Stalking the French turkey...Thanksgiving in the Normandy countryside...

| Friday, November 26, 2020

Dear Friend, 

“La Thanksgiving!” As a young girl, Madame Chantal was sent to Vermont, where she spent six months learning English. She learned a lot. But English, not so much. 
 
Nevertheless, Madame Chantal enjoys the local reputation of being au courant with American customs. “Squanto, non?” she threw out tentatively, cocking her head and looking at me with bright dark eyes. “Le cranneberghe? »
 
“La canneberge,” I told her. “And turkey.” Madame Chantal paused, knife in hand, a few scarlet clots dripping onto her white tablier. She sucked in her breath. Of course. Every year at Thanksgiving, Americans overthrow the rules of gastronomy. They serve turkey out of season, when tout le monde knows that, just as lamb is eaten at Easter, la dinde is a Christmas feast.
 
Still, Thanksgiving is about families uniting together over a meal. That is a cause for celebration fully endorsed by French culture and by Madame Chantal herself, mother of four children and grandmother to 12. And even more so in these days of “le confinement,” when we’ll be celebrating en tout petit comité, in a very tiny group. In a country where an older generation still remembers the dark days of the Occupation, le virus is not about to overturn the sanctity of family bonds.
 
“Bon. I can give you the turkey.” Madame Chantal put down her knife, deftly trussed up the limp legs of a chicken she was preparing for another of her clients, wiped her hands on her tablier, and took up her order book.
 
We stood in her atelier, a shadowy grange with a dirt floor and stone walls presided over by a long wooden work table. A few bare light bulbs, draped with cobwebs, illuminated the scene. They hang from thick wooden beams that are pegged together and bowed with age. From these, Madame Chantal suspends various tools of her trade.  There was a pile of funnels for feeding geese on a chair. That morning, she had been preparing poultry orders; feathers were scattered on the dirt floor. The chambre froide, a large commercial refrigerator, hums in the back; the one object other than Madame Chantal’s crisp white coat that hints of modern times. 
 
Madame Chantal’s husband is a farmer with a small herd of beef cattle and a few fields of crops and hay. She has her own little business raising poultry. Chickens and guinea fowl are sold all year round, and ducks and geese are raised to make foie gras for les Fêtes, starting with la Toussaint on the first of this month and lasting until the beginning of Lent in late winter. Turkey is raised for Christmas and New Year’s Eve feasts.

The Noir de Normandie is Madame Chantal's preferred breed. The turkey was first bred near Courtomer, at Queen Margueurite's chateau in Alençon in the 1530s.

Turkeys, sighed Madame Chantal, preparing me to understand that this bird is a culinary luxury, are a nuisance and a worry. Chickens are canny and have an instinct for self-preservation. They can lurch themselves into flight if necessary. But turkeys are stupid, frail, and easy prey. Foxes and weasels snatch them away if they wander outside their pen. Does a turkey fly? Pff! Better a horse should fly! (Comme en Dumbo! added Madame Chantal in case I hadn't caught the allusion.)

The French expression, “le dindon dans la farce,” “the turkey in the farce,” is not about the ingredients of a stuffing. It describes the hapless fool who is the butt of jokes and duperies. A “dindonnerie” is an idiotic comment. And to eat like a turkey, “être gourmand comme un dindon,” is to gobble down your food like an uncivilized brute.

One year, every single one of her turkeys died, Madame Chantal continued, shaking her head at the whimsies of this difficult fowl. Done in by une bacterie, un microbe in the soil.

“Ce catastrophe,” she added, “even after I gave each one une poivre dans le bec!”

Forcing each turkey to swallow a peppercorn for its health was a lot of work. And a waste of time, as it turned out. But this year, she added more cheerfully, the flock is holding its own. We went outside to choose a likely prospect. The turkeys like to sit on the wall of the poulailler, basking in the sun. Although there are many breeds of turkey, Madame Chantal prefers the Noir de Normandie, with staid black feathers. Hardy and resistant to the damp Normandy climate, the Noir is the oldest of the French turkey breeds, entering Normandy via the Spanish Conquest of Mexico in about 1534.

France’s first turkeys were raised less than an hour from Courtomer. The flock belonged to Marguerite d’Angoulême, sister of the famous king François 1er, who bred them at her château in Alençon. The turkey was then an exotic delicacy, reserved for royal tables.

“Un des plus beaux cadeaux du nouveau monde au vieux continent.” said Madame Chantal, with a friendly wink. "One of the New World’s nicest gifts to the Old.” And, of course, Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate not just family ties, but the ties that bind our two continents.

Yesterday, we celebrated Thanksgiving at the Chateau. The table in the grande salle à manger was decorated with holly and magnolia from the park, yellow autumn leaves, and a bouquet of last marigolds from the garden. Our turkey, stuffed with Monsieur Roblin’s chair à saucisse, sausage meat, onions and local chestnuts, was a lanky fellow, but young, tender and crispy-skinned. Sauce made from the tangy red currants of summer’s harvest substituted admirably for la canneberge. Home-grown potatoes and Normandy butter and cream made a delicious purée. Instead of gravy, I serve a sauce made from the juices and giblets of the bird stirred with crème fraiche. We started with the French classic, soupe au potiron, pumpkin soup, and ended with the Normandy specialty, tarte tatin, from local apples.

A November view from the dining room at Chateau de Courtomer.

Ah! la bonne chère…a feast fit for a king and for Thanksgiving! Fire quietly crackled on the hearth. The dining room windows offered a view of the late afternoon sky streaked with brilliant crimson and soft pink, then turning a velvety dark blue as the last rays of the setting sun stole into twilight.

And with that memory still resonating in our mind's eye and tickling our palate, we wish you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving 2020 weekend from Chateau de Courtomer – and we give thanks to you, our friends.


A la semaine prochaine...with news from the Chateau,

A note for our Continental and British friends: Like no other celebration, Thanksgiving in America draws families together from disparate parts. It also celebrates the unity, albeit fleeting, of two peoples. As every American schoolchild knows, the first Thanksgiving on November 11, 1621 was a joint feast where Indians, represented by Squanto and 89 other native Americans, and those Pilgrims who had survived the first winter in their New World celebrated the harvest together.

Our first president, George Washington, proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving in November 1789, for the “opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for [our] safety and happiness." It was the end of the Revolution and a time to fashion a new country.

Thanksgiving became a formal national holiday toward the end of the American Civil War. The proclamation of 1863 evoked the “lamentable civil strife,” with its “widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers” and called for all Americans to “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it…to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

Worthy goals, even if met with intermittent success. Thanksgiving still celebrates the abundance of nature and the brotherhood of man.