Touring Poitiers: Visiting a Medieval French Town in the Aquitaine with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring Poitiers:  Visiting a Medieval French Town in the Aquitaine with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

Poitiers is a medieval French town in the Aquitaine region that was founded in 1432.  About 100,000 inhabitants call Poitiers home.

The trees without leaves and cold breeze coming off the Claia and Birre Rivers reminded me that it was winter.  The cold seem to penetrate my thick jacket due to the humidity from the water.  I put extra blankets on Florence as we set out to explore town.

Our first stop was to the tourist office where I picked up a map and tourism guide.  Citizens of Poitiers have roots that go back to Gaul and ancient Rome.

Three significant events happened in Poitiers that are important for French history:

-Christianity became France’s religion when Clovis, King of the Franks, defeated Aleric II, King of the Visigoths, in 507 AD.

-In 732, Charles Martel repelled Muslims from modern-day Spain here to keep the French kingdom sovereign and Christian

-In 1429, a committee of doctors recognized that Joan of Arc was carrying out a mission from God in Poitiers

The biting cold stung our faces and legs, so we went as fast as we could to visit the Saint-Pierre Cathedral built mostly in the 12^th century.

The contorted Romanesque statues around the church portray the urgency of listening to the word of God.  Poitiers is surrounded by the Marais Poitevin or “Poitou Swamp.”

People were fearful of death in Poitou, because the harvest is precarious there.  It is hard to grow crops in swampy land due to the ease with which mold can grow on plants due to dampness. 

If agricultural practices are not maintained to keep the crops dry, rot might set in.  If harvests were small, the aristocrats took it all.

The church visually helped keep order in the agricultural year with their medallions of astrological signs and “travaux” or work associated with that sign.   Sculptures of the astrological sign and the “travaux” that goes with them are usually carved under them on the tympana (half-moons) over church entryway doors.

Weekly markets were held in front of many churches in France where people could view the outside of the church, even if they do not go in.  Illiterate peasants could understand the agricultural work associated with seasonal time by looking at the tympana while aristocrats might look at books like Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Barry (Preserved in the Château de Chantilly Library.)

This church also has a maze or labyrinth painted on the wall as well.  Pilgrimages were encouraged in the Middle Ages to Santiago de Compostella, Rome, and Jerusalem. 

Not everyone could afford to go on a pilgrimage or was physically able to do so.  These labyrinths in churches allowed everyone to visit the Holy Land and visit Christ’s birthplace.

I read that there was a 4^th century baptistery close by as well, which we left the church to visit.

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

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Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After our hostess made the trifle, the wife of another one of my husband’s colleague’s arrived with her little boys. 

The boys played with Florence and called her “baby doll.”  The women drank cuppas of tea, and  I supervised; Florence was small and real and not a doll despite running around and pushing the boys on the floor.

I was discovering that baking was an English woman’s great asset.  We ate a beautiful apple-spice cake that the other woman guest made at home before visiting.  I knew that walnuts in banana muffins were what vegetarians considered to be a hidden protein and thought baking was a tremendous skill to acquire one day.

After tea, our hostess began to chop vegetables as we talked.  I volunteered to help, but our hostess would hear none of it.

At 4 pm, another set of sons arrived home from school, they changed out of their uniforms and played a little with Florence before going at each other to play mock-rugby.

Florence rejoined the ladies where we could feed her biscuits and juice.  The men arrived around 6 pm and dinner began.

We ate the crudités with the hummus and taramosalata.  Our hostess ordered Indian “take-away curries, masalas, and saags.”  “Take-away” means “take-out.”  I loved my British English lessons.

The wines I selected at Tesco went well with the spicy Indian food – a Sauvignon Blanc from the Touraine and a Soave from the Veneto.  I also bought a Chianti like everyone did in the 1990s, but it was not right with the food.

We put on some Rolling Stones, David Bowie, the Bee Gees, and Elvis Presley music and danced.  I danced with the kids in a circle and Laurent was teaching “The French Rock” moves imitating Travolta to the English women. 

The guys came over to dance with Florence, the boys and me in a circle.  The kids conked out, and the adults kept dancing until the windows steamed up.

We opened up the windows for air at 3 am and finished eating the spicy, Indian saags, masalas, and curries.

Laurent and I went home laughing and wanted to come back and visit Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern England one day.

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

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Exchange Student in London: Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Making a Trifle Dessert with an English Family – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

When we arrived at the house, my husband’s colleague’s wife made tea and served us larges mug of it with milk and called it a “cuppa.” 

She opened several boxes of biscuits, placed pretty paper doilies on a plate, and nicely arranged the butter cookies for us to dunk in our tea.  I had indulged in so much stroller aerobics during my visit that I knew I could indulge a bit.

Florence sat in her stroller throne and ate butter cookies while the trifle class began, and I loaded up on cookies (biscuits).

The day before, our hostess cut up a sponge cake and layered the bottom of a round bowl with it.  As I watched, she placed a layer of strawberry jam on top of the sponge cake and sliced fresh strawberries on top of this.

She said you could use any kind of fruit and jelly of the same fruit in the trifle.  Next, you add a layer of yolk-colored vanilla custard on top of this fruit and jelly layer.

On top of this custard layer, she placed shavings of chocolate, which we ate with our “cuppas” of tea.

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

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Exchange Student in London: Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in London:  Attending an In-Home Trifle-Making Session – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of the best memories I have of our trips to London was spending a day with one of my husband’s colleague’s wives making a trifle pudding dessert. Trifles resemble Appalachian Banana Pudding, so this has become a two-part series.

Our family friend picked Florence and me up early in the morning and off we went to do grocery shopping at Tesco.  We bought vegetables to cut up for crudités as well as hummus and taramosalata – Greek caviar spread. 

I liked being able to buy ethnic food items at the local grocery store like Laurent and I did in Chicago at the Treasure Island store downtown where we lived in Marina City – the corncob towers.

Back in London, we bought a package of vanilla custard to make the “trifle.”

I told Laurent’s colleague’s wife about the banana pudding my aunts used to make where you would layer the sides and bottoms of a glass baking dish with vanilla wafers and place sliced bananas on top of the vanilla wafers.

Then, my aunts would place a layer of cooked butterscotch pudding on top of the bananas and let it cool and then put a layer of vanilla pudding on top of the butterscotch pudding.  Finally, they would place a 1-inch layer of homemade whipped cream on top of this and refrigerate it.

They would eat a big piece of this with a lot of coffee with milk in it for breakfast and say it was their beauty secret.  (They all looked like Marilyn Monroe or Lucille Ball even without make-up.  I have tried to pattern a lot of my domestic life on theirs no matter where I live.  They clean their own homes, cook, do laundry, and tend to work at secretarial jobs when children are small.)

My sister Kathie babysat me as a child.  We often ate banana pudding for breakfast before going out for walks and shopping in all sorts of weather.  In the summer, we went out for a morning bus ride to Palmer Park Woods in Detroit to go for a walk and feed the ducks Cheez-Its. 

On the way back home, we would sometimes stop at a Lebanese or Chinese restaurant for lunch or Howard Johnsons.  In the summer, Howard Johnsons would let me swim, if we bought a full lunch afterwards. 

We both cleaned house after I was six years old.  I could do some simple tasks that my sister showed me how to do. 

Laurent’s colleague’s wife asked me why I did not go to private school as a child.  I told her that we all knew about Winston Churchill’s boarding school experience, because his mother Jennie was American. 

We really did not like too much corporeal punishment.  My family tried to reason with children, yelled, took away privileges, and would finally swat you once on the behind (in private), if these other measures did not work instead of hitting children.

I told her my mother preferred Montessori teaching methods and had books about it at home.  (The Sunday School I went to taught us the methods in it like cleaning up after butter cookies and lemonade at a very young age.) 

She raised both of us according to its “castello or castle management” organizational style in addition to traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I added Waldorf-Montessori-Jesuit Catholic to this later in life, because I knew how important art and music and Biblical knowledge are for personal relaxation and ethics.  I especially liked how the Hungarian Esterházys ran a great estate and hired the composer Joseph Haydn as their personal musician for nightly entertainment.

This was the American side of trifle making and child rearing practices.  To be continued….

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

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Exploring Deauville - Visiting France's American Film Festival Town with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring Deauville – Visiting France’s American Film Festival Town with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One clear and brisk autumn day, Laurent and I set out for the resort town of Deauville, which is like a French Palm Beach on the English Channel.

The traffic on the ride there was heavy.  Obviously, we were not the only people going to the seashore.  People usually go in the summer for the yachting facilities, golf courses, casinos, health spas, and designer clothing stores.

There is also a racecourse for those with a little extra money to burn.

I wanted to buy some postcards showing off Deauville’s natural beauty.  Most of the postcards showed the casino and golf courses, but I eventually found one with photos of Deauville’s white sand beaches and the boardwalk along the edge of it.  I bought a bottle of Pays d’Auge Calvados as well.  Calvados is apple brandy.

Deauville is only two hours away from Paris.  Many Parisian families go to Deauville in the summer with their families to benefit from the month-long summer vacations.

As we were walking along the boardwalk called the “Promenade des Planches” in French, we saw one of France’s former prime ministers, Edouard Balladur, out for a walk by himself.

Laurent smiled at him and Mr. Balladur smiled back at Laurent.  It was a special moment.

Laurent asked me, “Do you know who that was?”

“Of course, I do.  I read newspapers,” I said.

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


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