Free Deep France by Celia Brayfield Page A

the Riviera, Saliés fell from fashion and the hotel’s fortunes
continued to be chequered. An Alsatian family owned it for forty years, then sold it to a British hotel chain operating out of Jersey, who sold it to the commune in 1977, who restored it and made
it into a holiday village for members of the public sector workers’ union, then decided that what the town really needed was a casino.
    The chief beauty of the hotel is its main hall, a huge atrium, whose walls are painted old-rose pink with squirly art nouveau flowers. It’s dominated by a sweeping double staircase of
polished wood, which leads up to a series of Italianate galleries. The design is strangely similar to that of the bigger Basque churches.
    Off the galleries would be the bedrooms, if the present management had got around to restoring them. The atrium is so huge, twenty-seven metres high and fifty-four metres long, that it has cost
a bomb to restore and money ran out before the job was finished. It usually looks the picture of Edwardian elegance all the same. On that day the potted palms had been pushed aside and the art work
was hard to see because the place was packed for the weekly tea dance.
    A small band played a medley of Bearnais tunes and half the company was stepping out on the floor, girls in satin jeans, matrons in chiffon, a few older men perspiring insuits. Since some traditional Bearnais choreography is a close cousin of Texan line dancing, the body of the hall was filled by a crowd of smiling and self-absorbed individuals
enjoying the pleasure of their own nifty footwork.
    Glynn was enraptured, so there was nothing for it but to find a seat, order a round of the pink aperitif called
pacheran
and watch the spectacle. Even the discovery that
pacheran
tastes even more like cough-mixture than Campari could not spoil the magic of the hour. Just as well the daube in the oven, intended for our dinner, would only improve with longer
cooking.

Recipes

    Beef Daube
    Daubes
, hearty casseroles, are typical winter dishes all over the south of France and in previous centuries would have been cooked slowly for hours over the embers in
the fireplace. In the Béarn, they used a special pot-bellied earthenware casserole with a well-fitting lid, called a
toupin
.
    The Béarnais daube is one of the simplest, and traditionally has pork rind among the ingredients. The rind makes the juice exceptionally rich, and can either be used in one piece at the
bottom of the casserole or cut into pieces with the meat. Most people now would prefer their casseroled beef in reasonably hearty chunks, but in past times the daube was made with small slices of
meat about 5 mm (¼ in) thick.
    One old trick which is worth trying, however, is to make the daube the day before you need it, without cutting off the fat attached to the meat. Chill the daube overnight, and before reheating
it you will be able to render the dish fat-free easily by lifting off the dripping that has risen to the top and congealed.
    A Béarnais daube is slightly spicy, flavoured with a mixture called
quatre épices
. It’s a blend of common spices which is used all over Gascony, especially in pates
and casseroles. Coming from a region where nothing succeeds like excess, it naturally combines more than four spices, and most cooks make up their own mixture to suit their own taste, choosing from
cloves,black or white pepper, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg or mace. The spices are, of course, a Moorish legacy, imported by the invaders from North Africa who overran Aquitaine
and got as far north as Poitiers in the eighth century.
    Serves 8
    1.5kg (3½ lb) beef – shin, stewing beef, topside or silverside
    6 shallots or 3 medium onions
    500g (18oz) belly pork, salted or fresh, with the rind – if you are blessed with a real butcher, you can ask him to slice off the rind in one piece for you
    1 bay leaf
    several sprigs of thyme
    6 cloves of garlic
    1 tsp powdered quatre épices, or whole spices tied