Monday, March 4, 2024

Dear Valued Customer,

*A wintry afternoon at Courtomer. The outer moat brims with rain water.*

Winter’s cold fingers have loosened their grip on the Normandy landscape. The buds of golden daffodils are swelling. The stiff leaves of tulips unfurl against the walls of the basse-cour. And the clematis planted beside the Farmhouse is ready to open delicately drooping white blooms.

But though the moat reflects the blue of the unclouded sky, a chill wind ruffles the bright surface. And by the end of the afternoon, la brume hivernale steals silently across the meadow toward the Chateau, softening the outlines of leafless trees. Grey mist, ushering in thecrepuscule, dims the golden light on stone walls.

The metéo predicts wet weather. And it’s a good thing, even though it means squelching across the grass in rubber boots and muffling one’s neck against icy drops.

«Fossés pleins en février, abondance dans les greniers,» says the dicton.

“Ditches full of water in February, barns full of grain in summer.”

The moats, ponds, and streams at Courtomer brim with water.

“Lamentablement,” noted Monsieur Yves, disapprovingly. Last autumn’s unusually abundant rain prevented us from sowing as much wheat as we wished. The ground was too wet.

“Que les cours se tiennent,” he concluded, looking up at the skies and expressing the farmer’s pious wish that higher prices will make up for scarce production.

When winter days turn cold and damp, summer’s harvest seems a distant promise.

But inside the farmhouse, the fire crackles merrily on the hearth. And inside the freezer, last summer’s bounty awaits.

“Aimez-vous ! c’est le mois où les fraises sont mûres,” wrote the great Victor Hugo, contemplating the moment when the harvest is at its fruitful peak.

“Fall in love! This is month of ripe strawberries.”

“On entend dans les prés le pas lourd du faucheur,” he reminds us.

The heavy tread of the reaper, cutting his way through the grain, presages the beginning of summer’s decline.

Love, like ripe strawberries, belongs to halcyon days. The grim reaper follows soon enough.

But Victor Hugo did not live long enough to know that the modern congélateur can preserve ripe berries from ruin for at least several years.

Immutable, frozen, lightly dusted with icy dew, last summer’s strawberries lay packaged up amid bags of chopped rhubarb and the last of green peas. Mementos of other seasons past were piled around them: fat cêpes gathered in the fall, a container of goose fat from our Christmas fowl. A package of ice, purchased during the height of the canicule of 2023, half torn open and then forgotten, was stuffed to the back.

I piled the strawberries into the copper bassine we use for making jam. Some were a deep violet red, some merely rosy, all were spangled with small golden seeds. The tiny leaves and stems of the hulls were still green. The fragrance of a summer’s day wafted into the warm kitchen air.

I took down my livre de cuisine. But a recipe is only an aide mémoire; you learn to cook in the kitchen.

My mother, like her mother before her, was a skilled faiseuse de confiture. It was one of the domestic arts that she embraced, part of the higher sphere of household génie. Perhaps she knew that she followed a long and exalted tradition.

“Apples and pears,” recounted Pliny the Elder, the naturalist writing in the 1st century A.D., “are sometimes boiled up with wine and water, and so make a preserve that is eaten with bread.”

The quince, he reported, was often boiled in honey to preserve it.
Palladius, whose 5th-century work describing agricultural life, “De Re Rustica,” was frequently consulted throughout medieval times, also took up the theme of fruit conserved in boiling honey or wine.

These ancestral forebears of la confiture belonged to the realm of medicine rather than gastronomy. Quince, apples and pears may have been preserved and eaten for their delicious taste in the ancient and medieval worlds, but Pliny, Palladius, and their followers were mainly concerned with the beneficial effects of these preparations on the digestion. The confiseur was a specialist in methods of preservation – using not only honey but vinegar, wine, wine syrup, and salt.

Despite the destruction of private libraries and farmers, cooks, and confiseurs during the barbarian raids of the 6th century, the works of Pliny and Palladius remained in use in monasteries and other centers of learning. The apothecary continued to practice his art.

Meanwhile, to the East, untroubled by land-hungry tribes from beyond the Rhine and the Danube, the Sassanid Persians and the Byzantine Greeks experimented with the jellifying properties of pectin in fruit, particularly lemons. Even further to the East, sugarcane had been cultivated for two thousand years in the Indus Valley, since about 1500 B.C.

The Islamic conquests of Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean brought the delectable potential of refined sugar to the attention of the Western world. Arab trading routes now united India, Persia, and Spain. Delicacies such as rose-petal jam, made with cane sugar and pectin-rich lemon juice, could be introduced to the Western palette.

Sugar, like all spices and drogues brought from the East, was a precious commodity. Under its Latin name, saccharum, it was dispensed from apothecary shops. Jellied preserves made with sugar were extolled as a way to distil and preserve the health-giving elements in fruit. These new confections were called électuaire in France, from the Latin word “eleucterium,» a medicine that is “to be licked.”

Delicious, exotic, rare and expensive… “licking medicine” rapidly began to appear on noble banquet tables as a stomach-calming “cooling” condiment for the large quantities of meat that were consumed.

By the 14th century, la confiture was such a highly-regarded luxury that Charles V sent “les meilleurs confitures” from Paris to his esteemed general. Du Guesclin, fighting for the king during the Hundred Years’ War, had beaten back the English after humiliating defeats in 1360. Charles also sent a selection of French jams to Gregory XI, the French pope safely installed in Avignon. To this day, the rue Tiquetonne in Paris honorsCharles’ master pâtissier-confiseur, Maître Roger de Quiquetonne.

The first livre de cuisine with recipes in French for making jams and jellies was published in 1555. Michel de Nostredame, its illustrious author, was already famous as an astrologer and enjoyed the favor of the queen of France, Catherine de Medici. But he had started out his professional life as an apothecary. Le Traité des fardements et confitures was published the same year as Les Prophéties. Nostradamus extolled the health-giving effects of preserved fruits, and gave precise explanations of the confiseur’s art. Perhaps his recipes, if less fascinating than the prophecies, have had a more enduring usefulness. He appears to have been the first writer to have recommended matching the weight of sugar to the weight of fruit, a principle of all modern jelly- and jam-making.

Jams and jellies remained luxury mets until the 1840s, when French sugar beet refineries made the ingredient cheap.

But making preserves was still a mark of distinction.

“Faire les confitures,” wrote the 19th-century novelist George Sand, “c’est aussi sérieux que d’écrire un livre.”

“Making jams is as serious a matter as writing a book.”

Madame Sand, who had taken a man’s name and Chopin as one of her lovers, and whom one of her admiring critics claimed would be found to have male organs if she were dissected, extolled the feminine art of making jam.

Time, not sugar, was the new luxury.

“The common strawberry,” a plate from the “Traité des arbres fruitiers” of Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, 1768. Duhamel was a distinguished 18th-century botanist who observed with interest the cross-breeding of wild strawberries from the Americas. These became the cultivated varieties known today throughout the world. BNF

One day long ago, my mother took me with her to pick wild strawberries. These, I knew, reliably flourished in the grass of a scrubby outpost called Cedar Hill, beyond the orchards of our family’s farm in New York State. A little forest of cedars grew tightly together, like a wild and alien island perched on top of the hill. Below the trees, the hillside was covered in rough, short grass and wildflowers.

In early spring, one observed the rounded white petals and golden stamens of strawberry blossoms. In early summer, we children found the small, delectable fruits, hanging on long stems like tiny red lanterns amid the grass. Each one was a tiny morsel of intense, perfumed sweetness, a marvel for the mouth and nose.

I couldn’t imagine how my mother knew about Cedar Hill, much less that strawberries grew there.

“Daddy and I came here for picnics,” said my mother.

The berries, warm and fragrant in the sun, had to be plucked carefully off the stems so as not crush them. We filled our baskets.

That evening, we had wild strawberries for dessert.

“Wouldn’t these make nice preserves!” remarked my father, with a smiling, sidelong look at my mother.

My mother raised her eyebrows. Cutting the hulls off each tiny fruit! Straining out the plethora of tiny little seeds! My father’s ideas of what would be nice belonged, as usual, to the 19th century!

Somehow, she found spare moments to make a few small pots of wild strawberry jam. The fragile, pointed fruits were suspended in syrup as red and translucent as a piece of stained glass in a medieval window.

I have not yet made wild strawberry jam, or even mentioned the possibility to my husband. But he, too, is fond of jam, which he associates, as I have told him, with the archaic archetype of the thrifty ménagère. He likes to see the ruby pots lining the shelves of the kitchen garde-manger.

I carried the strawberries into the kitchen and set to work. Ah! The fleeting taste and fragrance of strawberries in June. A memory of wild strawberries on a scrubby hillside. An ancient method of capturing a summer’s day on a winter afternoon. A moment of time lovingly suspended in a glass jar.

A la bassine! You will find my method for making confiture de fraise below, with a song to accompany your labors.

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Here is my method for Confiture de fraise à l’Elisabeth

I first rinsed the strawberries. While the fruit was still frozen, I pulled off the hulls with a short sharp knife.

I weighed the fruit.

Then, I weighed out half that amount of sugar. Strawberries do not need as much sugar as other fruits; they are almost 90% water. The trick is to reduce the water content by boiling.

I layered the sugar with the strawberries. I left the mixture to thaw and macerate overnight in a pottery bowl.

The next day, I poured the macerated strawberries and their juice into my copper bassine. I squeezed in a lemon. I brought the contents to a brisk boil.

Boiling reduces the water, bringing the ratio of fruit and sugar into the roughly 50/50 balance needed for conservation. Boiling also breaks up the pectin-containing molecules in the juice and starts the jellying process. Lemons, as the Persians knew, also help stiffen the confiture. They are high in pectin. Finally, copper ions released from the bassineinto the boiling liquid are also essential in the “prise de confiture.”

Once the mixture has boiled rapidly for a few minutes, I turn down the heat, remove the fruit, and set it aside. I bring the juice back up to a brisk boil. I skimmed off the white foam with a spoon.

Then, I return the fruit to the bassine, bringing the mixture back up to the boil. I do this two more times.

This is a method, like maceration, that I learned in France. Though tedious, it preserves the flavor of the strawberries despite the high heat needed to reduce the water content.

By now, the jellying process should be well advanced. I test a few drops of jam on an ice-cold plate. If it doesn’t run, the jam is bien prise and ready to pot up. Usually, I have to return the concoction to the boil for a few more minutes. La prise, the jellying point, always takes more time than I expect.

Once prise, the hot jam is poured into jars that have been sterilized by boiling in a large pot. Palladius recommended that the Roman confiseurseal his pots with plaster. Instead, I screw on the lids firmly, and turn the pots upside down. This creates a tight seal and keeps bacteria out. If I want a perfect seal, I purchase canning lids and use those.

Here's a song to accompany your labors:

La Confiture describes the great difficulty of avoiding drips, smudges and stains while eating jam, especially when it runs through the holes and over the sides of a slice of baguette, despite the clumps of butter one uses to stop the leaks. "Les Frères Jacques," who wrote the song in the 1970s, conclude:

Qu'elle soit aux fraises à la rhubarbe
On l'ingurgite goulûment
La confiture on la chaparde
On l'aime clandestinement

Whether it should be
strawberries with rhubarb jam
One swallows it greedily, jam!
Jam, one steals it,
Jam, one loves it,
Clandestinely!

At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we hope to open our "petite maison," the gatekeeper's cottage.

Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site. She can also act as your concierge.

English and French spoken.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Putting summer in a jar 🍓 "Time, not sugar, was. now a luxury."