I was too lazy and too cowardly, my courage already broken by my pathetic attempt to manufacture jelly.
Because I hadn’t been able to find an instant dessert resembling jelly, I’d tried to devise it myself with boiling water and sheets of gelatine and far too much sugar and red food colouring. (Thanks again to the guests who brought the colouring. Had I known better I would have asked them to bring a few packets of jelly powder as well.) It was a complete disaster. In appearance, texture and taste. The colour had turned out more brown than red, the liquid wouldn’t set and it tasted like cough syrup.
But I was so determined to have trifle on the table that I used this cough-syrup concoction in place of red jelly. And crème anglaise from yoghurt containers instead of good old custard, and a local sweet wine by the name of Rasteau (a village just on the other side of the hill) instead of South African sweet wine. A Boer makes a plan, I proudly announced to my family. But the plan doesn’t always work, does it?, Daniel mumbled when he surveyed the business. Aside from me he was the only one who knew what trifle was supposed to look like. But even Alain and his French sons knew that it couldn’t look like this. Cake crumbs and peach slices floating in cough syrup.
Everyone knows a Coke float, Daniel giggled, but this is the first time he’s seen a cake float.
I usually have an adequate sense of humour, but that was a joke I failed to appreciate.
Another thing that’s unavailable here is whole-wheat flour. Not to mention bran. Maybe the health shops in the big cities stock these things, but we live far away from any big city. And however fond I am of a fresh baguette or a buttery croissant, sometimes I miss a thick slice of whole-wheat bread. Or whole-wheat rusks.
Perhaps this is the taste I miss the most. A hunk of whole-wheat rusk dunked in coffee. Slowly sucking the coffee from the rusk.
In South Africa I simply popped into the nearest home industry shop once a week to top up my supply of rusks. I seldom left without a few other treats as well: fudge or koeksisters or coconut ice, ostensibly for Daniel and his friends. And a bunch of arum lilies or sunflowers for the house.
In France there’s nothing that could remotely be compared to a home industry shop. Nowhere would you find such an eclectic mix of cakes and flowers and knitted baby booties and crocheted toilet-roll covers. Only intimidating pâtisseries where breath-taking little chocolate creations are displayed behind shiny glass. Confectionery museums, that’s what they make me think of. I can’t imagine anything as inelegant as a whole-wheat rusk ever turning up in such a museum. As unimaginable as Tretchikoff’s Blue Girl in the Louvre.
But what do you do when visions of rusks haunt your dreams at night? When you know that the next day (and the one after that) you’re going to have to be satisfied with yet another croissant? They say necessity is the mother of invention. In my case, necessity was the mother of baking.
Yes, I conquered my lifelong fear of the oven. I started baking my own rusks. As with the trifle for the Christmas table, the first few attempts were tragic flops. As with the trifle, I had to substitute certain unobtainable ingredients with others. Instead of the whole-wheat flour I know, I use what the French call farine complète, an insipid beige version of ordinary white flour. Instead of a handful of bran I use whole-wheat cereal that I crush with my foot.
The foot-crushing I learnt from Two Fat Ladies on TV. You put the breakfast cereal or the biscuits or whatever in a plastic bag on the floor and you stamp your foot as if you’re furious. Much more effective than crushing it with a rolling pin – and also an excellent way of getting rid of everyday frustration. As you can tell from my three-year-old daughter’s theatrical foot-stamping.
Instead of buttermilk, which is apparently unknown in these parts, I use several containers of natural yoghurt.
Slowly but surely my rusks have been improving.
My mother’s favourite recipe requires two teaspoons of baking powder, two teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda and two teaspoons of cream of tartar. Don’t ask me why. The baking powder isn’t a problem. The bicarbonate of soda I eventually found at the chemist, after an extensive search among the flour and other cake-related ingredients in several supermarkets. The cream of tartar remains the missing link in my rusk evolution. In the end I started using a different recipe.
Last week I took the best batch of rusks ever out of the oven. The ladies at the home industry shop would’ve been proud of me. But I feel a bit like I do when I’m praised for a book I’ve written. I want to protest, I want to confess, I want to say that I didn’t do it entirely on my own. Readers usually forget about the important role played by a writer’s editor in a book’s success. And this time one of this writer’s editors played a deciding role in the success of her rusks.
Like any good guest, Louise Steyn, faithful editor of my youth novels, had asked what she could bring along when she visited this region a while ago. A packet of whole-wheat rusks, I’d pleaded, although by this time I knew that rusks made a rather impractical parcel in a tourist’s suitcase. Usually it’s just a heap of crumbs that arrives at the other end. But I was so desperate that I was prepared to eat crumbs.
And then Louise astonished me by travelling through Europe with an enormous Tupperware of rusks in her arms (in the aeroplane, I suspect, she cradled it in her lap the entire night), determined that this time I wouldn’t eat crumbs.
I was still stammering my thanks when she completely floored me by producing a paper bag with 5 kg of whole-wheat flour from her suitcase. As any tourist knows, 5 kg is an enormous load when your entire luggage allowance is 20 kg. Just imagine everything she must have left behind for the sake of a sack of flour!
Thanks to this sacrifice, above and beyond any editor’s duty, I can bake proper whole-wheat rusks for the next few months. I eat each batch slowly. I hide it from the children. It isn’t nice, I know, but it has to be done. Daniel and Mia are formidable rusk eaters. Maybe it’s hereditary. What baffles me is that even Hugo has developed an inexplicable craving for whole-wheat rusks. He was born in France, he eats only white bread and until recently he didn’t even know that something like rusks existed. Now he rummages around the kitchen at night and the next morning I follow the trail of crumbs all the way to his bed. Now I’m beginning to wonder if the passion might not be contagious.
In the meanwhile I’m going to keep hiding my rusks. I don’t think I’ll soon find another guest who is willing to tour Europe carrying a massive bag of flour.
4 Paper equals panic
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, is what we were taught at school. But now school is a long way away, I live in another country and I’ve learnt a new law: paper is power.
Long ago I thought that paper was something delicate that could be crumpled, torn up or set alight. Now I know better. Paper is something mighty that should be copied, certified and signed, watched like gold or wielded like a weapon.
Paper is omnipresent and inescapable. Paper is king, Caesar and president. If you want to live in a different country, you have to learn to respect paper.
Maybe things are different in England or Australia or one of those Anglo-Saxon countries where nowadays computers are widely used to facilitate administrative matters. But in France state officials still seem to harbour grave suspicions about computers. Technology is used simply because it is there, but information isn’t really regarded as information unless it is written on paper. Copied, certified and signed.
Every time I find myself at a mairie or préfecture – the French versions of municipal offices or provincial headquarters –
