Doing summer right, all year round

This week, French holidays, respecting boundaries, and all my family arriving for a wedding. How to feed people on the hoof, plus a recipe for a tomato and onion tart.

We are peak summer right now. It took Sean about three times as long as it would normally to retrieve my brother from Perpignan airport on Saturday as the roads were so full of holiday traffic.

Holiday well and holiday often seems to be the French way. The French have 30 days annual leave as standard and, on top of that, five civil public holidays and six saints’ days each year. And let’s not forget the concept of “le pont”, bridge days when public holidays fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday – as Assumption Day did last week. This means that lots of public servants will also take Monday or Friday off too, the bridge between the public holiday and the weekend.

This is also the time of year when TikTok, Facebook and Instagram come alive with Americans marvelling at the amount of holidays Europeans in general and the French in particular take. Do people really take the whole of August off? The answer is no, not really, though people often take a good two or three weeks off between the middle of July and the end of August. Things are definitely slower. It takes longer to get stuff done. We tried to order some light switches and sockets from our electrical supplier at the end of July and we all just accepted they would not arrive now before September. On that same shopping trip, we also attempted to buy a bed but we all conceded that eh bien ,c’est le mois d’août so it wouldn’t be here before September, when unfortunately our guests for whom the bed was intended were arriving in August.

You just shrug, accept it, pour a pastis and get on with, well, nothing. It’d honestly quite nice.

This sense of ease is not just for summer, either. It’s my observation that the French are quite well-boundaried people, and this is backed up by legislation. In 2017, the right to disconnect directive came into place (droit à la disconnexion). This ruling acknowledges the rights of workers in companies with more than 50 employees to a private life, family life, uninterrupted by emails, texts, and other communications outside of working hours. I notice from the news that the new Labour government in the UK is considering similar legislation. You know what? Nothing terrible happens. In fact, French productivity is higher than productivity in the UK. It’s almost as though if you’re well rested and have time out of work to share with people you care about and doing things you love, you’re going to be a happier employee, or at least one who doesn’t resent every moment spent on the work clock.

Events, dear friends, events

My mother has been here for a few weeks, my brother arrived from County Durham on Saturday, my nephew Angus and his fiancée Olivia from Sweden on Sunday. Angus and Olivia are getting married here next weekend, so we are a whirl of wedding plans, rosé and happiness.

Meals this week will be crammed in between hair appointments and picking up dry cleaning, last-minute meetings with the caterer and the pâtissier, finding just the right ribbon for a hat, confirming how many oysters we need for the oyster bar, and checking menus with the restaurant for Sunday lunch. The fridge is full of boxes of carottes râpées and celeriac remoulade, salamis, olives, cornichons, cheese, yoghurt, butter (salted, unsalted) and washed lettuce. The pantry shelves are busy with bowls of tomatoes, peaches and eggs. Some meals will be hasty assemblies, eaten together at the table, or single feasts piled onto plates between running to Carrefour for more ice and painting the garden table.

At times like these, you can’t go wrong with a tart. I almost always have everything I need to make this tomato and onion one to hand, and I often have ready-made, all-butter pastry  stashed in the freezer too which makes it an even simpler task. In France, you can buy these pastry sheets in rounds so you don’t even have to roll them out. Add some salad, and call it lunch. Eat it warm if you like, and those who are still missing somewhere between the greengrocer and the dry cleaner can help themselves when they get home.

So today, there is the recipe for the tart, a grab-it-while-you-can menu, and an action plan for getting it all ready.

Tarte à la tomate et oignons

Tomato and onion tart

This may seem like an insane amount of onions for one small tart and it is, but it is exceptionally good. With all of those onions, plus tomatoes and olives and anchovies, it’s practically Mediterranean health food