Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Related post: Pear-Chestnut Confit

I don't often write about non-bread magic but I must share with you this visit to Solange Couve, jam-maker extraordinaire who lives with her husband Stéphane (whom we didn't get to meet as he was away visiting his mother), her dog Victor and her two cats, Lulu and Lily, in a remote corner of the Ardèche department in south-central France. From the highway it takes about 45 minutes and hundreds of steep curves on very narrow roads (we were glad to be traveling on a holiday when traffic was sparse) to reach the farm.

New vistas opened up with each turn in the road and if it had been possible to stop more often (alas, opportunities to just get off the road and admire the landscape were few and far between), I could have taken dozens of pictures, all different. It's easy to understand why so many of my French friends rave about vacationing in the Ardèche backcountry.

Like Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, the farm is literally located at the end of the road.

The farmhouse has remained pretty much as it was when Solange and her husband decided to make it their permanent home 27 years ago. The sink has remained the same, the doors and walls were repainted in their original colors and the volumes were not altered.

Solange and Stéphane happened upon the farm one day while traveling in the area and fell in love with it at first sight. It then belonged to two elderly sisters who, as it turned out, were only too glad to sell and move away. The surrounding land had been left idle for 20 years although some of it was being farmed by neighbors. The couple led a busy life in Paris where Stéphane was a dentist with a thriving practice and Solange, who was a real estate agent, spent her week commuting from the capital to central France and to Corsica. In other words, they mostly saw their new house as a destination point for downtime.

After a few years however the pull of the farm became too strong to resist. Stéphane sold his practice and bought a new one in the Rhone valley, about 45 minutes away. As for Solange, she decided to forego real estate and to become a farmer. Now for that dream to become reality, two things needed to happen: the land had to be cleared up (a process which involved an enormous amount of manual labor) and Solange needed to acquire notions of agriculture. Not a woman to be easily deterred, she enrolled in an agricultural studies program in Valence and spent a year learning everything there was to know about trees: how to plant and prune them, how to take care of them, etc. When that was done, she spent another year learning about food-processing to find out all she could about sugar chemistry. An overkill, she soon realized, for someone whose only aspiration was to learn how to make jam properly. But Solange is nothing if not thorough and she forged ahead.

Meanwhile the land had been cleared and planted with close to 4 acres of fruit-trees. Since the Ardèche is raspberry-heaven, Solange also planted 2.5 acres of raspberry bushes as well as red and black currant bushes. For the first 10 years, she produced on average 6 tons of raspberries a year and sold them fresh to the local cooperative. Then the raspberry bushes were hit by some illness and had to be ripped out. She decided to diversify.

Using no other ingredients than fruit (pears, apricots, peaches, quinces, berries, etc.) from her land and sugar, she started producing more than 5 tons of jam a year which she sold mostly to luxury hotels and restaurants and to high-end grocery stores and bakeries as well as to fruit and vegetable markets which offer a small artisanal product section.

Since she had kept the chestnut-trees (the Ardèche is famous for its chestnuts) which were on the property when they bought it, she embarked on a trial-and-error learning process which taught her how to turn her chestnuts into delicious marrons glacés (candied chestnuts), crème de marrons (chestnut spread) and purée de marrons (chestnut purée). She also learned how to make pear-chestnut confit, an exquisite concoction which can be served with a brioche as a light dessert at the end of a holiday meal or poured over fromage blanc (soft curd cheese). As soon as she mentioned it over the phone, I knew I wanted to learn how to make it and report on it on the blog (after all, it could tempt you to make a brioche to go with it!).

Today Solange is semi-retired. She has kept her workshop (located about 2 miles away from the farm) but she only works for a few luxury hotels and restaurants on the Côte d'Azur and in the Alps as well as for family and friends. She still makes marrons glacés and other chestnut delicacies, including the confit, but she no longer sells them (too much work). I wish I could describe in details the lunch and dinner ardéchois she prepared for us and the extraordinary breakfast that awaited us in the morning featuring grape juice from her own grapes, no less (they grow on the vine that shades the big table just outside the kitchen door), but it would be off subject. Suffice it to say that Solange loves to cook and that her imagination is bottomless when it comes to extracting as much flavor as possible from the fruit and vegetables she grows on her land. We were awed!

Pear-Chestnut Confit

Related story: Meet Solange Couve, Artisan Jam-Maker

Chestnuts are abundant in the Ardèche where they are used in a variety of dishes, some sweet and some savory, and even in bread. To make this confit, Solange uses chestnuts from her own chestnut-trees.

She also uses pears from her orchard (she only grows Williams pears). The ones she uses in this particular dish are the last of the season and she has saved them for the demo. 2010 hasn't been a great year for pears: last year the pear-trees yielded a huge crop of very big pears but this year, they struggled to produce fewer and much smaller fruit. Still the pears seem marvelously fragrant and juicy to me.

For this recipe, the pears are first peeled...

... then cooked in syrup until they become translucent.

As for the chestnuts, they are cut horizontally in a circle, then boiled briefly to slightly loosen their two layers of skin. Once peeled, they are cooked in boiling water before being added to the pears. Preserved chestnuts in syrup can also be used, whether home-made or store-bought.

Solange uses a special knife to cut through the chestnuts but as demonstrated in the video below, a regular paring knife can also be used.Previously, when she was processing her chestnuts for commercial purposes, she had them peeled in the village by an artisan who uses a less labor-intensive technique: he places the chestnuts inside a rotating cylinder perforated with many small holes and uses a flame-thrower. The flames lick the outside of the cylinder, burning away most of the skins. The chestnuts are next dipped in water then placed on a rolling mat where the remaining skins are removed by hand. The perfect ones can be used whenever a recipe calls for whole chestnuts whereas the other ones are puréed and used in other recipes.

Solange says that it is best to let fresh chestnuts dry out a little as they are easier to peel if they have shrunk a little. Store-bought ones are usually somewhat dry already, so this step can be skipped. Since the skins are easier to remove when the chestnuts are hot, it is almost guaranteed to be a challenging exercise and caution is de rigueur. If one isn't really partial to burned fingers, it is best to use chestnuts preserved in syrup as a less hazardous alternative.

Ingredients:

1 liter of water

400 g crystallized sugar

10 pears

10 big fat chestnuts (or their equivalent in broken pieces)

1 vanilla bean (from Tahiti if available)

Method:

1. Peel and cook the chestnuts as described above. Solange cautions that the chestnuts need to be peeled while still hot as their skin starts to stick again when they cool down.
2. Heat water in a medium-size wide and shallow pot (to facilitate evaporation) and add the sugar
3. Slice open the vanilla bean and scrape the tiny grains into the syrup, then add the two halves of the vanilla bean to the pan
4. While the syrup is boiling, peel and core the pears and cut them in quarters
5. Plunge them delicately into the boiling syrup and let them simmer. Refrain from handling them as they cook. To avoid breaking them, do not flip them over
6. When the pears are translucent, gently add the chestnuts with some of their cooking water and let the syrup thicken again
7. Pour into jars when done. The confit will keep for a couple of weeks in the fridge. To extend its shelf life, it is imperative to sterilize the jars, a precaution that Solange takes systematically. She places all her jars in a big pot, covers them with cold water, then bring the water to a boil and lets the whole thing boil at 176°F/89°C for 15 minutes. None of her jars has ever spoiled.

Unfortunately my version of iMovie doesn't allow me to add subtitles or I would have done so. But I can at least tell you what Solange is saying in this video clip (and please excuse my use of the French word "translucide" for "translucent" in the spoken dialogue. After two weeks of complete French immersion, I clearly had a hard time switching my aging neurones to English!).

• When adding the pears to the syrup, make sure they are completely immersed and let them simmer
• When preparing the chestnuts for peeling, cut through both skins all around. It is a bit hard to do but but when cut that way, both skins loosen simultaneously in boiling water.
• Using a chestnut knife makes cutting the chestnuts in a circle a bit easier but a regular paring knife can be used as well
• It doesn't matter if the cut penetrates the flesh of the chestnut
• After peeling, the chestnuts need to be cooked before they can be added to the pears
• Add some of the chestnut cooking water to the syrup in the pear pan, so that it can thicken again without caramelizing
• It doesn't matter if the chestnuts crumble when added to the pears. In fact if using preserved chestnuts you probably want to break them a bit at this point.