It rained and, at the right moments, the sun came out.
I spent a long week in Brittany with family during the Easter holiday break. It was different for a few things: I went with just two children (ha!); we were a smaller group than the accordeonic summer get togethers — just my sister, my brother and his family, and my mother — which is also nice; and it was our first trip to Brittany in early spring. Trees were budding, bear’s garlic invasive, market stalls already laden, the sheep’s cheese producer not yet selling his tomme, still ageing in the cave.
But it was also a familiar rhythm of markets, cooking, gardening, clearing out, walks in the forest and trips to the coast. Taking advantage out of season and on a rainy day we also finally made the trip to Oceanopolis, the famous aquarium in Brest which, I concede as someone who usually loathes zoos, is pretty great.
Here are a few notes from this unexpected holiday.
The importance of apéro! I will continue to wax poetic about apéro for anyone still willing to listen. It is a most quintessentially French institution, and it bears being extolled again and again. My grandmother always marked the beginning of the evening with a glass of white wine and a cigarette, perched high on a stool in the kitchen, often with my uncle as companion. But I didn’t grow up in an apéro family. Not everyone drinks, and too often too many things — cooking! — got in the way. I am on a mission to rectify that. Be it just peanuts and beer, or olives and a glass of wine. Ideally, though, it will include something bitter — Cynar, Campari, or this holiday’s new crush Suze — with thin slices of saucisson, some crisps, a chunk of cheese and radishes or wedges of fennel. That’s nearly a meal. Crucial is to stop, send the young kids upstairs, and take a moment. Realistically this won’t happen every night year round, but it should happen every day on holiday. And this time, it did!
Easter. When we were children we poked holes with needles into raw eggs — one at each tip — blew out the contents into a bowl ready for omelette, and decorated the emptied eggs with layers of cold dyes offsetting designs made by hot wax poured from minuscule funnels. Sometimes we just painted the eggs, or drew on them with crayons, very cautiously. While I’ve never found the time to do that with my children … not even this year … I’ve managed to keep up another tradition of dyed hard-boiled eggs decorated with leaf and flower motifs, if it meant stripping the skins off a bowl of onions late in the evening at the last minute, hunting for herbs out on the street by torchlight! This is the method, bookmarked for next year. (The result can be seen on the first photo of this Letter.)
These decorated hard-boiled eggs are at the centre of our Easter tradition. They are fun to make, each imprint revealed with trepidation and a twinkle of magic. They’re good to eat, according to our family tradition cut in half, yolk scooped out and in its place a dab of mustard, a drop of olive oil and red wine vinegar, salt, and pepper, the yolk popped back on top, each half egg eaten whole, in one bite. But funnest of all is the game of breaking the shells in egg-fist fights: hold the egg firmly, enfolded in one hand, and shatter it against its opponent, your breakfast neighbour’s. The shell which doesn’t break wins … but the winner will have to wait for another battle before they’re able to eat!
On the way back from Brittany to London we stopped in Rouen.
One of the great pleasures of travelling in France is stopping along the way. When I was a student and often drove across the country with friends, we’d take long breaks and visit a village, an abbey, a beach in the small hours of the morning. More recently, with four children compacted into the car, the strategy was to get to our destination as soon as possible … with the fewest and briefest number of stops, lest one be forgotten by the wayside, or some of our ensconced provisions tumble out of the car on the way to the loo. But this time, luxuriously, I was travelling with just two, which makes stopping so easy. And from now on, everywhere we go, an ‘escale’ will be part of the plan — such a better word than ‘stopover’.
Things I’ve eaten, or wanted to eat, this month
Back in London I went to Noci because we’d made a date with friends and it was virtually the only restaurant open on a Monday night! The cacio e pepe was very good.
This week was Anzac day and I made Anzac biscuits!
I also made a savoury pie filled with greens using this flour/olive oil/white wine crust seen on Stefano Arturi’s Italian Home Cooking. It is just as great, easy and versatile as he promises. I used a mix of white spelt and dark rye flours and it held very well! Perfect.
Nigel Slater’s fresh soups for spring reminded me how long it’s been since I made watercress soup, and now I can’t think of anything else.
Ugandan ‘Rolex’ (!) — ‘rolled egg’ wraps — is Yewande Komolafe’s recent NY Times column. An omelette rolled up in a chapati. Mmmm.
A few more things
I went to Sadler’s Wells to see three works performed by Nederlands Dans Theater. I was most excited to once again see pieces by Jirí Kylían, Crystal Pite & Simon McBurney, but in the end it was Gabriela Carizzo’s La Ruta which blew me away.
Mohammed Sami’s exhibition The Point O at Camden Arts Centre is beautiful. If in London, it’s not to be missed.
Yasmin Khan wrote about the magic of slow travel and her recent trip to Istanbul in her Substack newsletter Rising Up. She always writes so beautifully and Istanbul really is a city to savour slowly.
Today felt entirely like spring. Happy weekend!
I really like the Easter egg ritual that you write up here. And importantly still, I most certainly subscribe to your views on apéro. It was my French friends family that gave me a love for it. Their choice of snacks were tiny little crackers shaped like fish which were as loved by the children as the adults.