31st July 2010 – The Party

It was all that we could talk about all day. We got dressed up, even putting on a little make-up around our eyes. I donned a cream and pink dress of many different layers of floating lace and rose-printed chiffon, a new acquisition from Lamastre’s Tuesday market. I even shaved my legs for the first time in six weeks. Whilst I had experienced a certain sense of emancipation with each added millimetre of fuzz, the sense of smoothness that followed the razor exceeded it in satisfaction. It frustrated me that my own sense of feminine attractiveness was so closely linked to the elimination of something so natural, not to mention so trivial. As we left the house, I plucked a small rose for my hair, and clipped it in. I felt beautiful. 

As we arrived at the vast gardens, we met Anne-Marie. She laughed gently at us in our get-up, telling us that it was always possible to pick out the WWOOFers because they were always young and well-dressed. She introduced us to her two current WWOOFers: a young and well-dressed couple from Bristol called Emily and Ben. We spoke in French to them, but it was a struggle. Emily’s French was reasonable, but Ben spoke very little. We were so adamant that we weren’t going to give in and speak English that they assumed that we were French. Anne-Marie clearly hadn’t told them that their predecessor would be there, or if she had then they hadn’t put two and two together. It was quite funny. We lapsed into English for a couple of minutes, but it felt too odd not to speak French to Kira and Josefien. As we wandered over to the barn they split away from us, and we didn’t see them again.

At the entrance to the barn, under a tall, wooden-roofed structure, there were casks of locally

brewed beer tended by an impressive – if somewhat sozzled – set of dreadlocks. Under his instruction, I poured my first beer from the tap: success! A perfectly clear deep amber with a small smooth head of dark cream. Josefien and Kira took lessons in beer-serving too. That half went down very easily, and after not very long we were back in the queue for more. Disaster struck as Kira and Josefien walked away with their second drinks and I took my place at the barrel: complete and utter failure. With a glass full of froth and a lightheaded feeling of hilarity, I joined the other two at the barn door.

Inside there were villagers dancing. Michelle was one of the dancers, resplendent in a long burnt-orange skirt and a red shawl. In the soft lighting of the barn, the colours had been pulled straight from India. At least, they had been when the lanterns were actually on, but somebody kept on leaning on the light-switch and plunging us all into the dark. The colours of her clothes were of little consequence in the blankness of the night! Xavier was on the sidelines looking a little uncomfortable in the crowd. I wondered if he was a man with two left feet, or if secretly, when he was alone with Michelle, he was a soulful dancer. In spite of his corporeal awkwardness, I suspected the latter. Anne-Marie was sitting a little further off on the other side of the barn, watching the revellers with a touch of wistfulness. I knew that she would have been at the centre of the gambolling had it not been for her still-injured knee. Behind them a folk band of musical locals played the accordion, the washboard, the guitar and the tambourine. The room was buzzing with the vigour of a ceilidh; the energy was infectious. 

Carla invited me to dance, and so I did, leaving my companions and joining in with an easy folk dance in a round, and moving on to more complex steps as the music changed. It was intimidating at first; everybody but me seemed to know the dances, and I ended up paired with a five-year old at one point. This stalled my progress in learning the paces, but eventually I got there, and I whirled around and around, dress flying, hair whooshing, eyes shining, head spinning with beer and movement and happiness.

The onlookers began to flock away from the barn, and dancers and musicians alike quickly realised that we were missing out on something. As that something was the announcement of the imminent arrival of food, my feet skittered swiftly in the direction of the long trestle tables, where Kira and Josefien were already sitting, a seat saved for me. There were lots of good looking men. All three of us were impressed by the testosterone that wandered around us, mostly long-haired or dreadlocked in hippy or laid-back but clean farmers´ clothing. There was one particularly striking African man sitting on the table behind us, and my eyes kept sneaking back for just one more peek. We developed a ridiculously obvious secret way of pointing out handsome faces: sexy mec à trois heures, sexy mec à trois heures! It seemed so much funnier and so much more clandestine to say that there was a sexy guy at three o’clock in French rather than in English, even though English would have been a much safer language for the purposes of secrecy. It was an oversight that I blamed on the beer. 

The dishes were finally brought out from the house, and the food tables were soon not to be seen for the jostling revellers. There was a huge range of salads as well as about a million dishes using quinoa, which appeared to be the fashionable gourmet food of the moment. There were bowls of pesto hummus, an entire wheel of Pierre´ comté, a curry of aubergine and tomato, slow-cooked and combined with lime pickle and bunches of fresh coriander. The three of us, though we indulged in the savoury offerings, were waiting for our berried tiramisu to make an appearance. Amazingly, despite having already made three of them, we still hadn’t had our fill of the creamy coffee-impregnated magic, and we fully intended to get to it before it was discovered by anybody else. We knew that it would disappear with revolting speed. Anne-Marie was on the lookout for some chocolate walnut cake or other; we learned from her that we’d be able to see the puddings coming out of the house before they reached the table. Still, we made frequent reconnaissance trips, just in case. While we were waiting, in-jokes prevailed, completely absorbed as we were in the atmosphere and in our week’s worth of friendship and laughter. 

Tiramisu! We fought off the locals for the first spoonfuls, and we never regretted it for a moment. Other puddings up for the tasting included a loud American woman’s cherry pie; an amazingly succulent and sweet apricot upside down cake; banana bread; inexhaustible supplies of fresh apricots and raspberries; bowls of the decidedly odd combination of cottage cheese and alcoholic cherries, and of course the chocolate walnut cake. I had never seen a woman with a gammy knee move as fast as Anne-Marie did when that cake finally made its entrance.

The empty plates were swept away as soon as the banquet had disappeared. The tables, too, were dragged to one side, and before we knew it a jazz band was in full swing. People began to dance with unbridled joy under the tent, fuelled by good food and shared excitement. Soon the air beneath the tarpaulin was thick with swirls of tobacco and cannabis smoke, although it was impossible to tell who was smoking what. Like a drugged apparition, a trombone player popped up amidst the dancers, somehow taller above the bouncing mass of bodies. He started up a tune, and suddenly everybody was singing in raucous unison, a strange Cajun song that everybody else seemed to know that involved plenty of stamping and clapping. We left at just before 1a.m. –we had a fair to attend the following day –but the party was still going strong. Unusually, I didn’t want to leave. I could have danced there all night; I could have stayed into the dawn, spinning and swirling and twirling and living.

27th July 2010 – Delicacies of Fontsoleil

In the kitchen of Fontsoleil, under the window out onto the balcony, ran shelves, constructed from long and irregular planks of wood supported by bricks. My attention had entered kitchen territory. Upon the shelves a vegan glutton’s paradise was laid out with sturdy glass storage jars of many different flours: buckwheat, chestnut, lupin, soya and plain; pulses and grains: couscous, quinoa, red lentils, puy lentils, split peas, buckwheat; and one jar full of raisins; then translucent receptacles of breakfast fare: toasted rice flakes, quinoa flakes, oats, buckwheat crackers, almond butter and tahini. These were strategically placed at the front of the shelves to hide the not so sightly bright emerald plastic tubs which had, according to the faded label, once contained sauerkraut but now held sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds in abundance. 

Lunch and dinner were impossible to tell apart from each other. At every meal an impressive spread would be set out. On the table there was always bread, butter, at least two types of cheese, and yoghurt. There were salady bits – lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, baby courgettes, carrottes rappées – and a dressing of Dijon mustard, olive oil, sunflower oil and white wine vinegar in a special pottery dressing pot. Soy sauce, yeast flakes, salt and a spicy Indian pickle served as condiments. There was always fruit of some sort – peaches or apricots or berries or cantaloupe melon – and to drink, a jug of water and a jug of kombucha, and sometimes apple juice. I thought that seemed ample, the first time that I sat down at the table.

But no! At each meal there was also a hot vegetable dish and two dishes of carbohydrates or pulses: sautéed potatoes with cumin seeds and olive oils; courgette puree with coconut milk; rice cooked with cinnamon; fresh pasta; ratatouille of aubergine, courgette and tomato; barely-cooked carrots, mangetouts and peas with herbs; split peas; sautéed courgette and tofu with Corsican rosemary and garlic; boiled potatoes; lentils; wilted chard and Chinese greens; buckwheat groats; potato rösti; creamed chard leaves; samosas; flageolet beans; green beans with lemon and thyme; courgettes with cumin, or chilli, or coriander; stuffed red peppers; homemade chips; fresh tomato soup; mushrooms with tofu, onion and curry powder; tabouleh; green beans, courgette spiced with ras-el-hanout; hardboiled eggs; softboiled eggs; fried eggs; quinoa. The list went on.

We all had to take part in the cooking. I quickly earned the status of La Reine des Épices – or Queen of the Spices – because of my tendency to use coriander, cumin, cinnamon and ginger when I cooked. One day at market Chantal even took me to the vast spice stall to advise her on what spice mixes would work well. I enjoyed this new description of myself, and kept up the pretence, cooking up a curry for them later that week using vegetables fresh from the garden. 

If there were leftovers of rice or grains or lentils we would mix them with egg, buckwheat flour, grated courgette or carrot and spices – or even sugar for a sweet version –and form into patties and fry them. They were delicious. Even the dubious combination of rice and superfluous crumble topping mixture worked well, much to everybody’s surprise, not least my own.

At the beginning Michelle had said to me that they didn’t eat many desserts at Fontsoleil. She couldn’t fool me for very long. Aside from goodies brought back from market, like baklava, walnut tarts and creamy pastries, we indulged in left-over crêpes with jam, or goats´ yoghurt with jam, or fresh berries by the bowlful. Each WWOOFer was asked to cook a dish typical to their country, so we also sampled apple and blackcurrant crumble and a summer berry cobbler. And then there were the tiramisus. We made three tiramisus that week, not that we were obsessed with them at all. One was

plain: just marscapone, vanilla sugar, cocoa, coffee and cake. The others were less conservative. We added raspberries to the second between the soaked sponge biscuits and the cream, their juices adding to the infusion and their acidity cutting through the heaviness of the sugary cream. With the third we experimented further, supplementing redcurrants and blackcurrants, the soft, sepia-dusted peaks of cream studded with translucent jewels that caught in the light. This looked pretty, but I preferred the raspberry creation. There was something quite exquisite about that combination of flavours on the tongue.

No meal at Fontsoleil was complete without a glass of strong coffee or a bowl of tea, sometimes green and occasionally black, or sometimes a tisane of mint or lemon balm picked straight from the garden, or of ginger, or spiced chai. The bowls that we drank from were all made by Michelle, as were the teapots, jugs and plates that we used on a daily basis. Some of them were just regular bowls, although perhaps a little smaller than might have been expected. Some had handles, making them look like teacups from a giant’s tea party. Some were mounted on a sturdy foot, goblet-shaped and regal above their shorter counterparts. There was only one of my favourite shape: it was more closed than the others, as if Michelle had been trying to create a perfect sphere, and had given up with a quarter of the globe yet to close. It was just the right shape for cupping in both hands. To go with the hot drink there was almost always a square of chocolate; it was organic chocolate, of course, and it would be the darkest of all the dark chocolates that Michelle could find, sometimes adorned with slivers of almonds or candied citrus peel. And we would sit on the balcony and talk over the meal and the drinks about love, death, spirituality and goats.

The balcony had been built by Xavier years ago, and it was beginning to show its age. Mellowed wooden planks supported the semicircular platform from the ground below, buttressed to the house. The platform itself was constructed from the same wood. There were occasional splinters and multiple holes in the floor, resulting in frequent fork-loss at meals, especially if Bali was up to his cheese-snaffling tricks. One hole was particularly large and particularly dangerous. It wasn’t uncommon to lose a chair leg if care wasn’t taken to avoid it. The planks closest to the edge were very loose. I wondered at what point Xavier would consider it necessary to mend the decking. It looked as if it would be a hefty job. In the centre, and taking up most of the space, sat an expandable wooden table which had once been varnished but which had been so well used and weather-beaten that only flecks of the shine remained.

The wooden rails around the perimeter were overgrown with grape vines to one side and kiwi vines to the other. They looked so similar that at first I assumed they were the same plant, but the kiwi leaves were rounder and more heart-shaped whilst the grape leaves resembled those of the maple. And the leaves and stems of the kiwi plant had a striking blanket of wiry light brown hairs, the same as those that covered its fruits. Bali had a particular proclivity for leaping up onto the balcony railings and chewing on the kiwi vine stems, which extended downwards on a trellis over the driveway, providing shade for the car and van, and a whimsical facade for the house. Up the walls of the house grew roses, and every day I would catch my clothes on the spines as I walked outside.

5th July 2010 – Lullaby for a Cockerel

As uncomplicated as wine infusing turned out to be, life soon took an interesting and unforeseen turn for the decidedly more complex. It was more than a week after the cherry fair, and Anne-Marie’s leg was still giving her grief; every day she was losing mobility, hobbling around on makeshift crutches. I didn’t know what had finally made her crack, but on that Monday when Valentin and I came down for breakfast, we knew that something was amiss. We were given a list of tasks to do that day: harvesting the sugarsnaps, picking blackcurrants, and tidying the cellar storeroom. We were told that Anne-Marie and Pierre were going to Lyon hospital – three hours away – to get Anne-Marie’s knee seen to, and that the boys were going to spend the day with a friend. We were in charge. Valentin had already arranged to go to stay with a friend that evening so he could watch the German football world cup match, but the farmers clearly expected to be back before nightfall. 

They set off, and Valentin and I dutifully set out to the lower garden where the sugarsnap peas lived. Given as the pea harvest had been one of my tasks from the beginning, I was in charge. I would spend hours squatting amongst them, wondering why they hadn’t been staked up like all the other creeping plants in the garden. I never found out why, but it would have been a lot easier on my back if they had been! As it was, they formed a raised, tangled carpet over the soil, the pea pods merging into leaves and stems and tendrils. It was like playing Where’s Wally – you got an eye for them eventually – except you really had to watch your step or you would destroy half the crop. I typically picked two bulging baskets of them each day. Valentin wasn’t impressed. He pulled his earphones out of his pocket and plugged himself in, his large, teenaged feet causing the plants underneath to emit squeaky, crispy death cries. 

I found it rather rude that he chose to listen to music when we had a choice of three languages to talk in, and I’m sure we could have found some common ground. I suppose he jumped to the conclusion that we would have nothing to say to each other. But he was missing out, not particularly on my conversation, scintillating as it may have been, but on the whole pea-picking experience. The sun was just beginning to warm the slope where we were working, and from far down in the valley came the soft sound of cowbells. I let the sound wash over me; Valentin never heard them.

After half an hour Valentin admitted to being bored and asked my permission to leave. It wasn’t for me to keep him there, so, despite his paltry third of a basket, I agreed. By the time I had got up to the house an hour later, his bags were packed and he was leaving for the evening. There was no chance of him playing with big, dangerous machinery that day, so there was equally no chance of him sticking around to do the ’girly` work. He had a friend to visit. That was the last I saw of him for three days. 

I rather enjoyed that day of farmyard solitude. From sugarsnaps I moved onto blackcurrants. To start with I had picked each individual blackcurrant by hand with painstaking attention, making sure not to crush a single one. A brief lesson later from an amazed Anne-Marie – amazed at how long it had taken me to pick so few berries – and I was stripping the bushes at an impressive rate. The trick was to bend a branch of berries over the basket. Around the base of the branch you pinched your thumb and index finger, and quickly pulled your hand upwards towards the basket, causing the berries to rain down into it. One time I ran out of basket space, so I improvised and used my sunhat. I never did manage to get the stains out, but it was worth it.

My morning’s work done, I raided the cheese supplies, and headed out to the family hammock to enjoy the midday sun. This was a practice frowned upon by the farmers, and probably by the medical profession too, but I wanted to make the most of the sun and the valley views. I decided that I would have plenty of time to cool off in the cellar later. I was right. There was a lot of tidying up to be done. Boxes were scattered with gay abandon, empty bottles were strewn amongst unwashed sleeping bags, pieces of paper littered the floors and work surfaces, and half-empty flagons of spirits lay on their sides. My leisurely spring clean would have been cathartic if catharticism had been necessary, but as it was I was already wonderfully calm.  This would not have been the case had I known what was waiting for me that evening.

I had been asked to put the birds to bed – by locking them up in their coop rather than by tucking them in under duck feather duvets – if the family wasn’t back by 8pm, and so I duly walked the half kilometre up the pebbled drive to the coop on the hill. Four hens, four chicks, two ducks and a cockerel. On my approach, the two ducks hopped obediently into the coop as good as gold. The hens with their chicks took a little more coaxing, but they too were quite content to settle down for the night. 

Not so with the cockerel. Whenever I approached him he would jump up in the air at me, talons in my face and powerful wings flapping ferociously. I quickly realised both that he could do me some serious damage, and that he clearly intended to if I got too close. He was in charge; there was no way that I was going to be able to shoo him into his little hut. To make things worse, one of the hens kept coming back out to watch the fun; even if the cockerel had by some magic gone into the coop, I wouldn’t have been able to shut the door. I was terrified, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just leave the birds out, or I knew they’d be corpses in the morning. And so I sang lullabies to a cockerel. I stood there and sang for twenty minutes. I didn’t sing any recognisable song, making up both tunes and lyrics as I went along, modulating from English to French: it’s time to sleep, yes it’s time for bed, come on my cockerel, good cockerel, wise cockerel, it’s time to sleep, the sun’s going down. Eventually, possibly out of boredom, or just to shut me up, the cockerel decided to play the game, whereupon I leapt into the run and slammed the door.  When I got back to the house I sank into a chair, emotionally and physically exhausted.

John-from-the-yurt came down with the news about an hour later, as it was beginning to get dark. Pierre had phoned him – it would have been pointless to phone me, as I’d been told not to answer the phone – to let him know that Anne-Marie’s knee was in a worse state than expected, would need operating on, and that they now did not expect to be back home until midday on Wednesday at the earliest. And so it was that I found myself in charge of a farm. Thankfully, John told me not to worry about the cows, which would be taken care of by a friend in the valley. He asked if there was anything I needed, and I quizzed him about how to deal with the cockerel. He advised me to arm myself with a piece of piping. I went to bed that night confused and not at all sure what to make of the situation. I would never have WWOOFed if I had known this would happen. Yet I’d coped alone with the farm that day; surely I could keep it running for two days more. I didn’t have much choice.

2nd July 2010 - Valentin

Cue the arrival of Valentin.  Valentin was a fifteen year old German coeliac, the son of a family friend. His school – presumably a Hauptschule, the least academic kind of German school which focused on more vocational subjects – required him to spend a fortnight working on a farm. Being abroad wasn’t obligatory, but as he had the opportunity, and in any case spoke near-fluent French, it had seemed a sensible decision for him. He had a healthy interest in tractors and farm machinery and was to shadow Pierre during the day, helping with the cows and the hay bales. As I either worked alone in the gardens or helped Anne-Marie in the wine cellar or with the housework, I saw him only at mealtimes, and there he was diluted by the rest of the family. At night he was to share my room. Since Caleb had left I had commandeered the proper bed, meaning that Valentin would have to make do with the mattress near the ceiling. Now, I had nothing against sharing a room with him. He was a teenage boy, and reminded me of some of the less savoury pupils whom I’d taught in North Rhine Westphalia, and his socks were freakishly large, but aside from that he was generally inoffensive. But it just seemed a bit odd. I was sure that in the UK it wouldn’t have been allowed for a minor to share a room with an unknown adult. But then, I reminded myself, I wasn’t in the UK. I was in France, and they did things differently here.

It was at around the time that Valentin arrived that I discovered the joy of walnuts. On the work surface by the hob was a large glass jar filled with pieces of walnut. Valentin had brought some gluten-free flour with him, and Anne-Marie, wanting to make an effort – and also wanting to eat biscuits – whipped up a quick batch of little walnut biscuits: slightly sweet, slightly bitter, utterly nutty and delicious. But this meant that the walnut jar was empty. To rectify this, I was introduced to a mammoth brown paper bag; it was the kind in which coal might have been kept. In fact, as it sat next to the fireplace, I had rather assumed that it did contain coal. But no, it was a sack of whole walnuts, and floating on the undulating brown sea of shells was a silver nutcracker. 

I set to work. Pulling a handful of nuts out of the bag, I noticed that they were strangely dusty to touch, the shells drying out my hands as I turned the smoothly and unevenly ridged spheres over in my palms. Tentatively I put the first one into the oval hole of the nutcracker, and squeezed the handles together. With a surprisingly loud crack, the shell split in a million ways, showering the room with tiny shards. Embarrassed, I unearthed the dustpan and brush from underneath a basket of clutter and swept up my mess. From that moment, I had learned my lesson: to keep my spare hand around the nut and apply pressure on the handles slowly. I became addicted to the satisfying muted snap as the shell split in two, and feeling the sound in my palm. It became a challenge to me to try to extract the nuts intact. I was fascinated by their form, brain-like and burnished. The nuts went into the jar. The shells were saved for the weekly lighting of the furnace. I looked forward to the furnace being lit as it meant a hot shower; despite the heat wave, the shock of cold water on my body still made my muscles contract uncomfortably. However, the furnace did have the inconvenience of being directly underneath my room, meaning that once a week, sleep didn’t come quite as easily.

1st July 2010 – Lebanese Lessons

The heat-wave wasn’t letting up, and the skies were refusing to give up their moisture to the thirsty ground. Anne-Marie gave me instructions to water the gardens. I headed up the hill to the high garden, deciding to work my way downwards. There was no such thing as a hose pipe on that French hillside. Towards the back of the uppermost strip of land was a concrete trough of rainwater: a small, garden-sized reservoir. Pondweed floated on the surface, forming a semi-solid skin of the same kind that might have formed on a bowl of cold custard. Poking up in lumps was the moss-green form of a watering can. I plunged my hand into the water, groping for the handle. My palm brushed against the side of the trough, and my heart jolted with shock. I had expected a harsh, stone-like sensation, but felt instead a slick wall of slime. I pulled the watering can out quickly, splashing my feet with the stagnant water. 

I knew that I had to be frugal with my water dispensing, but it seemed counter-intuitive. The soil absorbed the water like a sponge, seeming immediately as dry as it had ever been. The plants, although green and alive, appeared brittle-stemmed and delicate. Had I been at home, I wouldn’t have thought twice about lavishing litres of tap water on each line of vegetables. Here I couldn’t; water was in such short supply. It got me to wondering how it was possible to grow anything in climates hotter than that of the Ardèche. I knew that it happened, but I couldn’t see how irrigation would be possible. How was water rationed out so that the plants could grow but so that none was wasted? Surely it would evaporate before it reached the roots? I pondered my way down through the three gardens, watering can in my grasp. 

That evening we had a visitor. Her name was Carla, and she lived up the hill in the yurt she shared with her partner John, the man whom I had encountered earlier the previous day. She was friends with Anne-Marie – it was by amicable agreement that the couple had been allowed to set up their yurt on Pierre’ land – and she had come to give Anne-Marie a cooking lesson, specifically, a vine-leaf stuffing lesson. Carla’s family hailed from Lebanon, and so stuffed vine leaves were a part of her cultural tradition. Given as I was there and keen to pick up new cooking skills, I was invited in to the tutorial. Laid out on the table were most of the ingredients we needed, brought down by Carla: rice, lemon, salt, oil, tomato. There was definitely something missing though -- where were the vine leaves? I had underestimated the self-sufficient lifestyle. I was unaware that vines grew on the farm, but apparently they did, and I was taken scrambling through overgrown tangles of nettles and thistles to a semi-obscured and crumbling old stone wall at the back of the upper garden where the vines were creeping. Carla instructed me to take only large, undamaged leaves: too small and they would unravel when they were stuffed, damaged and the stuffing would fall out of the holes. We gently laid about eighty leaves into our basket and headed back to the kitchen via the herb garden to pick up some parsley. 

Back in the kitchen, we prepared the rice. I thought that it was probably risotto rice that we used; it definitely ended up stickier than the average basmati. We squeezed the lemon and sprinkled the salt over the uncooked grains, and added finely chopped parsley and tomato. Then it was time to get stuffing! First of all, we had to cut off the stems of the leaves. A tiny v-shape was cut into the nape of each leaf to rid them of the tough area around the stem. At the centre of the top end of the leaf we were instructed to put a small amount of stuffing – small enough that it looked stingy; this was to allow for the swelling of the grains. Anne-Marie and I began overzealously, but soon learned to keep our portions to a minimum. Next the leaves were rolled into a cigar shape, and then each end was folded over, along the line of the edge of the leaf. Each little package was then placed with care at the bottom of a large saucepan. We created concentric circles of vine leaves as the pan filled up, and then multiple layers of concentric circles of vine leaves. I had struggled to understand how the leaves wouldn’t unravel during cooking – there was no cocktail stick or string involved - but then I began to see that they would be too close together to move. A small plate was placed on top of the final layer to keep them from falling apart, and the whole thing was covered in water. A lid was put on, and the saucepan put on the stove to boil, before turning down the temperamental flame to simmer gently. 

Twenty-five minutes later, we turned off the heat and let the leaves sit and cool a little before we touched them. When they were cool enough to handle, we lifted them one by one out of the saucepan and onto an enormous white plate. The vines had felt like green paper- wrapped rocks before they had been cooked, but now they had absorbed all the liquid they resembled soft cushions of dark olive green. We drizzled them liberally with olive oil, and awaited the hungry troops. Except that with all that effort, we were pretty hungry ourselves, and they were deceptively moreish. They disappeared much quicker than was intended. We didn’t admit to Pierre how many we had originally made, although from our guilty grins, he may well have guessed.