Chartreuse

"They say Christianity is in decay; but no religion that invented green Chartreuse can ever die”

Saki

Grenoble lies in a hollow encircled by three mountain ranges: the Belledonne, famous for its ski slopes; the Vercors, a stronghold for the Résistance during World War II - and the Chartreuse, home to the Carthusian monks and their famous green liqueur. Now, I'm not a great skier and I wasn't around during World War II but I do know a bit about the liqueur: it is a beautiful colour; it smells and tastes like a summer’s evening in an Alpine meadow and ...it gives you a Day-Glo hangover that you’re not expecting because it is really strong.

The Order of the Grande Chartreuse was founded in 1084 by a German writer and academic, Bruno, who taught at the University of Rheims. Weary of the endless piles of marking, pointless administration and mind-numbingly boring staff meetings – or perhaps simply obeying a call from God – Bruno decided to become a monk. Together with six friends, he scoured France for a suitable isolated spot and happened on the Chartreuse Desert, an inhospitable snowbound place near Grenoble in the French Alps. The group built themselves seven simple wooden cells, a chapel and a dining hall and enjoyed a life of prayerful contemplation and light snacks, thus establishing the first Carthusian (Charterhouse) monastery. Today there are twenty-four of these communities around the world and their way of life has not changed for over nine hundred years.

In 1605, the monks at a Carthusian monastery outside Paris were given an ancient manuscript of unknown origin, entitled An Elixir of Long Life. At that time, few people knew how to use herbs and plants for medicinal purposes and the monks were only able to understand and use parts of the recipe. By 1737, the manuscript had found its way to the Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble where the monastery’s apothecary managed to unravel the complex formula and create the Herbal Elixir de la Grande Chartreuse, from the maceration and distillation in alcohol of one hundred and thirty plants, flowers and various other bits of vegetation.

This new medicine was distributed locally, by mule, to Grenoble and the surrounding villages. It became surprisingly popular and the monks soon caught on to the old ‘for medicinal purposes’ routine and adapted the recipe to make a milder drink – that is to say, ninety-six rather than one hundred and twenty-four proof - which they called Chartreuse verte, Elixir de Santé.

During the French Revolution, members of all religious orders were driven out of the country. The Carthusian monks fled in 1793 and as a precaution, made a copy of their precious manuscript. One monk was allowed to stay in the monastery and he was given this copy to look after while the original was given to another monk. Unfortunately, the latter was arrested and thrown into prison in Bordeaux but was able to pass the manuscript to a mysterious hero who somehow smuggled it back to the Chartreuse, where he gave it to a monk who was in hiding near the monastery.

This monk didn’t have a clue what to do with the manuscript - and who could blame him? He had his own problems to deal with (imminent death by guillotine, hypothermia, starvation and so forth), and he promptly sold it to a local chemist, Monsieur Liotard - who didn’t have a clue either, so why he bought it in the first place is anybody’s guess.

In 1810, Napoleon ordered all secret recipes of medicines to be sent to the Ministry of the Interior, and a relieved Monsieur Liotard dutifully sent in his white elephant of a manuscript. Despite being experts in irrelevant waffle, nobody in the Ministry could decipher the thing either, but rather than admit that, they sent it back marked REFUSED. When Monsieur Liotard died, his heirs returned the manuscript to the monastery with, one imagines, a puzzled shrug.

The monks were thrown out of France once more in 1903 under a law that prohibited all religious orders. They were allowed back in 1932 when they began producing their liqueur again. In 1935, their distillery in Fourvoirie was destroyed by a landslide and a new one was built in Voiron, which is where Chartreuse is produced today. The blending of the plants, however, is done in the monastery by two monks – the only two people in the world to be in possession of the formula. Each monk knows half the recipe and because they don’t talk to anybody – not even to each other - it remains a secret. They are linked to the distillery by computer and are therefore able to oversee production while keeping their vows of solitude and silence and doing a bit of on-line shopping at the same time. Green and yellow Chartreuse – the yellow is sweeter and not as strong as the green – is matured in oaken casks in the longest liqueur cellar in the world.

The original elixir is still used for medicinal purposes today but frankly, you’d have to be pretty ill not to notice the taste. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to cure – although farmers here do swear by it for the treatment of flatulence in cows (note to tourists: do not be alarmed at the sight of staggering cows. They are not suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy – it’s Happy Hour on the Prairie). Green Chartreuse, however, is one of my favourite drinks; it is so sweet and fragrant that I hardly notice how potent it is - but the fact that Saint Bruno is traditionally depicted nursing a skull (even if it isn’t his own) should have alerted me. Hmmm. If you ask me, these monks have a lot to answer for…

Let them eat more cake

Today is Epiphany and la fête des Rois - Feast day of the Three Kings, Balthazar, Melchior and Gaspard. The fact that the Bible does not mention that they were kings (they were magi or wise men), or that there were three of them (three gifts are mentioned) or indeed that they had names, does not deter the French from celebrating with more food… in this case a galette or a gâteau des Rois. The galette is made from flaky pastry and frangipane while the gâteau – more traditional in the south of France - is a brioche topped with sugar and candied fruit.


This treat is usually reserved for children (mince alors!), who invite their friends around to share it. According to custom, one child crouches under the table while the cake is being cut and calls out the name of the person to whom he wants the slice to be given. Because, you see, this is no ordinary cake. Somebody who obviously didn't like children came up with the idea of concealing a hard, dry bean (la fève) and a tiny porcelain figurine inside. The children who find these in their slices are crowned King and Queen for the day with the golden paper crown provided, which is meagre compensation if they've just broken their teeth on the china ornament or, worse, swallowed it...



You have been warned...

Je ne sais plus...

There is so much to see through my French Windows but today all I can see is him:


How does one fall out of love? Can anybody tell me? I have been trying my best for the past two years but I just can’t get the hang of it.

I’ve tried Regression (remember when he did this to you…?) but that only works if you have a really selective memory.

I’ve tried Visualisation (a couple of strategically-placed sharp objects and a heavy duty pinch clamp for example) but all I can see are his blue eyes crinkling up at the corners when he smiled.

I’ve tried Denial (you never really loved him) but then how come my heart is just a gob of raw mincemeat now?

I’ve tried Demonizing him – but he never was an angel and I fell in love with him anyway.

I’m doing my best to Detach but there’s this bit of me that is firmly stuck and I pull and I pull but it just won’t come away.


So – tell me…how does one fall out of love? It can’t be that difficult…after all, he managed to do it in no time at all…

Je ne sais quoi

After twenty years of living in France, you'd think some of the Frenchwoman's chic and timeless beauty would have rubbed off on me. Not a bit of it. Even before I open my mouth, people exclaim: "Oh là là, you must be English!" I think it is something to do with my straight, mousy hair, which I have worn in the same thin bob since I was seven, or perhaps it is the way a simple silk scarf I have attempted to knot casually around my neck can make me look like a whiplash injury sufferer - or it may be the cellulite on my flabby knees. Whatever the reason, I don't seem to possess that 'je ne sais quoi' quite simply because I really don't know what it is.

French women have always been coquette. Even Joan of Arc treated her rough hands by rubbing them with honey - you'd think, what with hearing voices and leading an army and all that, she'd have other things to worry about than hand cream. Marie-Antoinette shampooed her blonde hair with a mixture of eggs, white wine vinegar and rum and the 18th century French courtesan, Madame Tallien, bathed in strawberry water to keep her skin soft.

Much as I would love to, I have never dared visit a salon de beauté. With names like Aphrodite, Venus and Hot Sauna Unisex Massage Parlour, I'm a little worried about what's on offer. The treatment they claim to provide involves acid, laser weapons and dastardly machines designed to pummel the cellulite out of you and it all sounds much too frightening to contemplate. Not surprisingly, many of the treatments were invented by the French: liposuction, endermology (where some sadistic person squeezes your spare tyre in a mangle-like apparatus) and mesotherapy (vitamin and drug injections destined to 'melt' your fat away) amongst others.

Even more drastic remedies are available, however. I live in the centre of town and when I first arrived, I was alarmed by the number of women I saw staggering around with bruised faces and black eyes. Had I unwittingly moved to a hotbed of vice and violence? Were the streets safe to walk at night? The answer was around the corner: no less than four cosmetic surgery clinics were squeezed between a supermarket and an estate agent's. Facelifts are also a French invention and there are some two thousand surgeons practising cosmetic surgery in France - although only about five hundred of these are actually qualified to do so. You can even get it on the Sécu if your nose/breasts/tummy are causing you enough psychological trauma. However, despite the ready availability of cosmetic surgery, France does not top the European League table in this area - the UK does and France comes a close second.

Does this mean we need plastic surgery more than the French? Of course not (I don't include myself in this statement: I actually need a complete face and body transplant but they haven't invented that yet…). I do think we spend less time on looking after our bodies. For example, four times as many French women use anti-ageing creams than women in the UK and the French are still the world's top users of beauty products and fragrances. A French woman will think nothing of spending thirty pounds on a tube of 'slimming' gel, which will give her thinner thighs and a flatter stomach within a fortnight. At least, that is the claim. There are clinical tests that purport to prove it and the leaflet that comes in the box has a lot of technical-looking diagrams showing you how it works. This gel makes your skin go either chilli-pepper hot or freezing cold and you use up a fair amount of calories just rubbing the stuff in. Oddly enough, the part of the leaflet that is written in English just says 'Skin smoothing cream' and doesn't even mention the fact that you can lose seven inches off your bottom by osmosis or whatever the phenomenon is called. Maybe it doesn't work on English skin. It definitely didn't work on mine…




If all else fails, or you're just too poor or cowardly to try, then tisanes or infusions are a safe bet. The French love these and no wonder: they can cure anything from insomnia to haemorrhoids. You just pour some boiling water on a few dead leaves, flowers and stalks etc. and let it stew for ten minutes - then you drink it. If you don't vomit it all up immediately afterwards, you should soon be feeling much better. You can buy these concoctions in chemists, health food shops or supermarkets and there is something for everybody. Try thistle and evening primrose infusion for beautiful skin; vine leaves and ginkgo biloba for slender legs; nettle and alfalfa for luxurious hair…and for weight loss, I can personally recommend senna pod and rhubarb. It certainly had me up and running beautifully…

Resolved

My New Year’s resolutions are a bit late because I haven’t been able to keep the first one…and I did want to have ten but I’m just not that resolute.

I read somewhere that the tradition of New Year's Resolutions was inherited from the ancient Babylonians, who believed that what a person did on the first day of the New Year would affect the entire year. Apparently, the most popular resolution at that time was to return borrowed farm equipment. And here’s me thinking they were a bunch of decadent whores…

With a suitable holier-than-thou expression:





I bring you my Resolutions:

• I will not procrastinate
• I will stop dieting (and before you keel over laughing, I've been dieting all my life so how come I'm now fatter than I've ever been, eh?)
• I will learn to do housework
• I will prepare my lessons more than fifteen minutes in advance (oops, better get cracking)
• I will defrost the freezer
• I will not involve kitchen knives, boiling oil (even if it's olive), nutcrackers and my absent husband in the same fantasy
• I will return that Massey Ferguson combine harvester I've had in the garage for six months

There we go. Sorted.

Cheese junkies

Well…it’s official. France is a nation of junk food guzzlers and has been for hundreds of years – at least according to Ofcom in the UK (Office of Communications). They want to ban the television advertising of junk food at times when children might be watching. They mean well, bless ‘em…but by using the Food Standards Association’s tables listing fat and salt content, they come up with cheese as one of the chief culprits. What am I going to do now?

General de Gaulle famously said that nobody could govern a country that had two-hundred and fifty-eight different cheeses. Actually, there are about a thousand if you count the locally-made ones and it is one of my life’s ambitions to taste all of them. Here are just a few to whet your appetite – although they are merely the thin edge of the wedge...

Camembert is undoubtedly the most famous French cheese. The story goes that, in the eighteenth century, a dairymaid called Marie Harel helped hide a priest who was running from the terrors of the Revolution and to thank her, the priest gave her his secret recipe for cheese. Marie began to make the round creamy cheese we know today and when her grandson offered some to Napoleon III who was visiting the area, it really took off. In 1890, a certain Ridel invented a wooden box to facilitate transport and inadvertently created a new hobby: tyrosemiophilia. This may sound like a weird sexual fetish but it is simply the collecting of cheese labels and there is a national club to prove it. I don’t personally know any tyrosemiophiles but I am sure they are very nice people.



Somewhere on the desolate craggy rock-strewn plateaus known as les causses, in southern France, roquefort cheese was born. Legend has it that a young shepherd, bored and probably desperate, spotted a shepherdess in the distance. Leaving his lunch of bread and curd cheese in a cave and recklessly abandoning his flock, he chased after her. She must have played hard to get because he didn’t come back until two months later and feeling a bit peckish (and who wouldn’t be?) he went to find his lunch. The bread had gone mouldy and so had the cheese but he ate it anyway, because he was that sort of bloke. Surprisingly, it was delicious: the king of cheeses had made its debut. Charlemagne was a great fan of roquefort as was Rabelais and Voltaire. Casanova claimed it “restored love and brought to maturity a budding passion”, if you see what he means…

We have our own blue cheese here in the Vercors, known as Bleu de Vercors-Sassenage, made from cow’s milk. There is a festival dedicated to it every summer. Unfortunately, my children refuse to eat it ever since we stopped off at a local farm to buy a piece and were served by a disgruntled farmer who’d obviously been mending his tractor when we interrupted him. They wouldn’t touch it, even after I’d scraped off the axle grease.

The majority of goats’ milk cheese – of which there are over a hundred varieties - is found south of the Loire where the rugged landscape and the relative lack of vegetation makes it difficult to keep cows. Goats, of course, will climb anywhere and eat anything. One of the most famous goats’ cheeses is the Crottin de Chavignol. The word ‘crottin’ means horse dung but this has more to do with the shape and colour than the taste – although it does pong a bit. From Provence comes the Banon – a small, round cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves and tied with raffia – and from the region Rhône-Alpes, the Picodon (meaning ‘small’). The cheeses come in various shapes with picturesque names such as palet (puck), pyramide, bûche (log) and bonde (plug) and they are all delicious.

Of course, if you like cheese, the Alps is the place to be. What can be better on a winter’s evening than a fondue savoyarde: melted cheese, wine, cognac and spices bubbling in a pot into which you dip pieces of bread? Or raclette – melted cheese poured on to potatoes and cold meats – or tartiflette, a dish of potatoes, smoked bacon, onions, cream and cheese? Of course, these meals are designed for hardy outdoor types who need that sort of sustenance after a day’s log-chopping or goat herding and not pasty lily-livered bookworms like me. No wonder I’ve put on weight.

I also like British cheese but the French think I’m joking when I admit this. For them, there is only one British cheese: a bright orange, tasteless piece of rubber called Chester. Most people don’t realise that Chester is a French cheese made in the Tarn and that no self-respecting British sandwich would give it the time of day. They prefer to see it as proof of the insipidity of our food. Perhaps this is a cunning strategy designed to safeguard their reputation but even if it is, it’s no big deal or - as the French say - “Il n’y a pas de quoi faire un fromage…”

So - how was it for you?

Er, yes, well...maybe they're not so different after all...Les Inconnus show us how it's done...Bonne Année!