Ingredients & Fine Foods

Hold the fruit lightly in your left hand. With the edge of your right thumb nail, cut a slit through the thin skin, close to the stem. Pull the skin up and away carefully, trying to pluck most of the white strands from the little nostril. Keep tearing at the thin peel, working your way down and around, until the clementine is completely naked. If it is still clutching a few scraps of pith out of modesty, remove those too. Pull the fruit gently apart in two halves, separate each segment and pop them into your mouth, one by one.

Thin-skinned pulpy bites bursting open on your tongue, the juices sweet and fresh and acidulated like candy. And afterwards, all afternoon, that lingering smell on the tip of your fingers. Orange-blossom essence with a hint of bitterness, a fragrance of crisp, bright winter days, for the sake of which you would happily volunteer to peel your friends’ clementines at the school cafeteria — and still do now with your boyfriend.

What distinguishes the Corsican clementine from other varieties of clementines? It is the only clementine produced in France — Spain and Morocco being our top two suppliers — and it can be found on markets and fruit stalls between November and January. Small, delicate and juicy, its segments are snugly enclosed in a thin smooth skin. Its peel displays a slight green tinge early in the season — nothing to do with jealousy or being picked too soon, this happens when fall nights aren’t cold enough to turn the chlorophyll into orange pigment.

Good-natured like all clementines (a sub-variety of mandarins), it has no seeds and is easy to peel. Perhaps even more characteristically, the Corsican clementine is hand-picked and sold with its thin, deep-green leaves still attached, lending it a definite air of elegance, and giving the wise consumer a unmistakable indication of the fruit’s freshness.

This year is a good year for quality, but not quantity — the annual crop will be about fifteen thousand tons instead of the average twenty — so if you stumble upon a crate of these bright jewels, snatch it while you can. Keep the fruit at room temperature and eat them within five days or so: on their own, or use them to make marmelades, salads, a sauce for game, candied peel, etc.

One bite in these unassuming madeleines and the hair in your nape will stand to attention, as you suddenly register the intensity of the chestnut honey aroma, and the smooth, moist, melting texture of the crumb dissolving in your mouth. You will taste it again to make sure it wasn’t just a fluke or a tastebud hallucination, and to your amazement it will get even better with each bite, until the madeleine is entirely consumed. You will lick the remaining sweetness from your lips and smile with satisfaction, happy to have found such a delicious treat, but wisely deciding that you will keep some for tomorrow and the day after that.

If you want to be punctilious (and who would blame you) these are not , striclty speaking, madeleines: in addition to chesnut honey from the Cévennes (a region in the South of France), flour, butter, sugar and eggs — that’s it — they are made with almond powder, an ingredient that is key to their wonderful texture but altogether absent from the classic madeleine recipe (honey is tolerated). These are, in fact, madeleine-shaped, honey-flavored financiers. But let me ask you this: do we care? Not really.

These madeleines come from a store I have mentioned in the past called Bellota-Bellota, which specializes in rare and luxurious food items*, imported from Spain for the largest part.

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[Ham from the Aldudes Valley]

In the galaxy of first-class hams, this one most definitely deserves its place. It is made by 60 producers in the beautiful valley of Les Aldudes in the Pays Basque, from a specific breed of pig called le porc basque.

This pig, which sports a pretty pink and black outfit, almost didn’t make it through the twentieth century: from 140,000 individuals in 1929, the headcount had dwindled down to a dramatic twenty by 1981, when the species was officially declared endangered by the French ministry of agriculture.

A few years later, a group of farmers from Les Aldudes, led by Pierre Oteiza, decided to save the basque pig from oblivion and return to traditional methods of breeding and salting. Their action gradually raised the number of pigs and sows, more farmers joined the cause, and in 1995 the porc basque was officially declared out of the woods.

This is just a manner of speaking because the basque pig is in fact destined to spend most of its life up in the mountain forests, where it feeds on grass, roots and the dried fruits that fall from the trees — chestnuts, acorns and beech nuts (faîne in French, which I’m sure you’ll be as happy to learn as I was) — in addition to a mix of non-GMO grains delivered to the herd daily. At 12 to 14 months, the pigs are taken back down to the valley for a somewhat less pleasant episode, which I won’t expand upon.

Their legs and shoulders are then salted with natural salt harvested around Bayonne (200 million years ago this area was beneath sea level), rubbed with pepper, exposed to the mountain winds to dry, and aged for 12 to 16 months.

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When I was a wee little girl I was sent to colonies de vacances (the French equivalent of summer camp, except it can be at any season) once or twice a year during school breaks. Both my parents worked and us kids had way more vacations than they did, so partir en colo was a good way for us to breathe fresh air and make new friends instead of staying in the city. To be truthful I didn’t like it that much — I was always a bit of an individualist and I hated being cattled around with a bunch of other kids. To make matters worse, spinach was often on the menu and there was a skin on the milk they served for breakfast <shudder>.

But one thing I remember very fondly was that when the colonie was somewhere in the mountains, we were usually given the opportunity to visit the local cheesemaker. While most of the other kids chose to go kayaking instead, or mountain-climbing or some such horrendous activity, I would always opt for the cheese, fascinated as I was by the huge vats of freshly squeezed milk, the gigantic curd combs, the endless rows of tommes de Savoie biding their time on wooden shelves in the cool cellar, and the overall smell and magic of the process.

I have never lost this sense of wonder, and artisanal cheesemakers remain a must-visit wherever I go. Being in the Pays Basque with Maxence, we simply could not miss visiting a farm that produced Ossau-Iraty, a traditional sheep‘s milk cheese with intensely aromatic and not too sharp flavors, and a smooth but slightly brittle texture. It is delightful on its own (as most pressed cheeses, it doesn’t really need bread at all), but the traditional companion is black cherry jam, preferably from the nearby village of Itxassou. Cheese historians (what a marvellous métier) tell us that Ossau-Iraty can be traced back to over 2,000 years ago, and it was awarded an AOC in 1980: this defines the specific and exclusive area in which it can be produced and given the appellation (between the Ossau valley and the Iraty forest), as well as a strict set of rules to follow during the production and aging of the cheese.

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