Pinot, Bretzels, and Cathedrals

It’s Week 48 since the French government sent me home after they realised Covid-19 wasn’t going away on its own. Right now, my house is quiet and still, barre the dripping of defrosting ice on the kitchen terrace and the hum of my oven as it dries out yet another batch of rusks for the family.

For a change the sun is shining. Winter gets really, really bleak here in Strasbourg, and the days without sunlight bare down on my mood with great effect. We have just crawled out of a fortnight length of not seeing the sun. 13 days of drenching rain and insipid grey clouds. The 14th day brought more snow. This time the snowflakes were fine, albeit they seemed to fly in like whirling dervishes on the winds from the Siberian Steppes and the night-time temperatures dropped to minus 15. While some of the city roads have been scraped and salted, less frequented suburban routes remain a blanket of crushed dry ice, and in the places where the snow attempted to melt, it was quickly refrozen, only to give unwitting cyclists and pedestrians a rather glacial experience. Believe me, it’s not exactly Disney on Ice, even though there may be some security camera footage to prove me wrong.

Right now I have moved my laptop from the wall-facing office, and am sitting with a view of the snow on our terrace and garden, and I am reminded of the first covid-times blog I wrote last March, 47 weeks and 6 days ago. Those chaotic days when we had a house filled with all 4 of us, all needing to be fed 3 times a day, each of us needing to use a computer and trying not to make too much noise in case we disrupted online classes or important telephone calls.

They were the days when parents around the world suddenly seemed to need to ‘up the ante’ when it came to meal times and how to exercise in the confines of a small confined space. They were the days that I was energised into recipe writing, and many, many nostalgic writings came from me to keep me from going guano-crazy. (Sorry, new inside joke.) Alas, content and my sense of humour dried up: actually writing perfect-proof recipes is not something I could do successfully in between helping The Drama with french class work, or trying not to fade away in the humid summer sun. Plus with a base of cultural ingrediants differing from hemisphere to hemisphere… well, you can imagine how I felt slightly ineffective.

By the time autumn arrived, our kids were sent back to school full time. While nothing else around us remained constant, our kids may have been responsible for transmitting viruses with greater proficiency than any shopper or socialiser needing to sip on a beer and have a smoke in public. (I apologise for my unproven statement regarding kids and the high French covid stats. For 3 and a half months, restaurants have remain closed, yet our daily infection rates do not fall below 20 000. One can only wonder where we’re going wrong.)

Anyway, with my girls back at school and my working day free, I set about a figuring out a few new activities. Clearly avoiding the greater need to learn to speak better french or practise doing my (drivers) learners licence, I embraced the warmth and love found in my kitchen.

The first ‘job’ was my food-based Instagram page. Given I have a veritable trove of food photos on my phone, I had a blast sharing them with occasional recipes- if I could fit those recipes onto the afore-mentioned Instagram space. Then I stepped it up a notch, and even so far as to create content and style my photos accordingly. Yeah, I had fun, I won’t lie. It certainly filled my days up quite nicely.

Other activities included photography, and I’ve created (to my childrens’ horror) a story line revolving around Dottie, a character from the TV series Lego Friends. By all accounts she’s a middle aged cafe owning hipster with natty grey hair. She may as well be my own alter-ego, if I may confess. Needless to say, Dottie is living her best life when the weather is unseasonably unreasonably European, and she crops up whenever it snows. We did notice her the first time taking photo’s of the toadstools in our garden in autumn, and who knows, maybe she’ll appreciate the spring tulips when the time comes. (If I’m not back at work full time, you can rest assured Dottie will appear in the spring).

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The 3rd activity I have found myself busy with during the recent confinement was the creation of my own sour-dough culture; my very own wild, fresh yeast. What am absolute trip that was! It took 3 attempts to be able to create something from what is essentially flour and water. Nowadays I have 2 jars of yeast living in my fridge, one called Lucie, and the other Robyn. They’re named after the author and demi-heroine of the fiction story ‘Sourdough’ (written by Robin Sloan), and not a week goes by now when I don’t pull them out of the fridge, breathe life into their cold cells, and bake bread. Or Chelsea buns. Or Vetkoek. Or (since it’s Mardi Gras next week- beignets will be made this weekend). I’ve become so entranced and obsessed with the Sourdough Stories that I even go so far as to attempt using Lucie as a leavening agent in my crumpets, and have researched the notion of using her to make aniseed rusks with. (Unfortunately neither Robyn nor Lucie are robust enough to make mosbolletjies with at this stage, so we’ll have to wait for a while before I tackle that one.)

By all accounts I am not alone in my efforts to be a sourdough bread baker. If you happen to google to process, there are hundreds of articles written about this particular activity to have arisen from Covid Times. Accordingly, I’m a relative novice, so while I will wax lyrically if you were to see me in person, I don’t feel I have sufficient experience to write about it. As for my experiences, I invite you to look for me on my Insta profile (gaenor_chefwitchery_). Whether or not the extra bread in my life is good or bad for any form of dieting, we’ll have to wait and see. Once thing is certain though- I reckon there are more healthy gut bacteria in my diet than there ever used to be.

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Something I wrote about in Year 1 of us living in France was our shopping habits- namely, how we cross the Mighty Rhine River into Germany for groceries that cost about 30% less than an average French shopping trolley. While I am happy to support the French fresh produce market on a weekly basis with all my dairy and fruit and vegetable requirements, we do tend to rely on the German dry consumables for slightly lower prices. Most remarkably I have discovered this year, are the seed and cereal ingredients. By all accounts I can make 1kg of muesli using German supplies for the base value of around 5€. The cost of the same ingredients here in France ensures my muesli costs double. This is not a joke.

Now, if for example, I were to stock up my cookie jars from the French supermarkets, there would be little money left over for wine, so by all accounts, the last 4 months have also been spent buying countless blocks of butter and I have spent endless (very happy) hours baking a welcome selection of biscuits for the family. One kid fancies the Fully Loaded Peanut Butter Biscuits (which are, honestly, really quite divine, even if you omit the peanut butter), while another kid despises PB, but The Drama likes being made to feel special, hence a request for each own personal batch of biscuits. (The Drama doesn’t like almond biscuits, so when I make a batch of gluten free Sicilian Pastacinni, you can imagine the stink I get from her.) Naturally, since I’m taking requests (or so it may seem to the untrained eye), hubby jumps on the bandwagon and makes sure my shopping trolley is fully stocked up with the additional blocks of butter to bake his Mom’s popular Rusks.

Obviously rusks are one of those nostalgic food sources to many of the hundreds of thousands of South Africans living abroad. (Right alongside biltong, wors and chutney.) I have lost track of how many people on Facebook social groups have either requested a recipe to make their own, or shared a photograph of rusks being dried out in the oven. And I won’t lie, I have shared both on more than one occasion.

Or, at least, I did, once. And as I clicked ‘send’ on the email page, I realised that the recipe I have written up is MY recipe. It’s written up with my knowledge and actions in mind, and no amount of telepathy will really dispense of my practises in any which way or form. Neither is there ever enough space to write up these parcularities on an Instagram page, so I figured I might try to write up here.

For the uninitiated, rusks are a South African type of biscuit, originally made from a brioche type of bread, but were deliberately left to dry out to preserve their life span without needing to be eaten immediately or to retain their freshness. They can be made in advance and kept for road trips and holiday excursions. Perhaps you remember a time when petrol stations didn’t use to line the highways with fast food outlets and oversized tuckshops, and how we would pack a picnic basket with flasks of coffee, tins of rusks, chicken mayonnaise sandwiches and boiled eggs?

In my own rather Presbyterian home, there were never any biscuits or rusks to snack on, and picnic lay-byes on the road less traveled meant cheese and tomato sandwiches and an apple.

In Hubby’s home, however, travelling across country must have been a vastly different experience. After all, I guess that is the reason why, nowadays when we road-trip or go away for a few days, do I have to spend the week before filling up the biscuit tins. Let me not give you the impression I don’t enjoy indulging in a cup of coffee and dipping a rusk into it while gazing out at a view that does not involve my kids crabbily begging for attention at six thirty in the morning. No, by and large, the notion of watching elephants wander down to the Malelane River in the Kruger National Park really does seem to be enhanced by dipping a homemade rusk into my dark black tin cup of moerkoffie as the golden pink sun rises at my back.

So I’ve established that rusks are a type of dried bread/cake/biscuit made for road-trips and dipping into your hot beverage. (Tea, coffee, hot chocolate- great. Vin chaud, mead… not so much).

What else?

Oh yeah.

They’re typically long and finger-like in shape, so that you can grasp one end and dip it into your drink. They’re okay to crunch through without a drink, but you will end up with crumbs everywhere, so don’t try this one in your marital bed.

As for a recipe, there are 2 different versions of traditional rusks. Traditionally, Mosbolletjies are where one would start if you look at the origons of rusks. Going back centuries, this brioche bread was made using a leavening process involving unfermented grape must during the viticulture process, by the French Huguenots in the Western Cape. (Excuse the Wikipedia reference here. I’m just winging this for now). They would add aniseed and spices for flavour, roll the dough into balls, where it rises before baking. Once baked, the balls would be torn apart and then ‘re-baked’ to dry them out for preserving.

The other method uses buttermilk and soda as a leavening agent, and thus Buttermilk Rusks are by and large, the more easily attainable rusks these days. (Coincidentally, my fabulous MIL is related to the Greyvenstyn family whose name is synonymous with the brand Ouma Rusks. How cool, right?).

Less time consuming to make as you don’t spend time rolling them into balls, you can bake Buttermilk Rusks as a loaf of bread or in a tray, and cut them into fingers afterwards. The buttermilk/soda leavening option makes them more forgivable, and you can opt to include extra ingredients to mix them up a bit. There is a host of clever Saffas living in France who have created a wealth of yummy variations, but I tend to stick to my Muesli version . (This is another reason I have not shared this recipe, as I include my own homemade muesli in- and it has taken up until today for me to adapt the recipe accordingly.)

The basis to Buttermilk Rusks would be the flour, sugar, leavening agent and well, buttermilk, but- whether it’s buttermilk or quite simply maas, milk, cream, cottage cheese, yoghurt or vegan variations, read through my personal thoughts and notes in the printable document below if you’re looking to make rusks for yourself.

But eeek- how long have I kept you? Somehow all of my thoughts from the last few months have escaped. It’s uncanny to think that almost a full year has passed during these surreal days. Certainly, we have followed 4 very distinctive seasons, to be sure! This winter has gone down as our coldest one yet. With a proper 30cm snowfall in our garden last month, we succumbed to even deeper plummeting temperatures this week. We discovered over the weekend (yes, it’s Monday as I madly try to wrap this up) that the wetland alongside the river, a mere 500 metres from home has FULLY frozen over. We tentatively sent the kids over on their ice-skates on Saturday, which turned into a full blown social event all weekend long with friends coming over to iceskate as well. It has truly been a surreal winter, that’s for sure. Did I ever imagine that we would be skating on a completely natural ice rink? Have a look at some of these photos.

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Anyway, my lovely friends, I hope that I haven’t bored you to tears. I’m going to click the publish icon shortly, so any further typos will be have to forgiven.

As for any predictions of whether we will be seeing you this year, time will only tell.

Love and best wishes to you all,

Me.