Going Way, Way Back … Cave Dwellings

So … in 3 B.C., Roman masons built a three-arch, interlocking-limestone-block bridge over the Calavon River. At the time, northern Italy and Spain were connected through southern France by the Via Domitia, of which this bridge was a part. As we tooled around Provence, we saw signs indicating remnants of the Via Domitia. And the bridge, Pont Julien, named after Julius Caesar, still stands a few miles outside Bonnieux. Pont Julien carried traffic for more than 2000 years, but today is reserved for bicycle traffic.
 

Before the village of Bonnieux came to be, settlers in the Luberon Valley lived down by the Pont Julien. At some point they felt the need to protect themselves from enemies, so they moved into limestone caves on the nearest hill.

Our Experience Luberon group got to tour one of these caves! Our first Sunday in Bonnieux, we walked down from the old church at the very top of the hill to the home of a friend of Kathy and Charley. Their friend, Michelle, gave us a tour of her family home whose bottom level (the cave) was built in the sixth century, the next level in the twelfth century, and the top level in the eighteenth century. She had learned from archeologists how the cave dwellers had lived there.

Into dim golden light, we ducked our heads through low tunnels and gingerly placed feet on uneven rock to hear Michelle tell about the early inhabitants of her family home. She showed us where spring water would have come in from a spot high on a wall. People had dug trenches to direct the water where they needed it. She showed us a little alcove where they would have hung game they had hunted. Again, trenches would have directed animal blood away. A cool pit carved into the floor would have preserved meat. People probably would have slept on a slightly elevated more-or-less flat area in the same “room.”

This beige cave led into another, and then another, all paths and walls very roughly hewn inside the mountain. In this higgledy-piggledy cave arrangement, early inhabitants crushed grapes, ground grain, skinned animals, tanned hides, and cured meats. Imagine the smells!

At some point, probably the early 1100s, the Knights Templar lived in Michelle’s caves. I am not sure if it was they who built the second level, but whoever did carved the year 1130 into the wall. Front-line soldiers lived in the bottom caves and officers lived on the next level up. A hole in the bottom-cave ceiling was a “shouting tube” through which officers could shout down orders to their men. Upstairs, the shouting hole had a stone plug in it.

Michelle’s grandfather was an expert ironworker. She showed us a model he had made for a railing he was commissioned to make for LeTrain Bleu restaurant in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. His ironwork’s ornateness was quite the contrast to the crude, but effective, chipped, gouged limestone of the cave dwellers.

Bridge photo credit: www.editionsaris.com. I bought this bridge postcard.

Double Welcome to Provence

Sunday, 12 May 2019, first full day of the Luberon Experience welcomed me with two very
Provençal experiences. First was the Mistral’s fierce welcome to the Luberon. This strong, cold, northwesterly wind discouraged many Isle-sur-la-Sorgue vendors from setting up at the traditional Sunday market, as their wares and perhaps their entire booths might well have blown away. Today booths were set up only on a few blocks on one side of the river, which seemed more manageable to me than the full market had been in 2006. I did not see any antiques dealers; typically, people come from as far away as Paris to buy antiques here. Tent flaps and colorful
Provençal cloths slapped and billowed in wind gusts. Savory steam rising from cooking foods warmed chilly air.

As a gentleman in our group relaxed in a sidewalk café, the Mistral blew the foam right off his cappuccino and his hat off his head. When he stood up to chase his hat, some lady’s flying scarf fluttered into his hand.

A tall stool by the window of Café de France was Charley’s post. Kathy was on a mission to buy fresh produce, cheeses, and sausages for our picnic lunch back at Hotel Le Clos du Buis. Every so often she would pop in to the café to deposit some bags at Charley’s feet; then she’d dash out the door to continue her shopping mission. A number of us joined Charley in Café de France to warm ourselves with hot beverages and use the toilettes.

Besides the Mistral, the buffet lunch in our hotel’s “ballroom,” basically a cave in the basement by the door to the garden, was also notable. Wish I had taken a photo of the most beautiful bowl of tomatoes ever. Rough-chopped red, orange, yellow, and purple tomatoes glistened like large jewels. Olives, sausage, cheeses, juicy rotisserie chicken, fresh apricots, cherries, strawberries, and breads were all purchased by Kathy at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue market this morning. Best apricot ever! This would be the first of many meals on this trip when I marveled that food in France tastes like what it is supposed to taste like.

After lunch, when Kathy and Charley’s two vans finished steep-switch-backing and deposited us at the top of Bonnieux’s hill by the old church and walked us around for history and vistas, photo ops abounded. The Knights Templar built the hexagonal part of the old church. On the other side off the old church stones vertically zigzag from the earthquake of 1909.

The Mistral howled in trees with a ripping, roaring sound. Everyone’s hair seemed about to take flight. I felt a bit scared to be so high up and so severely buffeted. Whenever I got poised to take a photo, the wind bumped my arm. Seemed best to keep my arms close to my torso and my person away from the edges of the hill. Four-hundred-twenty-five meters altitude is only about fourteen-hundred feet, but the drop-offs were sheer. And that wind was powerful and unpredictable.

Although I have spent time in Provence before, I had not experienced the famous Mistral, so now I have. Vibrant food tastes are among my favorite highlights of previous trips. And they both welcomed me on the first day of the Luberon Experience.

Post-vacation adjustments, and gratitude

First breakfast cooked by myself in more than three weeks. Not an unpleasant adjustment because I like to cook, and I like my cooking. I don’t even mind washing dishes. But still … four days after touching down in Chicago, I’m still in post-vacation fuzz, really not wanting to do much except look at my vacation photos and smile.

In the midst of this happy haze, however, I am quieted with gratefulness. First, to God for providing this vacation with all its abundant, artfully presented meals. Because of dietary and budget restrictions over the years, I have almost always rented vacation lodging with kitchens so that I could do my own cooking except for one or two restaurant meals. So to the best of my recollection, for probably forty years I have never had a true vacation from cooking.

During the past three weeks in France, I was the gauche tourist taking pictures of all the wonderful food. I will just include one shot from each week. Week One (European Experiences) is a salad from Café de la Fontaine in Maussane. Week Two (Paint Provence with Tess) is our awesome chef Anna with her gluten-free strawberry tart. Week Three (Hotel Valdys in Saint-Jean-de-Monts) is  one of many healthy fresh seafood dinners.

I’m also super-grateful to my gourmet-chef hubby Robert for all the incredible meals he prepares. And better late than never, I am thankful for my mother’s faithfully putting healthy, balanced meals on the family table for my first twenty or so years. Having such an extended break from meal prep, I guess, increases my appreciation for all those meals and acts of service I tended to take for granted.

Might as well change my watch back to Chicago time today. Tough saying au revoir to my beloved France.

Sea Salt from Les Valencières

Emmanuelle, our hotel’s tour guide took us to visit one of many Vendée area marais salants, or wetland salt farms. Along the road we passed once-rectangular, now overgrown marais salants, as well as active ones. When we arrived at Les Valencières and met the salt farmer, or saunier, we learned that he had restored an abandoned marais salant to create his working salt farm.

 

We could see the picturesque village of Bouin from Thierry Odéon’s sea salt salorge, the hut where he keeps his tools and sells fleur de sel. We all sat inside the salorge while Thierry explained his process.

Although harvesting salt from the ocean has a science to it, the method is a simple harnessing of nature’s gifts in nature’s time. Grids of basins are dug so that high tides can deposit saltwater in the basins. Both sun and wind are needed to evaporate the water, leaving white salt, which the saunier then rakes up. The earth in this region is rich in a gray clay that enhances evaporation, so Thierry creates his grid of trenches from that gray clay.

 

Thierry controls the flow of water with a very simple, primitive really, method of plugging and unplugging a hole in a tiny écluse, or lock, with a weather-beaten wooden stick. In this photo, you can also see gray clay, dry and cracked during low tide. The deep-green, low plant growing in the clay is salicorne, which we broke off pieces of to eat. It tasted salty with a nice crunch.

A few interesting tidbits unrelated to the business … Black and white wading birds called avocettes find shelter from their predators in the salt marshes because foxes don’t like salt. Fish find the marais salants’ basins way too salty, so they are not a problem for sauniers.

On our way back to the hotel, we got even better at recognizing abandoned versus active marais salants across the landscape. And now we also recognized dark brown salorges dotting fields with hand-painted signs by the road inviting people to buy their fleur de sel.