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 – I become depressed at the sight of all those shelves filled with files. Just imagine how many trees had to be felled to manufacture all that paper.
The other emotion that regularly overwhelms me in a préfecture is a little less worthy of me. It’s a kind of blind envy of the Voortrekkers of days gone by who could embark on their Great Trek without papers. Anyone who tried to stop them along the way was summarily mowed down. It’s not a tactic of which I approve, of course. But on more than one occasion in the past few years I’ve had to fight a primitive urge to threaten an unhelpful French bureaucrat with an old-fashioned muzzle-loader.
I don’t want to haul an ox wagon across a mountain. I am genuinely grateful that I was able to load my earthly possessions onto a sturdy ship. But my life would’ve been so much easier if my modern Great Trek was a paperless saga.
It’s not just foreigners who can be driven insane by the French obsession with papers. Every French child receives a carnet de santé at birth, a 96-page book in which every doctor’s visit, inoculation, disease and injury of its first few years will be recorded in detail. After that the carnet is supposed to accompany the child throughout its entire school career. When I wanted to enrol my five-year-old son at the local school, the headmaster refused to admit him because he didn’t have such a book. Who knew what horrible diseases he’d brought with him from Africa? I waved his official inoculation certificate about. So it was just a single sheet of cardboard, I protested, but it contained all the necessary details. What more could they want?
They wanted more. About 95 pages more. No French official will be satisfied with one page if he can get 96.
No, it’s not just foreigners who struggle to keep head above paper, but it’s worse if you’re from another country. The French are used to it. I suspect that French babies are born with a piece of paper in their hands, a tiny certificate that grants them permission to leave the womb. If you were born elsewhere it can take a lifetime to get all these papers together. If you’re an adult by the time you start this paper trail, you’re like a lame marathon runner who starts the race an hour after all the other runners. You’re never going to catch up. By the time you’ve got your hands on every possible piece of official paper, they’ll have thought up a few new ones.
Sometimes you end up in situations so absurd that it would make Kafka gasp. With me it has happened a few times. Once it was on a sweltering summer’s day in Valence, which was my administrative capital at the time. Soon afterwards it became Avignon, and now it is Valence once again, because I’ve moved house twice, just a few kilometres from my previous address in each case, but each time I ended up in a different administrative