That sounds better than it actually is. The wind is starting to whip up and there are only three tomato and four basil plants in the garden, bordered by drooping sunflowers and lots of dahlias and zinnias, all unfortunately orange. I dramatically limited the size of my garden because seeds are pricey here and mostly because I don’t have any water faucets for outdoor purposes. At least, that’s what I thought in the spring when I dug up all the weeds and ivy next to the terrace to make a small garden spot edged in large stone slabs. I managed to carry those heavy (heavy!) slabs from the front yard, down the steps to the terrace by constantly visualizing how lovely they would look there. This mentality exasperates some folks and is absolutely incomprehensible to others. Happily none of those people belong to my inner circle and everyone found my insanity quite normal. Hmm…
Back to why the garden is so small, albeit prolific. I didn’t realize that in France, the outdoor water faucets are often located in the garage, and only mid-way through the summer did my upstairs neighbor fill me in on that important detail. I’ve spent quite a bit of time living in France, but I’d never bothered with gardens here till now. The water faucet-in-the-garage is apparently a given for the French; my neighbors and partner alike found it odd that I didn’t know. I found it odd that they had all seen me going back and forth between my kitchen and garden with large plastic bottles of tap water, for months, yet no one had mentioned the faucet in the garage before now. Feeling unjustly criticized, I countered with the obvious question: “So, where are the water faucets in the United States?” Blank looks all around, I tried to suppress a smug smile. I didn’t try all that hard.
Like any intelligent soul, I walked all around the premises to locate the water faucets when I first moved into my little apartment. Seeing none, I assumed that the garden plants had to be watered the very old fashioned way: with watering cans filled at the river or the kitchen sink. I never considered catching rainfall in barrels. I’m patient about many things and ecologically minded, too, but catching rainfall in barrels would be way too much trouble for a few tomatoes. For a brief moment, though, I considered buying a really long length of hose to siphon water from the river into my garden. I know how to do that from all those years on a farm way back in another life. But I abandoned the idea as folly because the distance to cover was uphill, too long, crossed someone else’s garden, and the hose cost too much anyway. I resigned myself to a garden small enough to water by hand, with water from my kitchen. Besides, I reasoned that Jean-Paul and I had a large garden spot at his house – and I thought it would be relaxing at day’s end to make a "few" trips back and forth from kitchen to garden. Maybe village life is deteriorating my brain cells.
The short of it is that I put in a few tomatoes, some herbs and flowers at my place, and we put lots of tomatoes, basil, and other big, sprawling stuff at Jean-Paul’s, where there is no garage, and where the faucets are indeed outside – so why all those surprised looks when I expected faucets at my place to be outside? (Va comprendre ces Français, même ceux que l’on aime. Go figure, those French, even those we love.) And I’ve been filling containers with water at the kitchen sink to keep my plants happy and growing. What seemed an easy chore has become an annoyance and I find that, even though I am melancholic to see summer’s end, I’m not dismayed to see the leaves on my tomato plants starting to die off. Just to be clear, it’s not from lack of water.
These past months have brought me other new experiences as well. The most out of the ordinary was working in a small honey extraction facility. I hesitate to call it a “factory” because that would conjure up something much larger and more organized than the actual place. I remember my first thoughts upon stepping inside and seeing the machinery and equipment, some of which could definitely be termed hazardous: “Ah, no phone lines, no cell phone reception, no emergency gear, hornets and bees flying about menacingly, you’ll be here alone much of the time – fais gaffe! Watch out!"
The bees, boxes and combs belong to a friend of ours whose back is shot from years as a beekeeper. He couldn’t do the extracting himself this year, so he asked us if we would help out. Even with our very limited experience, we can empathize: we’re both in dire need of a visit to the local kiné. Thankfully the extracting is in hiatus at the moment.
There are numerous apiculteurs and apicultrices in the south of France and all kinds of honey produced. Chris’ honey comes mostly from chestnut trees, although all his jar labels say otherwise. Here’s his very practical explanation: he sells most of his honey in bulk, in large vats, and only a small quantity currently goes into jars for sale to individuals. When he first started out years ago, that wasn’t the case. Back then, he sold his honey in different sized jars, mainly to individuals, so ordered a large number of labels for the kind of honey he was then producing: a blend coming from different flowers. Even though his production and marketing have changed, he hasn’t used up all the labels he bought years ago, so sticks those on his limited jar production, noting the correct year. He reasons that anyone who knows honey will know that it’s chestnut honey and will be intelligent enough to understand that the label means nothing; it’s just a bearer of his name and the year. On top of that, most of the folks who buy jars of honey from him are from the area anyway, so know him as well as his honey. He told us that occasionally someone driving by will come into the extracting facility out of curiosity and will purchase a jar or two. Out of these customers, a handful come back to complain that the honey in the jar is not what’s indicated on the label. Chris just shrugs. He figures they just want to act like experts. Who in their right mind, he asks, would drive all the way back up into the mountains to make such a dumb complaint?
He also talked to us about the honey market, saying that although it’s fairly good these days, to actually make a living beekeeping, you have to have many, many hives (ruches) and take dramatic and often costly measures against diseases. Entire hives can be wiped out nearly instantly. Eco-friendly measures are in general expensive and time-consuming. He and his wife practice ecologically sound beekeeping, just barely eking out a living from their 500 hives. Other local beekeepers tell us that that’s a respectable number and that you can’t live on fewer unless you have a second job or also sell your honey on the village market circuits, and for that you have to get up at 5 every morning, load your goods into your van, travel to that day’s market (there’s a market to be found somewhere every day in the region), then spend long hours pitching your product. Chris refuses that life-style, even though it might increase his income. He prefers having some free time for other pursuits. He composes incredible jazz and blues numbers on his guitar, just for pleasure – being timid about such things, he’s never played in public. His wife shares his perspective about the market circuit. She suffers from lumbago and no longer works in the miellerie, although she still goes out into the fields with Chris when she’s able. She supplements their income by working as the village librarian for our closet-sized stash of books.
We learned that the bee scene requires a certain steady nerve. Decked out from head to toe to fingertips in white beekeeping garb, Chris and Dom, along with a Dutch friend of theirs, go out into the fields to collect the hives when it’s extracting time. They load the hives onto their truck and cart them off to the miellerie, which Chris financed and built with help from the local government and the European Union. Other apiculteurs use the miellerie as well, but it’s not a co-op. It’s Chris’ project and his equipment for the most part, too. The others book time to use the space and equipment, then come in with their hausses (bee boxes filled with honey-laden frames, and a few still very buzzing bees) to process.
One Sunday morning while I was working in the miellerie, expecting to be entirely alone, Nadou the apicultrice showed up with her hausses. Ready to retire in just a few years, she’s owned and run her own small honey business most of her life, with a few sideline gigs teaching French to foreigners. She sells her honey and pollen in small, hand-labeled jars, mostly to individual buyers at the local markets and in a couple of village shops. Her hands, gnarled by arthritis, betrayed her hard beekeeper’s life. Her attire did not. She was dressed in a lovely skirt and snazzy sandals, whereas I was dressed in an old pair of roller-blading sh
orts, a tank top, and a pair of plastic tongs. It was hot and humid and the work messy, hence my choice of clothing. Nadou donned an apron and went to work. I doubt that an apron would have covered me sufficiently for the tasks with which Chris had charged me. There was honey dripping everywhere, off of everything, including every one of my fingers. There’s no way to extract the honey without getting some of it on you – a lot of it in the beginning, when you’re just learning how. Nadou was mostly tapping her honey into jars that she then labeled. I like to think that it's easier to be elegant pasting a label than scraping honeycombs with a big hand rake to knock off the seals the bees have made (they’re very efficient little creatures). That’s what I was doing when Nadou arrived, prepping the honey boards for the centrifuge machine that would spin the honey out of the combs.If you’re working on a small scale, you can do all the scraping by hand, then put the honey frames into a small spinner. If you’ve got a lot of honey to extract, though, like we did, a large spinner and a cutting machine are more practical. The cutting/scraping machine we used could hold 50 honey frames; the centrifuge machine could hold 30 at a time.
Here’s the process, with my apologies to anyone reading who knows the correct vocabulary in English. I’m writing with the handicap of having experienced honey extraction in French only. You lift what can be a heavy-with-honey frame from a bee box, to place it into the scraping machine. Carefully. There are blades at the bottom that can take your fingers off. And the metal rods that hold the frames in place can easily crush your hands. I quickly figured out that it was easier to stick my fingers directly into the honey combs in order to correctly position the frame between the (moving) rods instead of trying to do it by holding the outside edges of the frames. The machine moved the frame down between the blades that scraped most of the seals, then was pushed along into a holding bin. Occasionally the machine got out of whack, sending a frame down a bit sideways. If you were quick enough, you could send the frame back up by setting the reverse button, enabling you to re-position the frame. Sometimes, though, the frame broke, its pieces caught between the rods. That was not fun to fix.
In fact, the first time it happened to me, I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to fix it. I thought I’d broken the machine. I was the only one in the miellerie, no one was around, I had no cell phone (which wouldn’t have worked anyway since you couldn’t get any reception in the place), and was therefore very, very wary of putting my hands into the machine to dislodge the broken pieces of wood. I knew that Chris was skeptical about having a woman working there, too; he’s a great guy but a tad bit sexist. That factored into my determination to fix things on my own, even though I was nervous about just how to do it.
I turned everything off, unplugged everything, too, then studied the machine. It seemed to me that it was out of balance on the right side, causing the frame to drop more on the left side rather than uniformly. Figuring that out would help me repair the machine to make it run more smoothly IF I could get the stuck and now broken frame out. Nothing was plugged in, so it was unreasonable for me to be afraid of the machine suddenly lurching into motion. However, that’s exactly what had me frozen. I could almost feel my hands being squished between the rods. “Ouch” does not express what I was imagining. This is not the kind of work you’re trained for if you have a PhD in literature…
BUT I took a deep breath, told myself that there really wasn’t any danger – which was true, since the machine was both off and unplugged – and with the help of a metal spatula and a hammer was able to pull out all the broken pieces of wood. I then re-set things, plugged the machine back in, ran alternately the reverse and forward motions until the machine was unjammed and running smoothly again. That was a good moment. It was a better moment when I positioned a new frame of honey and it dropped down evenly between the scraping blades, allowing me to continue the job. I remember asking myself aloud what I was doing there in that miellerie anyway. Good question.
Next step in the process: once you’ve run enough scraped frames into the holding bin, you lift them one by one to check that the seals have all been adequately scraped. If some remain, you scrape them by hand with a pronged metal tool – very sharp, by the way, very slippery, too, since it’s covered with honey. If a frame is substantially laden with pollen, you set it aside, to be placed in the spinner in a particular fashion. Once you have the frames all prepped, you load them into the spinner, ten per arm of the spinner. Then comes the hard part that requires some muscle power. You have to lift up the full and very heavy arm in order to position it in the spinner. It's a backache in the making. Once all three arms are full and a few other details taken care of, you can (finally) turn on the spinner, first at a slow speed to make sure all’s well, then kicking up the speed little by little to full blast. The honey flows and flows, running through several filters and finally into a huge vat. It's lovely to see, especially when you've done it all yourself without too much mishap.
The post-centrifuge process involves removing the spun frames from the spinner, placing them back in the bee boxes, then stacking the boxes. Not so interesting. Once you’ve emptied all the frames and are down to the metal catch-tray that protects the floor from being covered with dripping honey, you head outdoors to deposit the tray on the ground. Hoards of bees descend on it to eat up the remaining honey. Everything is recycled, nothing wasted.
I’ve never been a honey lover, but found myself licking my fingers and liking the gooey stuff. I’ve not touched a drop since my last day of extracting, even though we have several jars of it in the kitchen cupboard. It’s not the same. My guess is I won’t eat anymore honey till next season, and then only what drips its way directly from the combs onto my fingers.
For those more constant honey lovers, I’ve included below two honey bread recipes, one in French and one in English. Bon appétit.
PAIN D’EPICES AU MIEL
Ingrédients :
* 125 g de beurre
* 250 g de miel
* 75 g de sucre roux
* 2 oeufs
* 225 g de farine de blé complet
* 2 pincée de sel
* 1 cuil. à café de levure chimique
* 1 cuil. à café bombée de cinq-épices (ou d’épices spécial pain d’épices)
Préparation :
1. Faites chauffer le miel, le sucre et le beurre, en remuant, jusqu’à ce que le sucre ait fondu.
2. Dans ce mélange légèrement refroidi, ajoutez les oeufs battus en omelette.
3. Incorporez, enfin, la farine tamisée avec la levure, le sel et les épices.
4. Versez la pâte dans moule carré de 18 cm de côté et faites cuire, à 170° C, pendant 1 h 30 environ : votre pain d’épices est cuit quand ses bords se détachent du moule.
5. Démoulez et laissez refroidir.
HONEY SPICE BREAD
Ingredients for 2 loaves (10 slices each)
* 2-3 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
* 315 ml (1 1/4 cups) whole milk
* 250 ml (1 cup) packed brown sugar
* 375 ml (1 1/2 cups) buckwheat honey
* 1 liter (4 cups) unbleached flour
* 2 tsp. baking powder
* 1 tsp. fennel seed
* 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
* 1/2 tsp. salt
* 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
* 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
* A pinch of ground black pepper
* 2 tbsp. candied ginger, finely chopped
* 1 large egg + 1 yolk, at room temperature
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 125° C (250° F). Butter two large (9 1/4 x 5 1/4 X 2 1/2) loaf pans, line the bottom with parchment paper and butter the parchment. Everything must be well-buttered or it will stick. Set aside.
2. Heat the milk, sugar and honey in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside until slightly cooled.
3. In the bowl of a heavy duty mixer fitted with the paddle attachment combine flour, baking soda, fennel seed, salt, cinnamon, cloves, ground ginger and pepper. In two batches, add the tepid honey mixture and candied ginger. Scrape down the sides as needed, and blend on low speed until just combined. Add the egg and egg yolk and beat on medium speed until well blended.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pans, dividing the batter evenly and not filling the pans more than half full. Transfer to the heated oven and bake until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean, 2 to 2 1/2 hours. (Watch the last 30 to 45 minutes, and cover with aluminum foil if the bread starts to become too dark).
5. Remove the loaves to a rack to cool slightly. Turn the loaves out of the pans and remove the parchment paper. Slice each loaf into 10 slices. The bread keeps well very tightly wrapped in plastic wrap for up to 1 week.
Posts
