cantine, where they had 4 course meals: entrée, main course, cheese, dessert. This is the typical school lunch in France. After cleaning the plate of the main course, they turned their plates over and put the cheese on the clean bottom of the plate. Very economical! Then they walked to a secluded beach on the north side of the village for their afternoon swim.

She was mostly impressed with the absolute focus French children had with stringing beads. To our daughter, this was a really tedious and boring activity! But every day, she came home and said with disgust that they had strung more beads into jewelry.

Once a week, a field trip was planned. One time they visited a chestnut tree forest and ended up exploring a cave. She told us that the leader went into the cave first, then the children went in one at a time, crawling on their bellies through a hole to get into the cave and then in a single file, they side-stepped along a one-foot wide ledge to explore deeper into the cave. She told us that the drop-off beside the ledge was very deep. We kept thinking of all the disclosure forms and safety measures we would have had to sign if they had done this in the US!   But she came home very happy and covered with dirt from the top of her casquette (baseball cap) to the tip of her tennis (sneakers). My favorite photo that summer was of her lying in the bath tub of bubble bath with only her smiling dirty face showing amidst the white bubbles!

Another week they all went to the water park, north of us, up the coast. I’d lathered suntan lotion on her and sent her with more. Then I warned the group leaders that they had to keep applying more lotion and keep her out of the sun as much as possible. “Oui, madame. Bien sur!” But children in the Roussillon are mostly of Mediterranean stock and have olive skin, while our daughter had Scandinavian-English very white skin, easily burned. The leaders just didn’t really believe what I was trying to tell them. She had a wonderful time, but she came home red as a beet! Literally! It was quite painful. Then she told us about going down the tube slide with one of the other girls. The following week I discovered that this was one of the children who had lice. It was a normal announcement at least once every summer that lice had appeared on the heads of one of the children. I took to taking a “Nit” kit with me from the US, just in case. Then we’d stand her on the balcony in the sun and inspect every hair on her scalp—and never found any, thankfully!

She vividly remembers the hike they took one week, through forests and fields. For a picnic lunch they each had a tomato, a hard-boiled egg, and bread and cheese.   By mid-afternoon, she desperately had to find a toilet, but of course there was nothing in the great outdoors. Finally she got up the courage to ask one of the leaders in French for a toilet and the leader just waved her hand, indicating to our daughter to just go off and find a bush. She was stunned, but after a while realized that that is exactly what other children had been doing when they had wandered off from time to time. She doesn’t remember, but when she was 3 years old, she’d had the same problem in a hardware store in the city; the clerk told me to just take her out into the parking lot. That was normal in France, children peeing wherever they found a place, usually a storm drain. We ran into the same problem several years later when we attended a concert in the old church in our village. No toilets anywhere to be seen. So at intermission, we found that the cemetery next to the church was the place of choice of the concert goers!

After several summers of attending Centre Aere, she became too old to attend and was advised to sign up for some of the other activities. So we signed her up for sailing lessons, through which she very reluctantly persevered. She thought her command of the language was pretty good, but when it came time for her to go out in the boat with another student, her partner, a boy, insisted on doing everything as he just assumed she didn’t understand anything. So she just laid back, trailing her hand in the water, and had a relaxing time, while he did all the work! I’m sure he felt very pleased with himself.

One funny incident happened at a friend’s birthday party one summer, which was a rude awakening for our little girl. We’d been invited to a large birthday party on the 14 juillet, the national holiday in mid-July, in the neighboring village of Port Vendres. The host had been cooking a whole lamb on a spit over an open fire all day and had tables laid out, covering almost the entire terrace, for all the guests. Our daughter had fun playing with the other children, running around and just being kids. When it was time to eat, she wanted to sit with the other children, so we were happy to comply. She figured that she had eaten with the children at Centre Aere for several years and understood enough of the language to get through a meal. About half-way through our lovely dinner, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there she stood with a look of shock and anger on her face, and perhaps a few tears forming, ready to fall. “What’s wrong? What happened?” I asked her. “I was sitting having my dinner and the girl next to me asked me a question.” “Okay,” I said, “What was the question?” “I don’t know!” she said. “I thought I knew, so I said ‘oui’, then she took my olive off my plate and put it into her mouth!” Aha! Our daughter had just lost one of her favorite foods because she had said “oui” to the wrong question! Lesson learned: never say “oui” unless you know what you are saying “oui” to!!

Until the millennium, which we spent in Banyuls, we did not have a television in our apartment. Our life centered around reading, practicing math problems, writing stories, going to the beach, practicing piano, violin, and voice, and playing card games. When the French soccer team was in the Coupe de Monde, we walked down to a café to watch on their TV set with dozens of other banyulencs, all sitting and standing way out into the street. We dutifully cheered on “Les Bleus,” while our little girl calmly sat on a chair, reading a book.   We decided to purchase a television as our only Christmas gift for the millennium. That’s when we found out that having a television means paying a special TV tax of about $200 every year. My friend said, “Just think of it as you would a contribution to PBS!”   Okay, but it’s a TAX!!

One of the first toys I bought in France for our daughter was a toy piano, and I had quite a time finding one that was actually fairly in tune. Having begun her music lessons at a very early age, she was always inclined to find music in the objects around her.

One year we noticed that when we took her to the beach, she lined up rocks (our beach was all rocks and coarse gravel) all along the edge of the mats and then she played her piano pieces on them, singing the tunes as she played them by hitting them with a stick. A few days later, she was “tuning” them by arranging them more carefully according to pitch! Soon she was composing tunes, playing the rocks as a rhythmic accompaniment. This meant that we really needed to get a piano into our apartment, so that she could continue to practice when we were in France. After visiting friends in Bordeaux, who had a digital piano, we decided that was what we needed for our apartment. It sounded fairly decent and would never have to be tuned! A year or so later, we found what we wanted at Harrods in London and had it shipped to friends in the village to await our arrival. It has been a godsend to all of us!

My fondest memory was the summer our daughter composed a musical story, entitled, “The Boy, the Butterfly, and the Jar.” How I wish we could have recorded that wonderful little opera! She has practiced her recital pieces on that piano and prepared for Fall lessons, she has performed for friends and family and created evening concerts for her parents, including a New Year’s Eve concert for our millennium celebration. And then she prepared her college auditions on it, not losing a day of practice during her summer vacations. In time we also had to bring along an extra violin, so she could keep up on her violin lessons, as well, and that meant a memorable trip to a violin shop in Ceret to purchase a new bow.

When she began college, our daughter explored several music festivals in France and had one memorable very hot summer in Nice at the summer music academy there. That was one of the summers of canicule (heat wave), when the TV announcers and newspapers warned old people to go spend several hours a day at a shopping mall, or some other large store that was air conditioned. Stores were generally not air conditioned until recent years, and houses were certainly not even beginning to be air conditioned until about five yeas ago. We have always found that there are very few days during the summer that are hot and still. Generally, the tramontane (wind from the mountains) is blowing to some extent. So hikingup and down the hills of Nice to get from the dormitories to her lessons and practice sessions was a chore and she came home at the end of the week with terrible heat rash. But she’d gone swimming at 10 p.m. with fellow students and she’d even gone parasailing, so the adventures continued. Her fondest memories were the summers she spent at a piano festival near Albi, situated in an old castle on the site of an old observatory.   Students attended from all over Europe and prepared a recital for the end of the session. We enjoyed taking our friends up to hear her perform.

During one of our weekly phone calls with her, she told us about her dinner that evening. Apparently there were several Swedish students attending the festival that summer and before dinner, they all began to sing the traditional Swedish drinking song. Anne, of course, knew this song as we sing it every Christmas as part of our Swedish Christmas Luncheon ritual, so she joined in with the students, singing along. They looked at her at the end of the song and said, ”Wow! How do you know that song? You’re an American!” So she explained her Swedish heritage and instantly became part of their “family.”

One of the important lessons a child learns in France is to be quiet in a restaurant. It was a lesson that we, as adults, also had to learn. French people, for the most part, talk quietly, concentrating on the food and each other’s company. For a child, this is often a difficult lesson to learn. For Americans, it is an eye-opener. When we take American guests out to a restaurant in France, we are immediately reminded of this lesson, as the diners around us stare and mutter at the loud voices to which they are suddenly subjected.   And sometimes, we receive very poor service because of this. To Americans (and Brits!), the quiet peace is simply a peculiarity of a French restaurant, which some never notice because they are too busy listening to the sound of their own voices.  Now that our daughter is an adult, she is also keenly aware of this characteristic of a French restaurant. I don’t think that as a child she ever considered the quietness of the restaurants in France, but once she began traveling with classmates through France, she began to notice that something was indeed different!

Every afternoon, while her father was napping, my daughter would join me in our tiny kitchen and become my sous-chef, as together we would prepare the evening meal or a special dessert. One of the recipes she enjoyed making was a simple potato salad, created by an American friend who lived for a while in our village. It used one of our daughter’s favorite ingredients: olives! It is simply potatoes, green olives stuffed with anchovies, crème fraiche, and plain yogurt, but is very refreshing.

 

 

 

We stock up on anchovy-stuffed olives when we shop in Spain, as this there we can find cans of olives packed in quantity-packs, like we might find in a big box store in the US. We are able to purchase anchovy-stuffed olives in the US, as they come in jars from California, but not all stores stock this item. The more difficult thing to get are small containers of plain yogurt in the US! The only kind of plain yogurt I ever find comes in a large tub. And, no thank you, I do NOT want vanilla yogurt!

We have created several wonderful desserts with puff pastry (pate feuillete), including our favorite, which we named “Chocolate Decadent Delight.”

Over the years, we have enjoyed her Roasted Potato Medley and my Exhaustion Chicken, recipes created out of what was on hand in the cupboard.

We both enjoy playing with new ideas, finding stunning presentations in our favorite French restaurants, then trying to recreate them. Because she learned about wine tasting at an early age, she has been able to appreciate good wines and found that saying “no” to a bottle of plunk wine that college friends bought because of a pretty label, was pretty much an easy thing to do! She knows the different between a rose and a Tavel and the difference between a good champagne and a Prosecco, and she hangs onto her Mas Christine for the special events in her future life. I’m pleased that she is on her way to exploring recipes in her own kitchen, and I am always eager to see what she creates next!

Now that she is an adult and out on her own, our daughter still tries to get to Banyuls once a year or every two years. Her home in the north now belongs to another family and her home in the south is where her parents live, and she is making her own home to fit her current lifestyle, but Banyuls will always be her true home: full of memories, friends and extended family.