Le Franco Phoney

St Jean de Sixt is quite a small village. It has a fruit & veg shop, a convenience store (called “8 to 8″, but actually, it’s more like 9.30 to 7 with at least a two hour closure for lunch, closed on public holidays and possibly Sundays and sometimes just if it’s quiet, and perhaps it should be renamed an inconvenience store), a tourist office, TWO ski shops and two bakeries. It’s the village nested between the ski resorts of La Clusaz and Le Grand Bornand, although perhaps some would argue that it’s a ski resort itself, as it boasts a few drag lifts and has its own ski lift company.

Regardless, St Jean de Sixt is not a big town. Yesterday, I decided to try out the free bus service (free to resident card holders or people with a season lift pass for Les Aravis—La Clusaz and Le Grand Bornand). The bus was on time in both directions and the connection to La Balme once I was in La Clusaz was conveniently timely. After a day on the slopes, the bus dropped me off once more in St Jean de Sixt. Within metres of the bus stop, a kebab van had appeared. It was open, although its number plate and signs suggested the van was normally stationed down by the southern coast of France. Still, I was impressed that I’m living in a place big enough to have a kebab shop, even if it’s just for the winter. As I walked home, I noticed that the van driver had plugged in an electrical cable. It trailed about ten metres from the van, around a corner, along a car park and finally, wedged under a closed door of the public toilets. I wondered if anyone had opened the door, pulled out the cord and watched the man in the van saying: “Bah, qu’est-ce que…putain” and shaking his fist, then chuckling as the plug-puller plugged the cable back in. I honestly can’t imagine anything more sinister.

Today, I was in a car with a friend who also lives in St Jean. I told him about the kebab van and he was very excited. After our afternoon on the slopes, he decided he deserved a kebab for his dinner. We drove down to where the van had been but it was gone. GONE.  I think I ruined my friend’s day, with the excitement, then disappointment of the fallacy of a kebab shop much closer than ever before to his home. He wants it to come back. Will it be back? Or did too many people pull the cable from the power socket in the public toilets for it to make him smile anymore? If you’re out there, kebab man, please come back.

In France, the 6th of January, Epiphany, is celebrated with a sweet treat. La galette des Rois (wafer of the kings) is a puff pastry pie-like thing with a layer of almond paste, known as frangipane, sandwiched between the pastry. It’s a special cake because it contains a porcelain figurine (now usually something plastic), which entitles the finder to be king of the household for the day.

Some history of the cake can be found here, but I’d prefer to talk about the here and now. Pictured is my very own wafer of the kings, which I bought at the local bakery yesterday. As you can see, it’s more like a pie than a wafer, and you get more than just a baked good when you buy this beast. Apart from the hidden figurine, the cake also comes with a cardboard crown for whoever finds the figurine to wear for the day. It also comes in this cool paper bag which allows the pie to be lightly heated in a microwave without losing its crispness.

My bag contained logos from the Savoyarde region. You can see there’s the Savoie coat of arms in the centre, a skier on the left, a local flower, a chalet (hidden by the galette), a bottle of booze with the same coat of arms, and just out of the the shot is a kid with a ladder because the Savoyardes used to be very poor and they would send their kids away to work as chimney sweeps in big cities. I don’t know why the yellow thing at the top has elephants sticking out of it. This must be a Savoyarde memento I’ve yet to familiarise myself with.

The great thing about this pie is that you don’t have to carry it flat. It’s so dense, it’s like a giant biscuit, and I guess that’s why the bag works so well. I carried this one to a friend’s place last night and we cut it up and ate all but two pieces. The hidden figurine is still hidden (hopefully). Maybe it’s an elephant sticking out of a yellow thing. Can anyone tell me what that’s about? None of the French people here seem to know.

First of all, I’m very sorry about this image, but it wasn’t fair that my eyes should suffer it alone, and my blog has been a bit barren of images of late, so I’m sharing it. Once again, I have French junk mail to thank for finding me a topic for my blog.

What we have here is a whole rabbit, skinned, and apparently ready for cooking and eating, with pleasant garnish. But I can’t help but see a human backside on this bunny. My overactive imagination has been aided by the hidden head and lack of paws, which would have made this meat more identifiable as a dead rabbit instead of something resembling a human. Is it just me or is this actually quite gross?

My blog statatistics tell me what some visitors have searched for before they arrived at my site, and they’re mostly on track with the content of this blog. The number one search every day is ‘how to pronounce French words’. I’ve discussed this, but there’s certainly no lessons coming from me, considering I’m still struggling to make the rolling ‘r’ sound!  So, for those visitors, try going to the BBC learn French website or the Indo-European Languages free online tutorials.

Now that I’ve lost half my audience, let me carry on with some other search queries. Someone found my blog by searching for “haloumi cheese in france”. Haloumi cheese is stocked in Paris, apparently, although I don’t know how widely available it is. It is not available at any of the shops in the vicinity of Annecy, Thônes, Moutiers or Bonneville. Yes, I have searched.

Another one: “how is ‘goat’ spelt in French language”. It’s ‘chevre’ and that can also mean goats’ cheese. So, if you order a salade chevre chaud, which translates directly to ‘hot goat salad’, rest assured that it’s actually warmed goats’ cheese salad and not a hot goat.

Another one: “music in Annecy”. The live music scene in Annecy is often limited to Savoyard thigh-slapping bands with big horns and matching outfits, but Annecy does offer some more modern live music too. Head to La Brise Glace (French for ‘ice-breaker’) on almost any night of the week and you’ll get some sort of music act. It varies from death metal to open mic nights and despite its diminutive interior, has often drawn popular international and local acts.

Now, some odder ones. Someone arrived at Le Franco Phoney after searching the net for “guys pee pee”. Mate, off you go to find what you want somewhere else! Other searches include:

• gay snowman
• angry tractor
• monster real life

Is this one person searching on several rather bizarre subjects? I’m afraid I can’t help this person/people or anyone who searches for these topics in the future. You’ve arrived at the wrong site. Is there a right site?

I was talking last night to an American friend who is married to a French girl, and he remarked one something that had never occurred to me. He said: “Have you noticed how in English, we insult our friends by animal, whereas foods are used French?” I hadn’t noticed. So, I’ve been thinking about it.

In English, you can indeed call your mate a pig, dog, cow, turkey, chicken, snake, donkey, ass and more. The only food-related insult I can think of right now is saying somebody is a cabbage or a couch potato. I’m sure there are more, along with a few nice ones, like calling someone pumpkin or honey, but banter-wise, the animals definitely outweigh the foods.

When my American friend was saying this, our French friend was giggling away in agreement, so I can only presume he’s correct. He mentioned patate (potato), flan, quiche, and cake (in English). Yes, you can call your mate a cake or a flan if she or he is being a bit silly. You can also yell ‘patate!’ at a fellow driver if they don’t follow the road rules. Imagine someone yelling out ‘potato’ as an insult! I’d want some comedy music to be playing in the background at the time, and cartoon cars too. I’m not good at French insults yet, so this is where you come in. What are some other French insults/friendly banter relating to animals or foods and when do you use them?

I took this magazine clipping the other day, which shows a ‘Gâteau au yaourt simplissme’, or in English, a simple yoghurt cake. If you’ve ever been a chalet host or stayed in a British-run chalet, you have probably experienced the yoghurt cake. It comes in all shapes and flavours: add anything you like to the mix, or top it with anything you like: the recipe is merely the framework of a bland cake if nothing else is added. So, why this recipe? Apart from being flexible on flavours (allowing a chalet host to make the same easy mix each day and then chuck in a banana or some cocoa powder or really anything else to add some flavour), no additional measuring utensils are required, and this is a cake that is said to withstand baking at altitude, which has the reputation —right or wrong — for being difficult when it comes to anything rising in the oven. The yoghurt cake recipe is said to avoid this problem by the use of the yoghurt itself. Perhaps this is true at extremely high altitudes, but I’ve never had a problem cooking a standard cake at 1,100 metres above sea level.

I found this recipe in a supermarket living-style freebie magazine. I was surprised to see it because I always presumed the recipe was purely the domain of the British-run chalet, like some sort of secret that only other chalet hosts knew about. Perhaps, it was the French who came up with the idea in the first place, and the Brits have merely cashed in on such an effective, flexible, no-fail recipe. Or, perhaps it’s the other way around: the author of this recipe section may have learnt from the Brits and adapted the recipe for French bakers — in this case, kids. The title translates to ‘Three recipes for the littles  and the bigs’.

Either way, the recipe is a winner, and I’ve translated this one below in case you’re interested.

Ingredients:

1 pot of natural yoghurt (keep the pot to measure other ingredients)
3 pots of plain flour
2 pots of sugar
1 pot of oil (vegetable works well)
3 eggs
2 teaspoons of baking powder (or, if in France, a sachet of ‘levure chimique’)
2 teaspons of vanilla sugar/a few drops of vanilla essence (or, if in France, a sachet of vanilla sugar)

Method:

1. Place all the ingredients in a big bowl and mix together well
2. Preheat the oven to 210° Celcius
3. Grease a cake tin, then pour the cake mix into it and bake for thirty minutes. When the yoghurt cake is cook, leave it to cool.

The word refuge in English is often associated with a place to take shelter by those who need it. Although the word looks the same and is pronounced in much the same way in French, the meaning here in the French Alps relates mostly to that of a typical mountain hut that provides food and shelter for travellers. Some are literally just a hut with bunk beds and some form of running water , working on an honesty box system to cover the cost of wood for heating and maintenance. Others are fully-operational restaurants that provide big meals, a sip from the typically Savoyard bottle of home-made booze with a dead snake inside, and heated accommodation with an indoor toilet. The indoor toilet is particularly handy in the cold winter months.

The refuge I went to last week was somewhere in between these two extremes. Refuge de Bombardellaz provides hearty food without the gimmick of a snake in a bottle, although I didn’t see what the accommodation was like as the refuge only took us an hour to get to from the car park at Les Confins. The refuge is only open in summer, which explains the outdoor tables, but I can’t help thinking how at least some of the wide path to the refuge would be great to slide down on a snowboard.

Click on the image for a bigger version

Having never been to this refuge before, my friends and I were equipped with a map, which was handy, because although the way is marked at most track intersections, the signs are missing from some, and we needed the map to check. The first signpost at the car park said the refuge was 55 minutes away.  We had a lunch booking in half an hour, but we figured the sign’s time estimate was for the elderly, families with young children, or injured people. No worries: half an hour is plenty of time! After half an hour, we passed a sign that said the refuge was 35 minutes away. What? At this point, I realised that we were, in fact, lower than the lowest common denominator of walker: we were the unfit. On we marched. After a further 30 minutes, the next sign said it was only ten minutes away, and to be perfectly frank, it would have been only ten minutes away had the road been flat. It was not flat. It was all uphill to the refuge. Ten minutes of walking up a hill turned into five minutes of walking, five minutes of stopping to catch my breath after pretending to be interested in a nearby flower, three minutes of walking, another few minutes of stumbling, and then a final push once the refuge was in sight. Now quite late for lunch, I felt cheated by the signs — and perhaps a little guilty about my level of fitness. The staff welcomed us warmly despite our tardiness.

As the wide-angle photo here shows, the refuge provides views of the peaks of La Clusaz, the neighbouring valley of Le Grand Bornand, and the mountains all around.

Lunch eaten and heart rested, we walked along a more narrow path that led down towards Le Grand Bornand until a crossroad gave us the choice to climb back uphill to Les Confins. Despite both walks ending in these treacherous uphill challenges, they were otherwise easy and enjoyable. Chuck in the reward of a hearty lunch with beautiful views and you’ve got a pretty good day out.

Here, you see a big chicken on a roundabout. The big chicken has several significations for me personally. Firstly, let me point out that the name brings back fond memories. We nicknamed a guy The Big Chicken years ago when I lived in Les Allues. He was a very overweight man who worked on the ski lift there, and when he saw some friends of mine devouring a whole chicken for breakfast on their way up the ski lift, his eyes were bulging with envy, and so, he became known as The Big Chicken.

But even before I knew of The Big Chicken in Les Allues, I had passed this particular big chicken many times. The metallic sculpture lives on a roundabout above the toll road that takes you towards the Alps. The first time I saw it, I was in a bus, so demanding a detour for a closer look was out of the question. The next time, I was driving as part of a convoy, and I had no way of stopping without losing my friends. Every time since, I’ve been in a hurry to drive back to England or back to the Alps and I’ve never taken the time to stop. That is, of course, until last week, when the road trip was much shorter and therefore more relaxed on timing. Now, I finally have my snap of the big chicken and I cannot describe just how happy this makes me.

You may be wondering why there’s a big chicken on a roundabout. Like many French roundabouts I’ve written about, this one signifies the produce from the region — Bresse. The area breeds good chickens for eating, and with their AOC status, they fetch a higher price than other chickens. The locals are very proud of their chickens, as this roundabout might suggest. The roundabout is visible from a great distance as the metallic sculpture is much higher than most roundabout decorations. Check the size of the car against the giant chicken. I wonder how many parents have had to stop after their kids have cried: “I want to stop at the big chicken.” Or is it just me? Before setting off, the obligatory photo of me standing in front of said big chicken with my best chicken stance (one leg raised, hands on hips, neck unnaturally forward) was taken. Now, if only I could get a photo of the Les Allues Big Chicken doing the same…

Something else that happened last weekend between the DONGing of church bells was a visit to some cheese caves. My friends who live there are in the cheese business (I love being able to say that), and one of them took us to the cheese caves where he himself matures the cheese. Cheese shops are one thing, but I have never seen so much cheese in one place in my life. The cheeses ranged from 10kg blocks of AOC Emmental to something Italian and going grey (apparently a good thing) in the corner, right through to cheese donuts which I don’t know the name of, and these lovely tiny cheese cones (photo taken by my friend Katie after I forgot to bring my camera). The cones and donuts were actually in a drying room, which smelt less pungent than the other caves. That’s not to say it didn’t smell: it’s just that the more humid caves were almost overpowering — and one of them was newly emptied, but still stunk.

Apparently, finding a good affiner de fromage is a hard task, so if you’re in the know when it comes to maturing cheese and you feel like a change of scenery to a little village in the middle of France, apply now! Anyone who can stand the enormous stink when standing in one of those caves all day has my respect. It reminds me of the time I went to the Savoyarde restaurant down the road that has the cows downstairs, with a glass roof for diners to look at them through. Despite the glass, the smell of the cows was very strong, and I could smell manure for days after . Thankfully, the smell of the cheese was not quite that bad. Still, I think I’ll leave it to the experts and those as passionate about cheese as my two friends are.

I’ve been in the north of France this week and I’ve noticed something about French food. Yes, it’s acclaimed as carefully crafted cuisine, created by chefs who take great pride in their work, but there is at least one exception and I believe I’ve found it. Melted cheese is, in fact, at the heart of French cuisine! Please hear me out before you protest.

I live in Haute Savoie, and prior to that, Savoie. Fondue Savoyarde is on most, if not all, local menus in both regions. Although the Swiss and the Savoyardes still dispute who has the best fondue and where it originated, I think everyone would agree that Savoie and Haute Savoie are the leading departments for cheese in France.

But wait: what about Nord-Pas-de-Calais? It’s nowhere near any mountains and it’s by the sea. You’d think restaurateurs would scoff at cheese in favour of delicious and abundant seafood. Seafood is indeed always on the menu, but so is cheese — melted. It’s a bowl of warm cheese with some bread swimming in it. You can choose whether or not a slice of ham and an egg is added. This dish is in competition with fondue for several reasons. First of all, it’s melted cheese with bread and meat, except everything has already been dunked into the cheese for you. Secondly, although the French have made it theirs (as the Swiss would also argue about fondue), it was originally a British dish. Which dish? Welsh rarebit!

If you’re not familiar with Welsh rarebit, it’s basically cheese on toast with a few things added to the cheese, like Worcestershire sauce and beer. The French dish, Welsh, is served with Worcestershire sauce, and from what I can tell, the cheese they use (something called ‘Chester’, which tastes a lot like Cheddar to me), beer is also added to the cheese before it’s ladeled onto a lonely slice of baguette sitting at the bottom of a big bowl.

Known by my friends as the Queen of Fondue, I was somewhat surprised when the Welsh beat me. The one pictured was my lunch, and I felt sick for most of the afternoon despite not finishing it off. This is by far the most stodgy meal I’ve eaten. It beats fry-ups and it beats the Austrian kaiserschmarren (huge steamed dumpling covered in custard). After my meal of melted cheese, dinner was a salad, and even that was a struggle. And there I was thinking that French cuisine was renouned for its refined chefs’ attention to detail. No problem for me though: stodge is great!