Back to school

It’s la rentrée and I’ve got that back-to-school feeling. This term, I seem to have signed up for a course in chandeliers. I go antique hunting, talk bull, and come home to a cosy duck parmentier.

The wedding marked the end of summer. It was closely followed by la rentrée, back to school. On my morning dog walks now I share the pavements with children in new sneakers, with fresh haircuts. The free library box on the square in front of the house is filled with thrillers and romances, holiday reading, though I did also notice an Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, so congratulations to that person for not wasting a minute.

In our house on the port, the renovation continues. The electrician is here putting in new light switches and sockets. I’m in a race to finish cleaning and renovating the chandeliers I bought on Facebook Marketplace so he can put them up. Spoiler alert: once again, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have vinegar spray, microfibre cloths, pretty brass wire, pinning pliers and an attitude of “How hard can it be?” that has carried me this far more or less without serious incident. The famous scene from Only Fools and Horses is never far from my mind.

Light switches and plug sockets in 386 parts taking over the dining room table. I guess it’s dinner on a tray then.

I’m still on the hunt for some large pieces of furniture for the hallway, a long draper’s table and some kind of dresser. I can’t tell you how many garages, brocantes (flea markets), vide greniers (literally, empty attic, like a yard sale) antique shops and stranger’s homes I’ve explored in my quest. I’ve even given the dimensions for the pieces I’m looking for to a few friendly dealers in case they come across just the thing while they’re on their rounds.

I heard about a place just over an hour from here in the Camargue, a huge warehouse called Le Village du Brocanteur, home to over 60 different dealers, and last Sunday we set off on an optimistic road trip. We arrived at this scrubby bit of land on the edge of Vauvert and I got that feeling, the feeling a gambler probably gets at the entrance to the casino. In front of me was a large hangar surrounded by other small stalls and tents. (I learnt a new word – the French word for marquee is barnum, from the legendary American showman and circus owner, PT Barnum).

Inside, there was everything from shiny mid-century modern furniture to old textiles, china, enormous armoirs, lighting, garden chairs, glassware, clothes, pictures, pottery, mirrors, paintings, essentially the treasures of a thousand lives. My eyes were everywhere, but I learned a long time ago you can’t hunt for the perfect pieces on an empty stomach.

And lo, before us was La Guingette des Brocs, a bar and café in one corner of the warehouse. (One day, I will write about the part the guingette plays in the French romantic imagination, but not today. If I forget, remind me.) The menu is simple, plates of charcuterie, steak frites, duck frites, and, this being the Camargue, gardiane de taureau, sometimes called daube camarguaise. The gardianes were the cowboys who tended the cattle and this dish is a slow-cooked stew made from bull meat marinated overnight in red wine, garlic, vegetables, herbes de Provence and orange zest, then cooked for hours until it’s very tender. Traditionally, it was served with Camargue rice cooked in hay, but for our purposes here, it came with pasta.

If I’d planned this properly, I would give you a recipe for a gardiane today but I didn’t have bull meat hanging about in the house and there’s nowhere to buy it on a random Sunday. (The duck parmentier below is good though, and just the ticket if you want a recipe to make ahead, so you have something delicious to eat when you get back from a hard day antique hunting, or gardening, or simply messing about.) But I promise to write a gardiane recipe for you soon. It’s a wonderful dish for autumn, and you can make it perfectly well with shin of beef if bull is hard to find where you live.

This being the Camargue, there are bulls in the pictures - including the pretend-y Picasso, here - and on the menu, as well as beef on the plate.

This recipe soc-anth is slightly beside the point, as what I really want to tell you about is the Guingette des Brocs. Everything was for sale, from the tables we ate from to the seats we sat on. The plates and glasses were random pieces. And the crowd? It felt a little like being at the racecourse where everyone’s a character and I can’t help myself from making up their backstories. There was the woman with the immaculate silver bob and heavily-kholed eyes, red sunglasses hanging from a blue chain around her neck – surely she knew heartbreak before regaining her joie de vivre through a life in fine linens and hand-painted china? And him, over there, in the double denim, chain smoking? Treats his mum like a queen. Would look you dead in the eye and tell you that Louis le Something chair is not repro and no, of course that woodworm isn’t active.

Divine mirror, a photograph of Nureyev, Zizi Jeanmarie and Yves Sait Laurent, a Michelin man, a fine selection of guns.

I loved it all so much I didn’t really mind that I didn’t find my draper’s table or dresser. What did I buy? Some linen tea towels to use as napkins, a length of butcher’s cloth and yes, another chandelier. I’m not sure where it’s going. I think I’m accidentally in the chandelier business now.

Le Village du Brocanteur
154 avenue Ampère
30600 Vauvert
levillagedubrocanteur.com

Wednesday to Friday 9am-5pm
Saturday and Sunday 8am- 6pm
In summer – June, July and August – they are open until 7pm

Duck parmentier with sweet potato mash

Not strictly a parmentier, as the mash is made from sweet potatoes and to be strictly a parmentier, it should be made from potatoes. (In the Eighteenth Century, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a pharmacist and an agronomist, dedicated himself to the promotion of the potato.) I wrote more about Parmentier here, and shared the recipe for duck parmentier from my book, but this time, I fancied making it with sweet potatoes – I like the sweetness with the duck – and I added onions, carrots, celery and peas as a sort of riff on shepherd’s pie. So it’s a parmentier without the potatoes and a shepherd’s pie without the lamb, in that loosey-goosey way of recipe creation.

I always have tins of duck confit in the pantry because they’re a short cut to a delicious dinner, simply fried and served with some potatoes sautéed in their fat and some green beans or cabbage for health. For dishes like this, it gives that wonderful slow-cooked flavour to something that really doesn’t take very long to make.

Serves 6-8, depending on what you serve on the side.