| Friday, February 5, 2021

Dear Friend,

 
“Oho, crepes!” exclaimed young Jules, his blue eyes sparkling, as we came into the kitchen. It was February 2 on a dark afternoon in the French countryside, and the older children were back from school. Rain dripped from bare black branches; the pallid sun was sinking behind the trees that line the stream in the back pasture.
 
Anne stood at the stove. A pitcher of milk, a sack of flour, a canister of sugar, a big rectangle of yellow butter, and a bowl of eggs were on the counter. Anne had come to us as our cook during our first days in France. Engaged to a rising star in the nearby town’s Renault dealership, she had taken a pause in her career as a hairdresser. She agreed to take on our family meals. Her smiling spirit warmed up the kitchen; her gentleness softened our first taste of France.
 
Young Henry stood on a stool next to her, an apron tied around his neck, holding a long wooden spoon. He stared thoughtfully into the flat round pan. Perhaps he was calculating its diameter and already sensing the mysterious power of pi. Little Edward peered into the bowl from a step ladder on Anne’s other side. From his tender age a fin gourmand, he was preparing to savor the frilly edges of the crepes, crisp with butter, and the taste of eggs and sugar in their dense golden centers. 
 
Jules put down his book bag with a thud and a grin. It was nice to see him so cheery; our first winter in France had been full of challenges for the children. The tutor we had brought with us to continue their English-language schooling had fallen ill; we had sent the children to the local school. Immersion, we found, certainly works as a method of language instruction. But it must be like being thrown off a pier into cold water in order to learn to swim. Like French itself, everything was different and strange for our children…playground games, cartoon characters, movie references, sneaker brands, bad language, jokes, and school food.
 
“We had to eat pâté!” announced Maria with disgust. “And we had boeuf bourgignon again!”
 
“But the mushrooms weren’t bad,” reflected Jules, looking on the bright side. 
 
The school food was actually quite good; copious, wholesome, and cooked up by the kitchen staff, from mostly fresh ingredients. And if it did not receive quite as much attention as the intricacies of direct object-verb accords in grammaire and multiplication methods in mathématique, food played a leading role in the school curriculum. Les semaines de goût, the “weeks of taste,” were dedicated to le fromage, le pain, le chocolat, les champignons and other principal ingredients of France’s culinary culture.

“What is the specialty of February?” the maitresse had questioned. “Chocolat!” came the response.

“But chocolate is special every single day in France,” complained Maria, whose observant eye took note of the changing displays chez le chocolatier in our local town.

“Ah, Maria,” said Anne with her kind smile, “But today, c’est le crepe!”

February 2, last Tuesday, is the feast of la Chandeleur. And as every French child knows, the specialty of the day is the buttery, golden-brown crepe, fried, flipped and served from a special flat pan with low curved edges. In town, as in the village of Courtomer, all the boulangeries and patisseries are making crepes on special hobs, drizzling them with Nutella, chocolate, jam or simply sugar and orange juice. You can eat them hot as you stroll along the sidewalk or take them home to heat up in the oven.

The Chandeleur coincides with two Christian celebrations – the Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple, 40 days after his birth as prescribed by Jewish ritual, and of the Purification of the Virgin Mary following childbirth, an ancient ritual which continues to this day as the “churching” of new mothers.

But the Chandeleur, like so many Christian feasts, has its origins in practices that reach back into the prehistoric, pre-Christian world. Rather than seeking to bring Man into the presence of the Sacred, as a newborn baby is brought into the Temple or new mothers are brought into the Church, these old rituals are about Man's relation to Nature.

In Gaul, or Celtic France, the round crepe of today was once a round cake, meant to imitate the shape of the sun and to suggest the lengthening of days. It leapt in the crepe pan as the sun leaps higher while winter progresses to spring – or so a poetic mind might imagine! The feast of Imbolc was traditionally celebrated on a day that falls around February 1, between the winter and spring solstices.

The Romans, who transformed Gaul into some of the richest provinces of their Empire, also celebrated mid-winter and the coming of fruitful spring with lighted torches and little sun-shaped cakes. In the 5th century, Pope Gelasius bowed to necessity and transformed the perennially popular Roman festival into Candlemas, from festa candelarum, the feast of candles, in honor of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To pilgrims who flocked to Rome on this day, carrying their lighted candles, he gave out a crispa, a flat, ruffled cake, and the origin of today’s crepe.

In the Normandy countryside, la Chandeleur was long celebrated as the Caund’leus, the fête des cierges bénis, the feast of blessed candles. Traditionally, each household carried a candle to church, where it was lit and blessed during the mass.

"Notre Dame de Chandeleur
Soyez clémente au laboureur
Qui met en vous son espérance.
Et si le soleil luit trop tôt
Abritez sous votre manteau
Les vignes, les blés, la semence," sang the congregation of farmers, alluding to the treacherous passage of winter into spring, when early sun can be as disastrous as frost and rain.

"Our Lady of Candlemas
Be merciful to the plowman
Who puts his trust in you.
And if the sun shines too soon
Shelter with your cloak
The vines, the wheat, the young seeds..."

Paraded homeward through village and fields, the candle was carefully stowed in the family armoire, the immense wardrobe still cherished by many a Norman family, and which in days of yore held its worldly goods. Secure in the depths of the armoire, the blessed candle warded off illness and storms, and its light, as needed, protected against evil spirits.

“It’s the Crepes of Wrath,” said Jules, smacking his lips as he ladled confiture d’abricot – home-made apricot jam – on the crepe Anne had just given him. His eyes gleamed. For an instant, he was transported into the good old days in America. There, he liked to sit up on his grandmother’s bed in the morning, where the two of them, chuckling and eyes twinkling, would watch that good old American television series, The Simpsons. Bart Simpson’s encounter with French culture, of course, is the episode called The Crepes of Wrath – although it is about the high crime of mixing French wine with antifreeze rather than wrathful crepes.

“Another crepe?” asked Anne. Everyone was quite satisfied. She put away the ingredients and starting wiping out the steel pan. She was already thinking ahead, to a feast in keeping with her own preoccupations.

“A bientôt la Saint Valentin, she said, with a misty-eyed smile.

We will celebrate Valentine’s Day this year with special thoughts for all those near, dear and as yet unknown who are about to wed…

A très bientôt, au Château de Courtomer,

P.S. We are taking reservations for this season and for 2022 and 2023. Please don't hesitate to call or write, as Heather and Béatrice will be glad to answer your questions about rentals of the Chateau, the Farmhouse and the Orangerie. We look forward to helping you with your holiday at the Chateau...or to working with those who plan ahead to a special wedding on our grounds or in the Chateau!