Visiting Tours (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Tours (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I loved the weekend trips I took with Laurent when we first lived in Paris (France).  I especially liked going to Tours where Laurent’s maternal grandparents lived in the Loire Valley that was full of châteaux.

It was cold, but we sat in the garden outside to eat anyways.  I liked talking and eating in the garden with all of Laurent’s grandmother’s flowers around me.

I enjoyed laughing at Laurent’s grandfather each time he said he was going to get “his last bottle” of some good wine for our lunch.  He used to be a wine salesman, so I am sure he had a wine cellar extending from Tours to Blois.

Despite the cold outside, I sat on one of the lawn chairs and played “jeux-jeux” or “baby games” with a set of kittens that Laurent’s grandmother had adopted.

I played with the yellow kittens all weekend.  The little tomcat kittens were going to stay in the Touraine despite being cute and cuddly.  Paris had enough tomcats to deal with already.

While playing “jeux-jeux,” Laurent’s grandpa served us steamed artichokes on plates with small bowls of vinaigrette on the side.

Laurent’s grandfather teased me saying “Queen Catherine de Medici ate so many artichokes that she almost died.”

“Too much vinaigrette,” I answered.  You can gag on olive oil with a highly acetic vinegar; Southerners in the US all know this.  You might not die, but you can mess up your clothing choking on this mixture.

After the artichokes, we ate delicious rillettes that resemble room-temperature, Mexican carnitas.  We spread the carnitas on toasted baguette rounds.  We also ate room-temperature rillons, slices of sweated pork that is cured in its own fat with Vouvray wine.

Vouvray is a slightly, sweet white wine from the Touraine region that goes well with rillettes, rillons, and chèvre goat cheese that has been rolled in ashes. 

Chèvre aux cendres is a specialty of the city of Tours.  You can drink a white wine like Vouvray with it, but the people of Tours usually eat it with Bibb lettuce from their own gardens “à la Touraingelle.”

“You never drink wine with vinaigrette,” Laurent’s grandmother told me.

“The vinegar in the vinaigrette destroys the delicacy of the wine,” she said.

We ate an apple tart for dessert with perfectly cut slices of apple and pastry cream as filling in the tart.  The crust was a sugar sablé one made with butter, so I ate it.

We finished with a pear eau-de-vie made with Reine Claude pears.

I was happy with that meal.  We ate it all weekend.  It was easy to serve, and we could talk about:

-cars (papie’s hobby)

-hats and famous writers from the Loire Valley (mamie’s hobby)

-good thriller films (Laurent and I both watched these)

I suspected mamie and papie watched the films we talked about when we went back to Paris. 

We all liked the actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Gabin, the director Luc Besson (for the Grand Bleu and La Femme Nikita), Jacques Cousteau, bad boy Gérard Dépardieu as Cyrano, and Socialist Culture Minister Jacques Lang, who wore a mini skirt around Paris to prove that gender is a cultural construct.

We had tons of fun with Laurent’s grandparents.  We always took them magazines and newspapers, including The International Herald Tribune, which I subscribed to at home in Paris.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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