Hot Sun, Cool Shadow Angela Murrills Raincoast ISBN 155192739X paper, 256 pages $30 (CDN)

A Culinary Journey in Gascony Kate Hill Ten Speed Press ISBN 1580085679 paper, 200 pages $18 (US)

Why is it that the hardest days of winter are those which make up the 4-week block that straddles January and February? These are the coldest and the darkest days, the bleakest and the soggiest, the days most devoid of hope. The 21st of December would seem to be the worst of days: it is the shortest day of the year, and as the first official day of winter it is a cruel reminder that we still have an entire season — a quarter of a year — to wait for spring.

But I’ve always found December 21st to be a day of promise: it is the turning point (I visualize the planet rounding second base, sprinting pell-mell for the sun), and I can squeeze three or four weeks of optimism from its meager ration of daylight. Which gets me to about this point — the dog days of winter — which is where I start to flag. What better time to escape into the land of travel literature; and where better to escape to but the south of France?

The t&p archives provide ample evidence of my fantasies about the south of France. Others (more practical than me) will say that I romanticize the region; but I keep adding to my shelf of armchair travelogues nevertheless. There’s W. S. Merwin’s The Mays of Ventadorn and the Deggans’ All of Our Summers Are French (now out of print). If I’m pining for Provence, then Ford Madox Ford, M. F. K. Fisher, James Pope-Hennessey, or Lawrence Durrell will usually do the trick for me. And when desperate I’ll even (re)consider Peter Mayle.

Mayle’s books are the best-known examples from that sub-genre of travel literature which describe the travails of those who live out their (and our own) dreams of owning a Mediterranean pied a terre: the frustrations of searching for that perfect not-too-run-down house tucked into some romantic southern corner; the endlessly amusing encounters with foreign bureaucracies; the agonies (financial, emotional, physical) of renovation/restoration. But always at the end of these accounts there is the well-deserved reward: the author wiping sweat from his/her brow, sitting at a rough-hewn table sipping on a glass of the local wine while the savoury smells of dinner waft from the kitchen.

There have been a couple of new additions to my South of France book shelf: a pair of books that will help you vicariously escape the rain and your dreary winter rations (for what’s the point of avoiding winter if you’re still eating porridge and peanut butter toast?) These are first-hand accounts from two foodies who have each established their own south-of-France beachhead, proving to the rest of us that it can be done.

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Twenty years ago Kate Hill, a Californian, went to Europe to buy a barge. She found a 100-year-old Dutch Tjalk, named her the Julia Hoyt, and ever since then she has been playing hooky on Europe’s inland waterways. In the early stages Kate spent her winters in California, returning to Gascony to spend summers cruising the Canal Latéral à la Garonne on board the Julia Hoyt (which she describes as her “one table restaurant and two-room hotel”). As the book’s jacket copy puts it, “guests on her popular, intimate culinary tours drift down the canal […] stopping frequently to sample Gascony’s distinctive cuisine.”

A Culinary Journey in Gascony was first published ten years ago, and it is good to find it once more back in print. The book brings some well-deserved attention to one of the less-known corners of southern France: the home of D’Artagnan the Musketeer. Readers of Kate’s book will find her singing the praises of Armagnac (the Gascon brandy), foie gras, goose fat, and pruneaux d’Agen. There are recipes for Tourte aux Champignons Sauvages (Wild Mushroom Pie), Rôti de Porc aux Pruneaux et Échalotes (Roast Pork Stuffed with Prunes and Shallots) and Tarte aux Poire et Chocolat (Pear and Chocolate Tart). This is good, hearty peasant food, real food from the French provinces, not the rarified and refined culinary offerings found in the frou-frou bistros of French metropolises, or in the Michelin-starred restaurants that are scattered across the face of France like so many black truffles studding a rack of lamb “Sarladaise.”

Kate calls the Canal Latéral à la Garonne her “long village”; after 20 years exploring this “long village” she knows its gastronomic treasures thoroughly, plundering the local markets for fresh produce in season: leeks and asparagus, crisp apples and sweet, succulent figs. The book is organized as if for a six-day voyage along the Canal Latéral from Castets-en-Dorthe at the western end to the Julia Hoyt’s homeport of Ste. Colombe-en-Bruilhois, with the six chapters simultaneously following the courses of a typical French meal: from aperitifs to dessert.

You might buy this book to simply help you get through winter, or to rekindle a particularly vivid French food memory: that bakery-fresh baguette with slabs of soft Brie and sun-warmed garden tomato, savoured beside a tributary of the upper Tarn in 1994 (the thought still makes you salivate). And who knows, you might be inspired to go that one step further: you could end up on board the Julia Hoyt next summer, or enrolled in one of Kate’s cooking classes, which take place in her restored pigeonnier in the Gascon village of Camont.¹

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Angela Murrills is a local freelance journalist who writes regularly on food and style for The Georgia Straight. Hot Sun, Cool Shadow describes her slow-simmering love affair with Languedoc, a coup de foudre which began during her first visit in 1993. In the years which followed she and her husband Peter Matthews arranged annual visits back, insinuating themselves more and more deeply into the region until they finally found themselves engaged in their own “I could see it coming” search for a Languedocian home with ready access to cassoulet, confit de canard, fois gras and sanglier. As she describes the dawning moment:

It wasn’t just the copper pot, it was the whole mystique of the French kitchen that we yearned for. If you’re passionate about cooking and eating, it seems inevitable that at some point you must fantasize about having your own place in the French countryside.

As you read descriptions of the many meals Angela and her husband Peter savoured in their wanderings through the Languedoc, you would be forgiven for imagining them as a pair of immense, heavy-gutted Francophiles gradually accumulating generous layers of “buttery yellow fat” about their midriffs. But the author photos on the rear dustflap show otherwise: they appear trim and none the worse for their many culinary indulgences.

Waverly Root, in his classic book The Food of France, calls fats one of the great dividing lines of cookery, identifying three main schools of cooking based on butter, lard, and oil. “The supremacy of French cooking” is credited to the fact that large areas within her borders are devoted to cuisine from each of these three categories, with Languedoc falling squarely in what Root terms “the Domain of Fat.” It is no surprise, then, to find the following rhapsodic passage in Chapter 1 of Hot Sun, Cool Shadow: “Cook confit very, very slowly,” we are told. “The fat should simmer as gently as a two-month-old baby blowing bubbles.”

The book is organized into a baker’s dozen chapters, with each chapter focusing on one gastronomic specialty and one specific section of the Languedoc. Chapter 1 looks at confit de canard, and the area around Albi, Castres and Carcassonne. Chapter 7 takes us to the beautiful port towns of Collioure and Port-Vendres, a traditional source for anchovies. Each chapter ends with one or two recipes which feature the key ingredient, but Hot Sun, Cool Shadow is more memoir than cookbook, and Peter Matthews’ line drawings make no effort to compete with the current fashion for photographic coffee-table food porn.

Reading this genre of book is mixed curse and blessing; it is a double-edged sword (or cooking knife in this case). We have first-hand descriptions of what are, in effect, our own fantasies being brought to life; and so we have proof that these fantasies are realizable. But in their pages it is always someone else who is inhabiting our dream-life, creating a dangerous envy that can make our own mundane days feel even more mundane.

I don’t know: perhaps this very discontent is what will eventually spur us into action. I can only hope, though, that the catalyst is not completely effective: if all of us who dream of moving to the south of France were to do so, the south of France could not possibly be the paradise that we imagine from these descriptions.

But then it probably never really was…

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¹ A special thanks to Kate Hill for her “call out” in a recent posting to her mouth-watering food blog, referencing a previous t&p posting on sorrel soup.