Not all flowers are welcome

This week, chrysanths, Christmas, and how many fairy lights is too many fairy lights? Plus an easy recipe for brussels sprouts.

The week before November 1 at the garden centre.

I’ve shared with you a few times now stories of my favourite fancy-pants plant nurseries in the region, but a gardener cannot live by species pelargoniums and Japanese secateurs alone. Sometimes you need a bag of grit. When I need a bag of grit, or a plastic trug or some gardening clogs, I usually go to the Jardinerie Grand Cap, the big garden centre by the HyperU supermarket in Agde.

Like garden centres everywhere now, alongside the plants there are scented candles and doormats with kittens or encouraging words printed on them (Live, Laugh, Wipe Your Feet!), china mugs and tea towels. It feels familiar, though this place has rather more olive trees, citrus and chickens than I ever saw at Camden Garden Centre in London.

More olives and chickens than Camden Garden Centre.

When I went to the Jardinerie Grand Cap this week for that bag of grit, there was a bedraggled clump of chrysanthemums shunted to the side of one of the terraces. For the French, is there anything less desirable than a pot of chrysanths on November 2nd? At the end of October, flower shops, markets and roadside stalls are filled with lively, colourful carpets of chrysanthemums, proud and well-tended, bushy and exuberant in their pots. This is because November 1st, Toussaint, All Saints’ Day, is the day French people visit their family graves, and most will take with them pots of chrysanthemums.

But by November 2nd, it’s over for these most sturdy of flowers. You seldom see them in people’s gardens, and it would be a proper hors d’oeuvre dropper to bring a bunch of them to a party as a gift for your host, as they are so closely associated with death.

Yesterday's flowers. Sorry chrysanths, overtaken by flashy poinsettias.

This week, chrysanthemums are yesterday’s flower, remaindered, pushed to the side, in favour of bold poinsettias in the primes of their lives, not just the traditional scarlet ones, but also modern spotted varieties, and others in restrained lime white or sugar pink. Christmas comes early to the garden centre. I’m here to tell you that the modern French attitude to Christmas decorations is to embrace the gaudy, sentimental and heavily beglittered, just as much as it is in England or America, or anywhere else it’s deemed essential to mark the birth of the Baby Jesus with a candy cane and a cheeky elf.

I began thinking about Christmas last week as we handed out just the eight kilos of Haribo to children dressed as  the undead for the village’s Halloween parade. As we chatted to parents and grandparents at the gate, some of them asked us when we were going to put up our decorations this year. The past three Christmases, Séan has covered our house with fairy lights, adding more strings each year so that now they creep out into the garden and along the railings too. Too much is never enough. It’s a very nice feeling to know other people enjoy it and look forward to it too, though possibly not the very nice lady who sometimes stops me in the street to let me know, in the gravest possible voice, that I left my porch light on Thursday, or a week ago, or whenever. I don’t think she could look more disappointed in me if I’d handed her a bunch of chrysanths.

Happy understated French Christmas.

Jardinerie Grand Cap
Zone Commercial Espace Grand Cap
34300 Agde
jardinerie-grandcap.com

Brussels sprouts with lardons and walnuts

I got quite excited when I saw these Brussels sprouts in the market. I love them so much and will eat them as often as I can between now and spring, which is often. Though I describe this a side dish here, and I suppose it is, but I often eat this on its own, for lunch, sometimes with just a few gratings of Comté or Parmesan over the top.

Serves 2-3 as a side dish, depending on what else you’re serving

2 tbsp olive oil or 20g butter
100g lardons or bacon cut into approximately 1.5cm pieces
2 shallots, about 140g, diced
400g Brussels sprouts, trimmed and any imperfect leaves plucked off [see TIP below: How to prepare Brussels sprouts], any larger ones halved
4 fat garlic cloves, halved, any green germ removed, and minced
300ml chicken or vegetable stock
60g walnut halves, toasted and roughly broken up, not chopped
A smallish bunch of parsley, about 20g of leaves and fine stems, chopped
1-2 tbsp Dijon mustard, depending how much you like mustard. I love mustard and see it as its own food group
½ tsp runny honey
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

TIP How to prepare Brussels sprouts
If you buy very fresh, young, small brussels sprouts, which are obviously the ones you want, there’s no need to cut a cross into the bottom of them when you’re preparing them like our grandmothers used to do. Just lightly trim off the ends and remove any damaged leaves.

1. Warm the olive oil or butter in a large frying pan (you want one with a lid, or use a large plate of you don’t have a lid) over a medium-high heat and add the lardons or bacon and sauté for 3-4 minutes, stirring now and again, until it’s lightly browned.

2. Lower the heat a bit, add the shallots and sauté for 3-4 minutes, stirring.

3. Tip in the brussels sprouts and sauté for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and stir for a minute, then pour in the stock. Cover the pan with a lid or plate and cook for 4-5 minutes, just long enough for the sprouts to be cooked through but to still retain some bite. Remove the lid and cook quickly until most of the liquid has evaporated.

4. Stir in the walnuts, parsley, mustard and honey, season with salt and pepper, and serve.

Market haul November 5, 2024

This week’s market haul comprises: a slab of poitrine salée, 13 eggs, as is traditional, lemons, sand carrots from Normandy, a single pain au chocolat/chocolatine, because we are nothing if not bastions of self restraint, walnuts, brussels sprouts, lettuce, sweet onions from Lézignan, cèp sausages, to which I am addicted, some slices of ham (my husband gets it cut extra thick), honey vinegar, some monkfish fillets and a pair of daurade , a red pepper, spinach, wonderful Pardailhan turnips – it’s the beginning of their season, potimarron pumpkin, leeks, celery, a Chinese cabbage for making kimchi, two little goats cheeses from the Ferme de Peyret.