This week we are between two ‘Réveillons’: Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. The night before each event is an important festivity across continental Europe, so my colleagues asked me on the 25th if I had ‘had a nice Christmas’ and I surprised them a little by telling them it would begin as soon as I returned from work, at 9pm. In the village we have been wishing each other ‘bonnes fêtes’ for several days before the big night; a useful greeting covering New Year as well. Another saying at this time of year is ‘May it end well and start well’ which is not only the prayer to providence for good fortune, that it may seem to be, but also refers to the feasting and socialising deeply understood by all.
The first celebration is chiefly a family occasion, a time to visit and receive relatives and involves the preparation of a huge amount of food for the late evening feast on the 24th. The notion of cost goes out of the window. What matters is having, just once a year the very best of the crucial elements on the table, one at a time or all at once. ‘Foie gras’ comes in all qualities and presentations, either from the duck or the goose. Inexpensive pots of ‘paté’ containing a small percentage of ‘pieces of real liver’ are passed over. These can be had at any time of the year. What every working man seeks here, and it may well be the blue-overalled customer in front of you, is the real thing – either the most expensive pot, sealed with a yellow fat, or a vacuum pack of a whole goose or duck liver which may be as big as a bag of sugar. It will be eaten with fig or onion jams, which have become ‘traditional’ accompaniments, and nutty bread at the start of the great meal. People have said that we should enjoy this while it lasts, as European directives will soon outlaw the practice of force-feeding the birds with grain in order to enlarge the liver. Whatever your feeling on this, it is big business.
Buying the ‘foie gras’ and the wines is regarded as the man’s affair. As I stood in Super U in the champagne section, a gentleman reached passed me and blithely took down five boxed bottles of Tattinger from the top shelf at a total of 180 euros, a sum which I had hoped would buy most of the food for me and my guests - but which in the end I exceeded by quite a bit. I clearly have a way to go before I am truly French in this matter. For a month now, the shop’s magazine has been filled with photos of smoked, Scottish salmon (sliced or stuffed and decorated with aspic jelly and flowers cut out from angelica), hams, joints of veal, legs of lamb, confectionery and wines. In the supermarket on Christmas Eve, fifteen metres of chiller cabinet were given over to cheeses, the same again for cold meats and charcuterie, then oven-ready fowl, chickens, turkeys stuffed with chestnuts, guinea fowl, geese and huge ducks that could never have got off the ground in this life, wild boar with cranberries, exotic ostrich steaks and roe deer with sachets of wine sauce.
For the post-modern housewife preparing her buffet suppers for one or other ‘réveillon’, the trend is towards ready-made food – pre-packed morsels of russian salad, salmon mousse, duck liver, rice paper parcels and other bite-size delicacies on tiny china spoons at 1 euro apiece or small glasses filled with vegetable terrine, layered and colour-coordinated to match your tableware at 2.95 each. As you can see, traditional fare has evolved along with everything else. Not even the working couple is excused; the local butcher will prepare all the dishes for you and deliver them, takeout style, to your home. Choose from puff pastry coquilles St Jacques, snails spiked on kebab sticks, crab gratin, lobster mousse, little ramekins of frogs’ legs in sauce, prepared oysters or filled mussels, slices of duck breast with redcurrants, whole turkeys which arrive hot so you only have to unwrap and serve at the right moment, with pre-prepared roast vegetables and dainty bunches of asparagus and green beans. He will even select the best wines to help all this down, which as we all know must include Cotes de Nuits, Pinot noir, St Emilion, Sauternes, Champagne Gosset grand reserve and more besides.
Certain ritual dishes have to be included. I recently learned to appreciate oysters and manage to open them too, setting them on a plate, trying not to lose the liquid which reforms. We eat them, swallow them in fact, with lemon juice, and bread spread with salted butter from Noirmoutiers. The best oysters supposedly are from the Ile d’Oléron on the west coast and come packed in multiples of a dozen, graded according to size and shell shape. Quails used to be the preserve of hunters who would eat them whole, with a teacloth over their heads to maintain the privacy of crunching their little bodies. Nowadays they are packed six at a time and sold as a Christmas treat with a stuffing of ‘foie gras’. You may eat yours however you like.
Now is the time to send around a few seasonal greetings cards. There is less emphasis on the Christmas wish, more on the New Year message so I still have time to thank a few neighbours for their friendly gestures during this year. Nowhere have I found packs of cards, still less the opportunity to contribute a fraction of one coin to my favourite charity by buying theirs, although there was a recent Telethon in aid of the local ‘Action against Hunger’ group in support of the region’s ‘nécessiteux’. Recently in Moutiers, shop customers were offered a plastic bag, a rare thing now in France where you normally provide your own, and were invited to choose tinned or packaged food to hand in, after passing through the checkout, to two young persons wearing badges. The only Christmas songs I heard were on Radio Meribel and those were in English, apart from a loud supermarket tannoy version of Jingle Bells in French, ‘Vive le vent, vive le vent, vive le vent d’hiver.’ Where, in Britain the population sits down after a large lunch to listen to the Queen’s round up of the year on Christmas day, here in Republican France, it will be the Address to the Nation by the President at New Year. Being between two feast days means that many trades are less available than normal because the ‘réveillon’ falls on a Thursday each week so with the next day being a holiday you don’t go looking for a garage, or a DIY store or a builders’ merchants anytime after lunch on that day. Some have taken the whole week off. This will seem quite familiar and anyway it leaves more time to look after the guests, all of which reminds me that we will be six at supper on the ‘réveillon’ on Thursday…Now, where did I put the telephone number for that butcher…?
* * *
copyright Julia Austen 2015